Family Notes B

• Bauman is criticized for being too pessimistic about modern society.
• Theories on individualization are accused of exaggerating on family fragmentation.
• Diversity and change in families and households can be found across the globe.
• The family still has its own basic characteristics which are shared in the European industrialized world.
• Monogamous partnerships are common in European marriages.
• European marriage is based on the idea of romantic love and couples are expected to develop mutual affection and love.
• The emphasis on personal satisfaction in marriage has raised expectations which sometimes cannot be met and this is one factor involved in the increasing rate of divorce.
• Western European families are patrilineal, meaning children take their father's name.
• Some tribes are matrilineal instead, where children take their mother's surname.
• Families are neolocal residence, meaning a married couple moves in away from both of their families.
• Many families, especially South Asian and poor working-class families, are matrilocal, where newlyweds settle in areas where the bride's parents live.
• In the case where the couple lives next to the groom's parents, this is called patrilocal.
• The nuclear family consists of one or two parents living in a household with their children.
• The nuclear family is eroding since different types of families are emerging.
• Rapoport et al identified 6 types of diversities that can be found in families: organization of domestic duties, cultural diversity, class divisions, variations in family experience during the life course, cohort, and sexual diversity.
• In the 1980s, Rapoport et al looked at families in Britain and how these are supposed to be.
• Cohort refers to the generations of families, with research discovering that as more people are living into old age, it is more common to find ‘ongoing’ families existing in close relation to one another.
• Sexual diversity in families consists of adults having different sexual orientations.
• Different families consisting of adults having different sexual orientations are becoming more common due to the acceptance of homosexuals.
• Legal divorce is possible in almost all industrialized and developing countries around the world.
• Malta is one of the countries who has recently legalized divorce.
• Step-families can involve children from different backgrounds, leading to confusion of what behaviour and attitude is appropriate and not.
• The rise of divorce rates has led to a high rate in remarriages, with the majority of remarried people being divorced before and some also being widowed.
• Individuals cohabitating use it as a fairly temporary, informal agreement where they spend a lot of time together and share accommodation.
• One of the difficulties in step-families is that a biological parent living elsewhere still has power over his/her children.
• Studies have shown that remarriages are less successful than first marriages, with rates of divorce from second marriages being higher than those from the first ones.
• Cohabitation refers to when 2 people live together in a sexual relationship without being married, increasing especially in developed countries.
• In 2001, of younger adults aged 25 to 34, 39% in Sweden were unmarried and cohabiting, 32% in Denmark, 31% in France and 30% in Finland.
• Step-families refer to a family in which at least one of the adults has children from a previous marriage or relationship, also known as reconstituted families.
• Many older divorced people prefer to choose cohabitation rather than marry again.
• Young adults often find themselves living together because they drift into cohabitation automatically rather than planning to do so.
• Relationships of the divorced married people can have their own constraints, for example, the other parents (who do not live with them) would want the children to visit them at the same time on the same day, resulting in less quality time and more tension.
• People who have been married and divorced are more likely to marry again than single people of the same age are to marry for the first time.
• There are both joys and benefits associated with step-families, but there are also some difficulties that might arise.
• Cohabitation is seen as an alternative or a substitute for marriage, with no legal commitments.
• Second marriage which stays might be more satisfying than the first marriages.
• There is an increasing number of one person households, with people deciding to marry later than before, spending time alone, or choosing to live with their partner instead of marrying.
• Remarriages can involve different combinations of people, such as those in their early 20s with no children, those in their late 20s, 30s or early 40s with each taking one or more children from the first marriage, or those who marry at later ages with adult children within the new marriage.
• A referendum was done in 2011 and the majority voted for divorce.
• The NSO in 2015 found out that there were approximately 900 individuals who had been granted a divorce.