Abstract

BAENA VALLEJO, Germán Arley; GARCIA QUINTERO, Clara Stella; DUQUE RESTREPO, María Cristina  and  VELASQUEZ MUNOZ, Daniel Stivan. Investigative perspectives on couples without children and their relationship with the concept of “family”: A state of the art. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2020, vol.37, n.2, pp.175-194. ISSN 1668-7027.  http://dx.doi.org/10.16888/interd.2020.37.2.11.

The objective of the work reported was to show the transformations the research shows about the family and to identify if couples without children are considered as an emerging typology of family configuration. The importance of the relationship between the categories of family and a couple without children is that this is a time when a significant reduction in the birth rate can be seen worldwide. Furthermore, households made up of couples who state that they do not want to have children also represent a striking increase. On the other hand, this phenomenon has led to the emergence of research categories such as DINK, Childfree and NoMo families, which converge in the increase of couples without children and of women who do not wish to have children.

From a documentary research under the modality of the state of the art, 35 articles were collected for this study between 1992 and 2017, which were analyzed from a hermeneutic perspective from the thematic nuclei “definition and transformation of the concept of ‘family’” and “Research perspectives on the relationship between childless couples and family”. The search required the following categories in Spanish and English: “significado de familia/meaning of family”, “definición de familia/definition of family”, “concepto de familia/family concept”, “parejas sin hijos/couple without children/childfree/NoMo”, “nuevas tipologías familiares/new family typologies”, “familia DINK/DINK family” y “familia moderna/modern family”. The databases taken into account for the study were Scopus, SciELO, Dialnet Plus, Psicodoc, EBSCO, DOAJ, Redalyc and Google Academic.

Most research agrees that consanguinity and procreation are no longer essential criteria for forming a family, and thus, couples without children are constituted as a new family typology characterized by more equitable, consensual and democratic ways of making decisions. The main reason for this change is the new place that women have conquered in society after decades of struggle for their rights, favoring a questioning of the patriarchal system and the hegemonic model of the family called the nuclear family. The discussions about gender imaginaries that began with greater force in the 20th century, give a place to women in working life that, over time, has favored a questioning about the relationship between motherhood and being a woman.

Research presents different criteria to define the family, which shows that this is a time when there is not one model but several family models. For its part, this diversity has been expressed not only in the dimension of social representations but also in the legal sphere; This is expressed this way, since several investigations in the field of law show transformations in Latin American constitutions by ways of understanding the family in a more plural way and based on fundamental rights.

Finally, the collection of research shows that the study on the category of couples without children is incipient, that is, it corresponds to a phenomenon that, despite enjoying statistical evidence, can be considered emergent in culture insofar as its relevance corresponds to the last decades. Most studies that deal directly or indirectly with the category of childless couple, consider this form of bond as a form of family and explain how at this time this definition is mainly determined by affective criteria, values built between the members, and relational dynamics; leaving in the background the criteria of consanguinity or kinship from the nuclear model.

Keywords : couples without children; family; transformation; gender roles; procreation..

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