Word: spain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Gracia Sánchez doesn't stray far from her father's thinking, but says the changes in Spain since her childhood are "mostly for the better." As a devout Catholic, however, she opposes the Zapatero revolution. "We've gone a step farther than was requested," she says. "Gay marriage and adoption wasn't a response to a demand from the people. It was a way to create a fracture in society; a coup de théâtre, to show how modern and advanced [the Socialists] were." Her husband Enrique Trabado, a lawyer for a major construction firm, provides...
...Certainly, Spain's next generation is less likely than any before to be reared within the traditional family structure. Noelia Posse, 29, says she always wanted to be a parent. But by the time her son Pablo was born two years ago, Posse's live-in boyfriend had already moved out. "We were in love, and decided to have a child. Sometimes things don't work out," says the city councilor in Móstoles, southwest of Madrid. "But I would have had a child even if I'd had to go to a sperm bank. My family is Pablo...
...Francisco Romo Adanero, a sociologist at Madrid's Catholic University of San Carlos, would respectfully disagree. He worries that the rush to abandon Spain's established ways undermines its future. "There is a terrible hate for tradition," says Romo. "[Spaniards] today are taught that if you're a person of these times you must renounce the past...
...measured by size alone, the Spanish family has seen better days: until 1996 Spain had the lowest fertility rate in Europe. The rate has actually started to inch back upward, from a low of 1.16 live births per woman in 1996 to 1.38 in 2006. That minor uptick is linked to larger immigrant families, but also to children of Spain's early-1970s baby boom starting to have kids of their own. It's not enough, though, to maintain the population level, so Parliament last year approved a $3,700 "baby bonus" subsidy for each child born...
...estimates of housing demand made faulty assumptions. A divorced couple, for instance, was automatically calculated as demand for one additional home, though in reality the husband often moves back in with his parents, or two divorcés join each other in a single household. Moreover, young people in Spain tend to live with their parents until they're married, a result of an affordable-housing shortage amid the housing boom. It proved untrue, says García-Montalvo, "that smaller families automatically mean more houses...