For most European countries the timing of first marriage and first parenthood are no longer the only and most appropriate indicators of the transition from youth to adulthood. This is so because both events were not only postponed, they also became increasingly disconnected from age and from each other. Moreover, among the female post-war cohorts there was a growing inter-dependence between the occupational and family career. These were good reasons to broaden the study of the transition from youth to adulthood.In the previous chapters, we have seen how the post-war cohorts made their transitions from youth to adulthood along various socio-demographic events in ten European countries. In Chapter 1, reference was made to the fact that some events making up the transition to adulthood are elements constituting the Second Demographic Transition (SDT). In order to summarise the discussion, it will be helpful therefore to position the countries on a SDT continuum. To this end, Liefbroer (1998) used four indicators of the changes constituting the second demographic transition: the total fertility rate (TFR), the total first marriage rate, the percentage of out-of-wedlock births (as a proxy for the spread of non-marital married cohabitation) and the total divorce rate. Using these data for nine countries involved in our studyno comparable data were available for Polandand applying principal compo-313 M. Corijn and E. Klijzing (eds.), Transitions to Adulthood in Europe, 313-340.
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