Family

• Alternatives to families


  • Children's homes
  • Residential care homes
  • One-person households
• Commune


  • A group of people who share living accommodation, possessions, wealth and property, based on shared political beliefs or environmental principles
• Kibbutz


  • A group of people who live together communally in settlements in Israel, and who value equality and cooperation between members
• Criticisms of Parsons, Murdock and the Functionalist Perspective


  • Outdated, unrealistic and sexist
  • Focuses on American middle-class families and ignores social class, and religious and ethnic diversity
  • Ignores alternatives to the nuclear family
  • Gives an idealised view of families that does not match reality
• Marxists are critical of the nuclear family and see it as functional for capitalist society
• Criticisms of the Marxist Approach to Families and Zaretsky

  • Ignores the fact that many people are satisfied with family life and marriage
  • Ignores family diversity
  • Focuses on negative aspects of the nuclear family
• Feminists argue that Marxists work with the traditional model of the nuclear family - that of the male breadwinner and female housewife
• Some feminists see female oppression as linked to patriarchy rather than to capitalism
• Many of these studies of families were carried out before civil partnerships and same-sex marriages were allowed
• Criticisms of Families


  • Feminists are critical of the patriarchal nature of families, the status and role of women in families, and the family's role as an agency of gender socialisation
  • Marxists are critical of the economic function of the nuclear family under capitalism, the family's role in reproducing social inequality over time, and the family's role as a unit of consumption for capitalism
• Other sociologists and commentators are critical of or concerned by the decline in traditional family values, social changes such as the increase in marital breakdown, divorce and lone-parent families, the isolation of the nuclear family from the wider kinship networks, the loss of traditional functions of families, and the functionalist perspective's unrealistic idealisation of the nuclear family
• Segregated conjugal roles


  A clear division of domestic labour - tasks are divided by gender, and the couple spend little of their leisure time together and have separate interests
• Joint conjugal roles


  No rigid division of household tasks into male and female jobs, and the couple share much of their leisure time and have few separate interests
• During the early 20th century, conjugal roles were segregated, with married women responsible for domestic labour and men as the main wage earners
• Parsons' view on conjugal roles

  The man takes the more instrumental role as breadwinner, and the woman takes the more expressive role as housewife and mother, explained in terms of biological differences between the sexes
• Feminists reject the idea of symmetry in conjugal roles, as women in paid work still have the main responsibility for housework
• Oakley's definition of the conventional family

  A nuclear family with a clear division of labour between the male breadwinner and female housewife
• Young and Willmott identified an increase in shared decision-making, including financial decisions, within symmetrical families
• Pahl found that more couples share decisions on household spending compared with 30 years ago, but husbands are still likely to dominate decision-making
• Sociologists see domestic violence as a form of power in which one family member attempts to control others
• After the introduction of the Education Act 1918, all children had to attend school until the age of 14, and Young and Willmott argue that childhood was officially recognised as a separate stage in human life at this point
• Research suggests that middle-class families are more likely than working-class families to involve their children in decisions
• Relationships are generally more child-centred and focus on children's needs, and the average family size is smaller today than 100 years ago
• Young people are now financially dependent on their family for a longer period of time, which can potentially lead to conflict within families
• Some children contribute to childcare and housework, help out in family businesses and provide emotional support
• Young and Willmott found that the extended family flourished in Bethnal Green in London during the mid-1950s, but in later research they discovered that the nuclear family had become more isolated from the extended family
• An alternative view is that geographical distance affects the type of support between family members but does not eliminate it altogether, as support at a distance takes the form of visits, phone calls and financial help
• Principle of stratified diffusion


  Many social changes (for example, in values and attitudes) start at the top of the social class system and work downwards, with changes in family life filtering down from the middle class into the working class
• Quality of parenting


  • One of the main factors affecting children's well-being
  • Associated with children's educational achievements and social skills
• Some parents cannot control their teenage children, and delinquent teenagers have been inadequately socialised into society's norms and values by their parents
• A minority of teenagers are themselves parents
• Household structures


  Changes since the mid-1970s include: decrease in proportion of children in nuclear families, increase in cohabiting couples, increase in same-sex couples, increase in one-person households
• The number of reconstituted or blended families in England and Wales fell from 631,000 to 544,000 between 2001 and 2011
• Reason for decrease in reconstituted families

  Babies more likely to be born to older couples who are less likely to separate
• Dual-career families


  • Increasing proportion of married/cohabiting women in employment
  • Some experience role conflict between parenting and employment
• Lone-parent families


  Proportion of dependent children living with one parent has increased, linked to rise in divorce and changing views on family/marriage
• Some commentators link rise in lone-parent families to decline in society's moral fibre and culture of dependency
• One-person households


  Number has increased, partly due to ageing population and more solo living among younger people
• Fertility


  Average number of children women of childbearing age give birth to in a society
• Women born in UK having fewer children (and at later age) than 30 years ago, trend towards smaller families