Negotiating the Life Course

The period of young adulthood, from age 18 to 30 years, has been characterised by Rindfuss (1991) as 'demographically dense ' because it is in these years that young people move away from their families of origin and move towards forming families of their own. The increased tendency for young people to delay these life course transitions means that the demographically dense age-range is being extended beyond age 30. This paper addresses the issues of change and dispersion in the pattern and timing of individual life course transitions. We focus on five key life course events, leaving home, cohabitation, marriage, fertility, and relationship breakdown and compare the experience of four birth cohorts, those born in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. We hypothesise that increased delay and dispersion of the timing of life course events is associated with the perception that young people must invest in human capital formation to a much greater degree than was the case in the past. 2 In 1986, Lesthaeghe and van de Kaa proposed that changes in family formation behaviour in Western countries constituted a second demographic transition. The features of this secon