Chapte 11 Flashcards
Family Is Diverse
Successful families
•Families exist in many forms
•Successful families…
–Provide emotional support for family members
–Take care of elders
–Raise the next generation
Family Is Diverse
Nuclear family and Extended family
Nuclear family: a parent or parents and children
Extended family: includes parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins
Family Is Diverse
Simple households and Complex households
Simple households:
unrelated adults with or without children
Complex households: two or more adults who are related but not married to each other and hence could reasonably be expected to live separately
Nine Changes in the
Canadian Family
The marriage rate is decreasing while the
cohabitation rate is rising.
The age of first marriage is rising.
There are more divorces overall, but the rate is falling.
More women are having children in their thirties.
The number of children per family has dropped below the “replacement rate.”
There is nearly as many couples without children as with.
Children are leaving home at a later age.
There are more lone-parent families.
There are more people living alone
Fun facts about Canadian Family
• The makeup and behaviour of Canadian families has changed drastically over the past 40 years.
• Statistics Canada (the National Data Intelligence Bureau), no longer keeps track of marriages and divorces.
• For 90 years (1921-2011) marriage rates were tracked for the country, and since 1972 divorces were tracked.
• So, why did Statistics Canda stop collecting data on marriage and divorce in 2011?
- The marriage rate is decreasing while the cohabitation rate is rising
– Crude marriage rate is the number of marriages that occur in a given year per 1,000 people in a population.
• The crude marriage rate has fluctuated over the years. (Reducing)
– While the marriage rates have dropped the number of common-law (cohabiting) unions has risen since the 1980s
- The age of first marriage is rising
The average age of first marriage in Canada has risen steadily since the early 1970s, but as Figure 10.3 shows, it wasn’t until the 1990s that the figures really began to climb.
3.There are more divorces overall, but the rate is falling
Analyzing divorce statistics can be complicated, however, examining legislation surrounding divorce can help us to understand these changes
In 1968: grounds for divorce expanded which made divorce easier
– Divorce rate increases from 54.8 to 124.5 per 100,000 from 1968– 69
•1985:DivorceActallows“maritalbreakdown”divorce
– By 1987, the divorce rate climbed to 363.75 per 100,000
• By 2002, the divorce rate declined to 223.7 per 100,000
- More women are having children in their thirties
• In 2010, the average age of a woman giving birth in Canada surpassed 30
• In 1987, 4% of women aged 35 and over gave birth for the first time, but 12% in 2011
• From 1995 to 2015 births to mothers in their teens has declined to 2.5
• Average age of first-time mothers related to average age at marriage
• Fecundity: the physical ability to conceive
– As women age their ability to conceive decreases, which may affect fertility rates
5.The number of children per family has dropped below the “replacement rate”
Total fertility rate:
is an estimate of the average number of children that a cohort of women between the ages of 15 and 49 will have in their lifetime
– In 2002 and 2016 fertility rate in Canada was 1.51and 1.54 respectively
- The number of children per family has dropped below the “replacement rate”
Replacement rate:
the number of children that the average woman must bear if the overall population is to continue at the same level
– Canada’s replacement rate is 2.1
– Canada’s fertility rate falls below the replacement rate
- There are nearly as many couples without children as with
The proportion of couples living with children has been surpassed by the proportion of couples living without children
• In 2011, 44.5% of couples lived without children, compared to 39.2% of couples with children
– However, the 2016 census shows a modest reversal, with the ratio of couples with children to couples without at 51.1 to 48.9
- Children are leaving home at a later age
Cluttered nest:
Cluttered nest: is sometimes used to describe the phenomenon in which adult children continue to live at home with their parents
– 1981–2016: men and women aged 20–24 living with parents rose from 51.4% to 65.7% and 33.6% to 57.6% respectively
– Causation:
• Prolonged education
• “Boomerang kids” who returned home after getting post-secondary education
• Cost of living
• Later age at marriage
- Children are leaving home at a later age
Empty nest:
Empty nest: describes a household in which children have moved out to live on their own
- There are more lone-parent families
• The number of lone-parent families increased from 8.2% of all families in 1966 to 14.2% in 2016
• Critics need to be cautious about their perceptions of lone-parent families as:
– Most lone-parent households began as two-parent households
– There are planned lone-parent household
– Adoption as well as advances in fertility technology give individuals today various avenues to become a parent
- There are more people living alone
• In 1996, 12% of the entire Canadian population age 15 and over lived alone
• By 2016, the overall percentage of Canadians living alone had climbed to 13.9%
– The percentage of adult women living alone is greater than the percentage of adult men living alone (14.5% versus 13.1)
– The fact that women tend to outlive men contributes significantly to this difference
Family in Quebec
Statistically, Quebec families are distinct from families in other parts of Canada
• Quebec has been the province with:
– Highest cohabitation rate: 39%
– Lowest marriage rate: 2.9 per 100,000
– Highest divorce rate: 69.2 per cent per 100 marriages
– The highest number of divorces among couples married less than 30 years: 61 per 100 marriages
• In 2011, Quebec had the greatest number of births to single mothers
– Greatest percentage of births to divorced women
– Greatest support for same-sex marriages
Same-Sex Couples and Marriage
Same-sex marriage legalized in 2005, and a better understanding has begun to develop regarding the importance of formalizing same-sex relations.
