What would your parents say? The impact of cohabitation on intergenerational relations in traditional societies.

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between nonmarital cohabitation among young people and their relations with parents in the cultural and institutional settings that favour marriage over informal unions. We use data from the recently released Generation and Gender Survey for Poland, a country with limited social acceptance for cohabitation, high attachment to the marriage institution and familialistic culture. Our results show that in a traditional country such as Poland nonmarital cohabitation is selective: these are mainly young people raised in better educated and less religious families living in urban areas who are more likely to choose cohabitation instead of marriage in their first union. Next, we analyse how living arrangement choices are interrelated with the frequency of contacts and satisfaction from relations with parents, as well as chances for receiving material support from family. According to our results, cohabitation may decrease the quality of relations with parents as measured by self-rated satisfaction, but it does not have strong and negative effects on the frequency of meetings with both parents or probability of receiving material support from them.