Rural Families

From 1900 throughout the first half of the twentieth century, a massive migration from rural to urban areas took place in most developed countries. Even in less developed countries, farm families fled to cities for economic survival. Between 1960 and 1980 in the United States and Canada, a turnaround occurred (Fulton et al. 1997) in which families began to return to rural areas, attracted by the slower pace of life and the ideal of quiet rural life.

The family farm crisis of the 1980s slowed that trend between 1980 and the early 1990s. Early census configurations from the U.S. 2000 census suggest that another trend, a return of large populations to nonmetropolitan areas, is underway.

Although the rural family is difficult to define from an international perspective, clearly it is not the cherished mid-twentieth century prototype: intact, large (five to twelve farm-laboring children), tradition-bound, earth-bound, living in a rambling farmhouse on inherited acreage. The rural family of the beginning of the twenty-first century is smaller, lives a more mechanized life, is, at the least, exposed to modern media and technologies, is more likely to hold nonfarm jobs or jobs not related to farms, is more educated, and is in many ways more like its urban counterpart than the rural family of one hundred years ago.