families

• Murdock's four main functions of the family


  • Sexual
  • Reproduction
  • Educational
  • Economic
• Parsons' two functions of the family

  • Stabilisation of the adult personality
  • Primary socialisation
• Parsons' classic extended family


  Has been replaced largely by the privatised nuclear family and modified extended family
• Murray disapproves of lone-parent families and welfare for them
• Engels: nuclear family is a way of passing on wealth
• Althusser: family is an ideological state apparatus
• Zaretsky: the family plays an ideological role in propping up capitalism - cushions the oppression
• Greer: relationships between men and women often remain exploitative
• Delphy and Leonard: women are exploited in the family through unpaid labour
• Beck-Gernstein: traditional family structures are disintegrated and being replaced by a wide diversity of relationships
• Giddens: confluent love


  Replacing romantic love
• Beck-Gernstein: love is the only certainty in an uncertain world
• Smart: individualisation thesis exaggerates the decline of the family
• Fletcher: divorce rate has risen due to rising expectations of marriage
• Goode: secularisation means marriage has become less sacred
• Murray: increase in lone-parent families due to welfare benefits
• Berthoud: South Asian families tend to be larger than other families in the UK
• Berthoud: family life in Caribbean communities based on 'modern individualism' - individual choice
• Young and Wilmott: families becoming more symmetrical - equal but opposite roles
• 2008 British attitudes survey - 80% of women 'always or usually' do the laundry
• Oakley: criticises Young and Wilmott for their methodology - 72% of men claimed to be helpful around the house in some way apart from the washing up - vague!
• Oakley: the double shift
• Duncombe and Marsden: the triple shift
• Edgell: women had responsibility for unimportant decisions, men for important ones
• Pahl: found financial sharing was moving from 'allowances' for women to 'pooling' system where funds are pooled
• Dobash and Dobash: violence against women is how the women's subordinate role is maintained
• Childhood


  Socially constructed and only emerged relatively recently with industrialisation
• Aries


  • Children were seen as mini-adults in medieval times
• Asian girls


  More strictly controlled by their parents
• Toxic childhood


  Concept proposed by Palmer
• Disappearance of childhood


  Result of the rise of digital technology, previously linked to rise of print media
• Purchase of intimacy


  Concept proposed by Chambers, linked to globalisation
• Increasing life expectancy


  Responsible for improvements in environmental conditions, according to McKeown
• Falling births per woman


  Explained by changing position of women, according to Sharpe
• Purchase of Intimacy


  Concept proposed by social theorist J. Chambers, referring to the idea that global economic forces have created new markets for emotional and physical connections with others.