This analysis uses data from an intensive village study to investigate whether
rising landlessness leads to increasing fragmentation and nucleation of families in rural
Bangladesh. It was found that, even after rapid fertility decline, the elderly and women
continue to rely extensively on family support. Although landlessness puts stress on
intergenerational relations, afavourably low dependency ratio (elders to sons), brought about
by the child-mortality decline of the 1950s and 1960s, has allowed the burden to be spread
over larger numbers of sons than were previously available. A persistence of traditional living
arrangements, in which sons form their own households in the homesteads of their fathers,
also contributes to retarding the process of family disintegration that is likely to be caused
when farm size decreases and the role of the farm economy in a traditional peasant society
diminishes.