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No. 87, 1996 Amin, Sajeda. "Family structure and change in rural Bangladesh," Policy Research Division Working Paper no. 87. New York: Population Council. Abstract Rising landlessness is feared to lead to increasing fragmentation and nucleation of families in settings such as rural Bangladesh. This analysis of household structure and family living arrangements for the elderly and women in an intensive village study in rural Bangladesh finds that the elderly and women rely extensively on family support. Although landlessness brings stress on intergenerational relations, a favorably low dependency ratio (elders to sons), brought about by the unprecedented survival of large numbers of sons that is the result of the child-mortality decline of the 1950s and 1960s, has allowed the burden to be spread over a larger numbers of sons than were previously available. A persistence of traditional living arrangements, in which sons form their own households in the homesteads of their fathers, also contributes to retarding the process of family disintegration that is likely to be caused when farm size decreases and the role of the farm economy in a traditional peasant society diminishes. The study concludes that, because sons remain critical to their elders support, son preference is likely to forestall a rapid transition to replacement-level fertility. Legal reforms designed to ensure greater gender equity in inheritance and work opportunities can alter that course by allowing women to play a greater role in providing support to the elderly. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
