Changing Family Patterns - Including Divorce Flashcards
The number of traditional nuclear family households has…
Fallen
Divorce rates have…
Increased
More couples…
Cohabit
Why are people not getting in the ages they used to?
Cohabiting, putting careers first and cost.
What are the threats to marriage?
Becoming less popular, increasing rates of marital breakdown with rising divorce rates.
What is the major reason why family patterns are changing?
Divorce
Why are women having fewer children and having them later?
Expensive & doesn’t fit in with career.
Why is Britain’s divorce rates higher compared to other countries in Europe?
Places like Spain and Italy are more religious than Britain.
What is the main alternate to marriage?
Co-habitation
What are the seven main reasons for increase in divorce?
- Changes in the law
- Declining in stigma
- Secularisation
- Rising expectations of marriage
- Women’s increased financial independence
- Feminist explanations
- Modernity and individualisation
What changes in the law gas there been?
Equalising the grounds of divorce between sexes.
Widening the grounds of divorce.
Making divorce cgeaper.
What is desertion?
Where one partner leaves the other but the couple remain legally married.
What is legal separation?
Where a court separates the financial and legal affairs of the couple but where they remain married and are not free to re-marry.
What are empty shell marriages?
Where a couple continue to live under the same but remain married in the name only. (No love and for the sake of kids)
Stigma refers to…
Negative label, social disapproval or shame attachment to a person, action or relationship.
The fact divorce is more common has now seen it become…
Normalised
What is secularisation?
The decline in the influence of religion in society.
What is childrearing?
Who’s bringing up the children.
Why have expectations on marriages risen?
In the past individuals had little choice in who they married.
Less tolerant of an unhappy marriage.
Feminists argue women carry a..
Dual burden: required to take on paid work in addition to performing domestic labour (housework and childcare)
Radical feminists want to make…
Women more equal.
What does ‘the individualisation thesis’?
Each individual becomes free to pursue their own self interest.
The New Right s high divorce rates as…
Undesirable as it undermines marriage and the traditional nuclear family which they think is vital to social stability.
Children from divorced parents are thought to…
Suffer from a range of problems such as crime and unemployment. They are believed to be kore likely to divorce when they get older.
