What might the future look like in terms of how family and intimate lives are composed? How do cultural expectations of childbearing collide with changing family forms and challenging environmental, social, and economic contexts, and what does this mean for traditional notions of ‘the family’?

These questions might be approached differently depending on who you ask. While European governments are concerned with falling birth rates and the role of reproduction in maintaining the economic productivity of the nation state, young people are concerned about a multiple convergence of ecological, economic, and social crises that transcend national borders to destabilise the building of intimate lives. Our project will explore the subjective views of young adults about their future intimacies and their networks of significant others across the European countries of Finland, Portugal, and Scotland, to grasp similarities and differences between socioeconomic contexts, cultural ideas about starting a family, and the responses of young people to these. The findings will enable us to sketch a wider scenario for European reproductive futures.

Why is this research important? European governments have historically drawn on demographic data to model population-level reproduction scenarios to predict revenues and expenditure. These data are used to make decisions on social and economic policies such as immigration, childcare, and welfare. At a different level, social attitude surveys have been useful in uncovering concerns around, for example, climate change and the future. However, large-scale methods of demographic data and attitude surveys prevent us from understanding young people’s own preferences and reasoning about their future lives, and the resulting diversity of companionship and family building that may unfold in the coming decades. Meanings of ‘family’ are changing and complex; companionship and family life increasingly consist of important non-kin others, such as friends and pets, yet young people are still subject to societal expectations of biological procreation. In the background are the economic hardships wrought by the financial crisis, the war in Ukraine, and the global Covid 19 pandemic, as well as fears around climate change and an unviable reproductive future.

Our project NETREP (Networks of Reproduction in the complex planetary future) will use a qualitative methodology to comparatively analyse young adults’ relational contexts as networks of particular relations and commitments from a nuanced life-historical perspective. This will offer a rich insight into the processes and constraints within which individuals make decisions on their future intimate life, and into society’s expectations young adults in three countries face. A network approach to young adults’ lived relations and sense-making allows sensitivity to the wide variation of contemporary family life, on who or what can be considered as family.  We will also analyse secondary data to detect attitudes and ideas that shape family building in the three countries.  The 4-year project is being led by Anna-Maija Castrén at the University of Eastern Finland.  Anna-Maija is joined by project research colleagues Aino Luotonen and Jenna Siivonen at the University of Eastern Finland, Vanessa Cunha and Rita Gouveia at the University of Lisbon, and Lynn Jamieson, Emma Davidson, Liliana Arias Uruena, and Lisa Howard at the University of Edinburgh. As well as contributing to academic theory on family life and risky futures, our findings will be key to informing policy and practice in the areas of, for example, family, fertility, public health, and migration.