Family Notes A

• Couples and top pocket relationships can be pulled out when needed and pushed back when no longer required.
• Family is defined as a group of people related by kinship ties, with the adult members assuming responsibility for caring for children.
• A household refers to either one person living alone or a group of people who live under the same roof and share living arrangements.
• Marriage helps to acknowledge and approve a sexual union between two adult individuals.
• In pre-industrial times, the family was traditional/extended, consisting of the parents, a particular number of children, grandparents, aunts & uncles.
• Marxists adopt a structural view on family and agree with functionalists that it is a source of social control.
• The female's expressive role includes providing warmth, security & emotional support to the children and male partner.
• The reason why these families used to have a good number of children is because they wanted help in their farms.
• Laretsky looks at the family as an escape from oppression & exploitation at work, the family can release the working class’ pain & stress as it is a private place where people, particularly male workers, can enjoy a personal life and be valued as individuals and have some type of control over their lives.
• Althusser believes that family is an ideological state apparatus because it helps to pass on the ideas and beliefs of the ruling class.
• Parsons suggests that the family helps to stabilize personalities by the sexual division of labour.
• The male's instrumental role includes being the breadwinner of the family and leading the father to become stressed due to work.
• Parson's second family function is to help family members emotionally by the sexual division of labour.
• Parsons looks at the nuclear family as the best equipped to handle the demands of the industrial society because one member goes to work outside and the other stays at home caring for the other members of society.
• Marxists believe that the family is based on private property and driven by profit.
• According to Parsons, the sexual division of labour refers to the fact that females have the expressive role & males have their instrumental role in the family.
• In industrial societies, the need for work and money, the lack of power and independence combined with boredom at work, the pressure to achieve success and support for the family all threaten to destabilize personalities.
• The Marxist view of the family was criticised by various other sociologists because the Marxist's idea of the family tends to be old-fashioned.
• In 2003, a report named as Changing Britain, Changing lives stated that people are now marrying their partner for love rather than for social obligation.
• Engels, a traditional Marxist, believes that the monogamous nuclear family developed as a means of passing on private property to the next generations.
• Marxists believe that the family is concerned with social control by teaching its members to submit to the capitalist class through the process of socialization.
• Beck & Beck-Gernsheim examine relationships in this rapidly changing world, they look at how traditions, rules & guidelines which used to control relationships before are no longer relevant in society.
• Beck & Beck-Gernsheim argue that this is resulting in the battle of the sexes, with more marriage counseling, family courts, marital self-help and high divorce rates.
• Bauman looks at how individuals are swinging back and forth between security and freedom, they want both, they often refer to therapists who can help them have both.
• In pre-modern societies, marriage was not based on sexual attraction or romantic love but it was often linked to the economic context.
• In modern societies, people have more choice over when, how often and with whom they have sex with.
• Giddens argues that plastic sexuality brings about a change in the nature of love, individuals now have a choice to have sex with a person who they do not necessarily love.
• We can now speak of having semi-detached relationships.
• Bauman argues that relationships between men & women no longer have bonds, they are no longer fixed & they have unbreakable ties.
• This is resulting in the ideals of romantic love to fragment and slowly replaced by confluent love.
• Evans argues about the dominance of men over women.
• There is a difference between confluent & romantic love, confluent love explains the rise of divorce and separation.
• The transformation of intimacy — Anthony Giddens
• Beck & Beck-Gernsheim argue that in this age of uncertainty, we are primarily driven to find and hold onto romantic love out of fear of loneliness in a world lacking communal bonds.
• Giddens sees another transformation in the nature of the intimate relationship, he argues that nowadays we can speak of plastic sexuality.
• Bauman uses the word liquid as a metaphor to describe modern society, it is constantly changing and we have a lack of lasting bonds.
• Romantic love is when 2 individuals promise each other that they will stick with one another through thick and thin no matter what.
• In pre-modern Europe, children were often working from the age of 7 or 8 in their family farms.
• Murray & Marsland look at the decline in traditional family forms and the increase in single parenthood and family instability.
• New Right perspectives are aware of the threats that the family is facing due to social changes such as rise in divorce rates, more stepfamilies, more lone parents, cohabitation as an alternative to marriage, births outside of wedlock, and same sex civil partnerships or marriages.