Family: Sociology

• Family diversity refers to the variety of different types of families in society, not just the nuclear family.
• Marriage is a legally recognized union of two partners in a relationship, it's a legal contract.
• In places like India and Pakistan, people are often chosen to be with each other due to their social status.
• The one child policy in China allowed higher social class or higher social status individuals to have as many kids as they wanted.
• The caste system in India means that people can't have relationships with people outside of their cast.
• Monogamy is the practice of being married to one person at one time.
• Arranged marriages are common in places like India and Pakistan.
• In China, there was a one child policy for over 30 years due to overpopulation.
• Divorce rates reached their lowest in 2018 since 1971.
• Divorce is the legal recognition of a partnership or marriage breaking up, also known as the legal dissolution of a marriage.
• Divorce rates have increased over the last 50 years, while marriage rates have decreased.
• A reconstituted family, also known as a blended family or a step family, is formed by two adults who come together after a previous marriage has ended and had a divorce.
• The Divorce Reform Act of 1969 is a piece of legal policy that enabled people to get divorced far more easily.
• Same-sex families are families of partners, regardless of their sex.
• A beanpole family consists of two adults and one child.
• Polygamy is the practice of being married to more than one person at once, it's a crime in the UK called bigamy.
• An extended family includes other relatives that aren't part of the next generation, such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on.
• Cohabitation is where two partners live together but without being married.
• The nuclear family is the traditional conventional family made up of two parents biologically have children and we're talking about at least two children there, it can be three four five six however many but it's more than one.
• A lone parent family only has one parent in it, that might be as the result of a divorce or the fact that one of the parents has never been around since the children have been born, but it can have any number of children.
• The majority of lone parent families in Britain are matriarchal.
• Divorce rates have declined over the last 50 years, but they have not been decreasing linearly.
• Cohabiting families are the fastest growing type of family in the UK.
• Arranged marriage is a practice where a couple are chosen to be together by their parents and it's been pre-arranged between those families.
• Lone parent families are also on the rise.
• Women on average have just under two children each over the course of their childbearing years, a decrease from nearly three children in the 1960s.
• Different cultures might practice polygamy, where one person is married to more than one person at one time, such as in certain aspects of Mormon culture and fundamentalist Islamic cultures.
• Polyandry is a practice where women have more than one husband or male partner, which is less common but can be seen in a tribe called the Nayar tribe in India in the late 19th century, where women had up to 12 male partners.
• Common or archetypal family types in different ethnic minorities include high rates of extended families in Asian households and low rates of lone parent families.
• The key changes in families and family structures over time include changes in marriage and divorce rates.
• The high rate of marriage in the late 1960s was due to the baby boomer generation, a group of people born just after the end of the Second World War.
• The baby boomer generation, born in the late 1960s, is a significant factor in the changes in families and family structures.
• Changes in family diversity can be attributed to the increase in reproductive technologies and birth control, as well as the impact of globalization and different families moving and migrating to the UK, bringing their culture and their archetypal family types with them.
• The divorce reform act of 1969, effective from the first of January 1971, led to a significant increase in divorce rates.
• Changes in marriage can be explained by the rise in cohabitation, the role of secularization, and declining and changing social attitudes.
• The divorce rates today are at their lowest since 1971, with the peak in 1993 at 165,000 divorces a year.
• In the past, there was a stigma around having sex before marriage and having children out of wedlock, which led to societal pressure to get married.
• Secularization refers to the decline of importance of religion in society, and as religion becomes less important, the pressure to get married for religious reasons decreases.
• Divorce has become normalized as people become less religious and feel less pressure to stay together due to religious vows.
• Happy marriages are not a given, and alternatives to marriage are becoming more common.