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The article discusses the transition to adulthood from leaving home to returning home in Australia. Living at homes with parents is common occurrence in the lives of today's young adults. This can be because they have not left the home, or because they have left and returned. Drawing on data from a survey, this article explores the role of traditional rites of passage to adulthood. The article first describes the stages which people in their twenties had reached at the time of interview. It then examines the different factors contributing to the patterns of leaving home and returning home. In the survey, 20% of young adults had spent some time in a one-parent family before the age of 18, and 80 per cent had grown up in a two-parent family. Those who had spent some of their childhood in a one-parent family were more likely than those from a two-parent family to have set out on the pathways towards marriage, children and a mortgage in their early to mid twenties. By their late twenties, 40% had a child, just under half had a mortgage, a quarter had both, and a third had neither.

In this article the author examines some recent trends in home-based employment in Australia, in the over-employed and under-employed and in the regional distribution of unemployment. Changes in labor demand and in job security have produced some specific responses on the part of workers and employers. But the magnitude and direction of these changes is not always clearly understood. With the restructuring of the workforce to meet new global demands, changes are occurring to, or are being demanded of, standard ways of working. People are seeing the need to create niche markets for themselves in the wake of downsizing and the offshore movement of traditional jobs. One of those changes is to the split between those who work at home and those who work in a location away from their private lives and families. Some researchers have suggested that the increase in those working at home has been quite marked, driven by workforce restructuring. Survey of persons employed at home in late 1995 estimated that 230,000 women worked at home but of these, only about 16,000 are registered in occupations that might be classified as fashion industry out-workers.

The article focuses on the Australian Living Standards Study of 5000 families in 12 rural and urban areas of Australia. The survey covered a host of issues associated with living standards and the contribution that service provision makes to family well-being. The study showed that the middle urban areas had a lower problem profile than other geographic areas in the study, as far as providers and parents were concerned, and the two outer urban areas of Campbell town and Elizabeth/Munno-Para featured among the top areas in many of the issues mentioned. In a needs-based allocation of resources, the funding of services for marital problems might therefore need a slightly different geographic formula from the allocation for child abuse, if the responses of providers are anything to go by. Those differences may not be major, but they do ensure that we cannot assume that outer areas are significantly more disadvantaged than other urban areas in all issues. They also indicate that problems can vary across the rural sector, sometimes mire roring urban trends but at other times not.

The article discusses the recommendation of the Australian report "Creating the Links: Families and Social Responsibility" relating to the establishment of Regional Family Support Councils. The National Council for the International Year of the Family, appointed as an independent advisory body to the Minister for Family Services, was asked to make recommendations for the development of a "sustainable and long-term framework of family policies." In preparing its recommendations, the Council drew on the results of a series of consultations, which it conducted around Australia during the Year. The report to the Federal Government was the outcome of the work of the Council. The report notes that many participants expressed the view that an infrastructure of locally available, family-centered resources should be developed and available to all who seek them, as part of the normal expectations of community life, rather than being centered on family crisis and breakdown. During this study 1000 services providers in four States and the Northern Territory were interviewed about service provision to their own local areas.

The article focuses on the increasing labour force participation of women with children. The percentage who had the care of dependent children had dropped in an almost identical way, from 54 per cent in the mid-to 46 per cent in the mid-1990s. It is because two trends have been working in parallel. The first is the trend for more of those women who have children to stay in, or return to, the workforce after the birth of a child or during the early child-raising years. The second trend has been occurring with somewhat less fanfare, perhaps because it has not attracted the need for specific services. During the same period, the birthrates of women aged under 25 have also declined. The 1985 Canadian divorce law used gender-neutral language and made it clear for the first time that mothers were expected to support their children financially. Child support decisions varied considerably with legal advocacy and judicial discretion and could not be said to be based on the cost of childrearing, the non-custodial parent's income, or equitable sharing between partners.

The article presents the results of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in 1994. Acting on the recommendation of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the Federal Government allocated funds to the ABS to conduct the survey. The survey commenced design in 1992 and went into the field during early 1994. The first publication from that survey, released in February 1995, reveals some interesting information about families and service usage. The Acting Australian Statistician commented that a "close cooperative relationship between ABS and Aboriginal and Tones Strait Islander people led to a survey that was sympathetic to their cultural values and priorities," and his statement appears to be reflected by other evidence. Compared with the Australian picture generally, indigenous households are more likely to be family based, and multi-family. Indigenous families are more than five times as likely as non-indigenous families to be sharing with other families in the same households.

