Family

• A household unit consists of one or more people living in the same house who may or may not be related to each other.
• There are three different types of households: couple households, single family households, and shared households.
• Roseneil (2006) suggests that an additional category of households can be added, referred to as ‘living apart together (LAT)’, where people are in a stable relationship and spend a significant amount of time together but do not share a home due to factors such as demanding careers or to maintain some independence.
• Nuclear family consists of parents and their children (two generations).
• There are variations on the two-generation structure of the nuclear family including: same sex families and reconstituted forms.
• Extended families are family structures that take two basic forms: vertically extended families, which involve 3(+) generations living in same household unit, and horizontally extended families, which are those with branches within generations, such as aunts or uncles living with, or close together.
• The death rate falls first, so that there is a growth in population, and then the birth rate falls later.
• Single-parent families or one-parent families involve a mother or father bringing up children without a partner.
• Fewer deaths related to work occur because of safer, healthier conditions.
• These rates usually fall during industrialisation.
• Better education and health care contribute to higher living standards.
• Developing countries tend to have higher death, birth and fertility rates than developed ones.
• High birth rates are due to factors such as mothers' lack of education and access to contraception and high infant and child mortality rates, so that parents cannot be sure their children will survive to adulthood.
• Advances in preventing and treating diseases contribute to higher living standards, especially better diets.
• Families of choice refer to close relationships that are chosen rather than being given by blood relationships or through marriage (e.g polygamous co-habiting structures).
• Reconstituted/step families include step-families resulting from the breakup of one family, due to death or divorce, and it is reassembly as a new family through marriage or cohabitation outside of marriage.
• Same-sex families are a variation of the traditional nuclear family involving same-sex couples.
• In the UK, civil partnership refers to a relationship between two people usually of the same sex that has been formally registered giving them similar rights to married couples.
• Single-person households are individuals who live alone by necessity, circumstance or choice.
• The UNCRC recognizes that children have more rights and laws.
• The legal policies created for the protection of children illustrate how children are seen in a different light than adults and must be protected from exploitation.
• In Shona society in central southern Africa, women are traditionally not treated as adults until they have children.
• Postman argues that childhood has disappeared due to the development of ‘open admission technologies’ such as social media and the internet, exposing children to images of adulthood and making them no longer naive and innocent.
• George Murdock, an American functionalist sociologist, argued that the nuclear family of a mother, father and dependent children was the basic family unit worldwide, based on research carried out around the world on many different countries and societies.
• One positive of an increasing elderly population is research in the UK has found that around 30% of the UK families depend on grandparents for children, with this figure increasing to nearly 50% in lone-parent families.
• In industrial societies, distinct human development age periods defined adulthood and childhood.
• For girls after their first menstruation, they are seen as “women”.
• Among the Yanomami people of the Amazon rainforest, girls are treated as adult women and marry after their 1st menstruation.
• Boomerang family refers to a family in which adult children have left home but then return.
• Philippe Aries in the early 20th century stated that the concept of childhood became a distinct phase in human development approximately 3 centuries ago.
• In modern industrial society, the role of grandparents in the family has evolved, contributing financially and through childcare.
• The changes in life expectancy have coincided with the rise in consumerism, globalisation and postmodernism, leading to older people taking an active role in their lives rather than letting society determine how they will be viewed or treated.
• Sue Palmer argues about the toxicity of childhood and that children do not have real opportunity to learn as their experience has been restricted by overprotective parents fearing for their safety.
• The concept of childhood didn’t exist in pre-industrial societies where children lived and worked alongside their parents.
• Marxist and radical feminists views have been criticized as being dated due to the progress seen in gender equality in some parts of the world.
• The stability and socialisation offered by the nuclear family is still considered the best environment to raise children according to the new right perspective on family diversity.
• Horowitz (2005) argues that with the traditional nuclear family structure children learn moral values which they take into wider social relationships.
• Family diversity has had a negative economic function on society and led to dependency on the state according to new right theorists.
• Nuclear families are the most appropriate for developing stability, caring for family members and successful relationships in children who grow up to be productive for the state and social order according to the new right perspective.
• The new right perspective is based on the idea that the traditional nuclear family consisting of two heterosexual married adults with clearly defined gender roles and relationships is the best equipped and desirable family type to provide stability and social order for society.