The dramatic transformation of family patterns in advanced capitalist societies has received much attention in both academia and popular media. The empirical trends characterizing demographic transition include later age of first marriage, low fertility rates, and the prevalence of diverse family structures: single-parent families, cohabitation, interethnic marriages, and unmarried single-person households. The relatively positive appraisal of “modern families” in Europe stands in stark contrast to the public discourse on family change in East Asia, where the dominant tenor can be better characterized by alarm and anxiety. Drawing on the South Korean case, this book project employs a historical macro-structural framework to better understand the long arc of demographic transition. I synthesize dominant arguments explaining family change – modernization theory, gender inequality, and “second demographic transition” – to construct an overarching theoretical framework that makes explicit the relationships between economic industrialization, political democratization, and sociodemographic transition.