Introduction

Current European debates concerning the decline of the nuclear family, the forms and implications of new family type structures, and the role of the welfare state in changes in family and gender relationships are hardly on the political agenda in Greece. There are clear indications that aspects of family life are altering. These include the later age of marriage, increasing rates of divorce, the increase in female participation in the paid labour force, and the very slow increase in single parenthood. Other new phenomena indirectly relating to family life, such as increased drug and alcohol use, and homelessness among young people, are also indicators of change. Yet the institution of the family remains a core value and practice, even if the foundations are less secure as individualism becomes a stronger force in Greek society.

The effects of family life mark all individual life histories in our Sostris data. Relationships between a child and its parents, parental abilities, characters, weaknesses and absences, the presence of significant kin, and the class, occupational, generational and community affiliations of the family, all have relevance to the individual's life course. In Greece, the institution of family has a strong, extensive and direct influence on the life decisions of its members, including career selection, labour market access, strategies in relation to social inclusion and exclusion, sexuality and marriage. It provides extensive financial, welfare and emotional support, and has always been forced to compensate for the limited welfare state support available in critical areas such as unemployment, dependency in old age, and sickness. In fact, the influence of the family emerged as far more substantial in the southern European countries participating in Sostris than in the northern European countries. Other Greek social theorists confirm this research observation about the critical and extensive role of the Greek family institution in work. Vergopoulos (1989) states that the social control, political authority, economic organisation, ideological and cultural systems are in accordance at all levels with the functioning mechanism of this unique and indissoluble institution. Commenting on the changes in traditional Greek society, caused by modernisation and development, he states that the only predominant central structure that occurs everywhere remains the Mediterranean patriarchal family, at the heart of which is the obedient and passive Mediterranean woman.