This article reports that the 1996 divorce figures in Australia showed a rise in the age specific divorce rate to the highest level for more than a decade. The annual rate at which children under 18 years have experienced the divorce of their parents, over the period since 1976, is shown in the article. The article depicts the numbers of children aged 0-17 years in each year whose parents divorced, expressed as a rate for all children under 18, and is referred to as the child specific rate of parental divorce. One of the consequences of the divorce of parents is, of course, the creation of a one-parent family. Hence the observable difference in growth between children impacted by divorce and children in one-parent families suggests one of two possibilities. The first is that children in one-parent families are more frequently being drawn from sources other than the divorce of parents. The second possibility is that a lone parent is spending longer in a one-parent family because of the slowdown of exit factors.

This article presents statistics related to the Australian teenage ex-nuptial birth rates. Some concern exists that Australian teenage ex-nuptial birth rates are on the rise, and that if this is so Australia will mirror the higher teenage birth rates of the United States. This concern arises mainly from a confusion over the relationship between teenage births and births generally. Taken together with the nuptial component of the birth rate, though, the overall teenage birth rate has declined. That is, there are many fewer teenagers per thousand giving birth in 1996 than there were in 1971. In that year, 55 teenagers per thousand gave birth during the year; by 1996 this had dropped to 20 per thousand. Compared with what has been going on generally among women giving birth, the teenage pattern is not so unusual and teenage ex-nuptial births in relative decline, rather than on the rise. In summary, the teenage ex-nuptial birth rate has indeed been increasing, but not as fast as the rate of increase of ex-nuptial births to older women.

This article focuses on the Australian workplaces. In its recent release, "Australian Social Trends," the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS 1996) examined unpublished data and concluded that although it does not show in the data, there is a difference in the "standardized" rate at which men and women take sick leave. Part of this difference is because women and men have different occupational arrangements; if the shape of both groups were identical, women would be seen to be taking more sick leave than men for each type of occupation. The overall analysis suggests a slightly higher use of sick leave by both mothers and fathers with children under 15, compared with men and women who do not have the same child-related responsibilities. The casualization of the workforce has hit women more than it has men, because they are more likely to be working part-time or in areas more subject to the casualization of labor. Casualization, by definition, is employment which does not bring with it either sick leave or holiday leave. Neither, in most cases, does it carry with it long service leave, which is available to 84 per cent of full-time permanent workers and more than half of the part-time permanent workers.

The article focuses on various issues discussed in the Australian Living Standards Study of 5000 families in 12 rural and urban areas of Australia. The major issues affecting service delivery for outer urban areas were high number of low income families, high cost of travel to work for residents, absence of important facilities from the area, difficulty of attracting services to the area and high number of non-English-speaking residents. The major issues affecting service delivery for middle urban areas were high number of non-English-speaking residents, high number of low income families, and scarcity and high cost of available land. The major issues affecting service delivery for inner urban areas were high number of low income families, high number of non-English-speaking residents, high number of Aboriginal residents, scarcity and cost of available land, high cost of living, and absence of important facilities. The major issues affecting service delivery for rural-remote areas were high number of low income families, difficulty of attracting services to the area, high cost of transporting goods to the area, high cost of travel, high cost of living in the area, absence of important facilities, and the distance from other services and facilities.

The article examines the effects of changing personal relationships on decisions about having children in Australia. The declining fertility rate in Australia and other developed countries has received a great deal of attention over the last few years. The contemporary decline in the fertility rate stems from the fact that increasing proportions of women are restricting their family size to one or two children, or remaining permanently childless. The decline in the fertility rate since the 1960s can be explained by a number of interacting factors including the introduction of the contraceptive pill and availability of abortion, improvements in the education levels of young women, and the increasing participation of women in paid employment. While the financial and non-financial costs of having children may lead women and men to have few if any children, it seems very likely that intentions about having children are also linked to expectations about relationship status. Those men and women who are already in an apparently stable relationship are likely to hold intentions based on an expectation that their relationship would continue. Some people who do not have a partner may intend to have children after they have found a suitable partner with whom to live. However, some relationships end before children are born and some single people do not find partners.