Conjugal Roles
Conjugal (or marital) roles:
Conjugal (or marital) roles: The distinctive roles of the husband and wife that result from the division of labour within the family
Conjugal Roles
Bott hypothesis:
Bott hypothesis: Elizabeth Bott (1957) characterized conjugal roles as
– Segregated: tasks, interests, and activities are clearly different
– Joint: many tasks, interests, and activities are shared
Earning and Caring: Changes in Conjugal Roles
Beaujot (2000) argues we moved from complementary to companionate relationships
– Complementary roles (Bott’s segregated roles) cast men primarily as earners or breadwinners and women involved primarily in the unpaid work of childcare and housework
– Companionate roles (Bott’s joint roles) breadwinning and caretaking roles overlap
Earning and Caring: Changes in Conjugal Roles
• However, the move to companionate relationships is not complete
– Married women, especially those with young children, still do more unpaid work at home than married men
• This has created an imbalance in conjugal roles, where women take on what some sociologists have called a “double burden” or “second shift”
– The double ghetto describes the marginalization of working women experience inside and outside the home
Earning and Caring: Changes in Conjugal Roles
According to Nakhaie (1995), the key to correcting gender imbalances is what Arlie Hochschild called gender strategy:
gender strategy:
– Plan of action through which a person tried to solve problems at hand, given cultural notions of gender at play
Earning and Caring: Changes in Conjugal Roles
• Child care responsibilities encourage occupational segregation:
– Women choose occupations that have greatest flexibility in terms of childcare-related work interruptions (e.g. care for a sick child, care for a newborn child)
The Ethnic Factor in Conjugal Roles
• Segregated conjugal roles dominates:
– Recent immigrants in some ethnic groups adhered more to segregated conjugal roles (e.g., South Asian immigrants)
– However, immigrants often slowly assimilate and adopt Western approach
• Ethnic factor still must be considered in any study of gender roles in the Canadian family.
Division of Domestic Labour and Gender
Frank and Frenette (2021) examined the apportionment of household and child-care tasks as perceived by couples in various socio-demographic groups.
• For both kinds of tasks, the estimated percentage mostly done by women was significantly higher than that mostly done by men, except in “gardening” and “outside work (repairs).
• The household tasks in which it was estimated that the highest percentages were done equally by both sexes were doing the dishes, grocery shopping, and gardening
Division of Domestic Labour and Gender
both women and men gave higher estimations of the
amount of work they do than did the opposite sex.
The men were more satisfied than the women were.
Division of Domestic Labour and Gender
Regarding Table 11.7, a number of factors related to dissatisfaction were identified by the researchers.
• Women in older couples (both 45+) were more dissatisfied with the division of labour within the family than were women in couples where both partners were under 45 years old.
• Women who had children younger than 15 were more likely to be dissatisfied than those who did not.
• Post-secondary education, place of birth, and women’s employment status also were found to be differentiating factors.
Marrying “In” and Marrying “Out”
Endogamy
• Endogamy: refers to marrying someone of the same ethnic, religious, or cultural group as oneself
Marrying “In” and Marrying “Out”
• Exogamy
• Exogamy: marrying outside one’s group
– There is a strong tradition among some ethnic groups to
practice endogamy (South Asians, Chinese)
– However, Canadians are becoming increasingly more comfortable with inter-ethnic marriages (Japanese)
Family and Ethnicity
• There is a history in Canada of the federal government creating policies designed to deprive racialized minorities of family
– Expensive head tax levied on immigrants from China and South Asia (19th and 20th century)
– The treatment of domestic workers (Guadeloupe, Jamaica)
Attacks on the Indigenous Family
Indian agents did some shi
During the early 20th century, Indian Agents withheld food rations to enforce monogamy
Attacks on the Indigenous Family
Residential schools
• Residential schools: created to keep Indigenous children away from the (assumed harmful) influence of their parents and communities
– Children endured physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hand of school officials
Attacks on the Indigenous Family
Forced sterilization
• Indigenous peoples, especially women, were subject to forced sterilization
– Under the Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act (1928–1972), the province sterilized 2,832 people, most of them women, 25% of whom were First Nations and Métis
Attacks on the Indigenous Family
Example of Scientific Racism:
• Act reflected 20th century belief in eugenics, a form of scientific racism that sought to prevent those deemed inferior to pass on their genes
– Form of genocide (destroy a people by preventing births)
• The Sixties Scoop: removal of large numbers of Indigenous children from their families by government-affiliated agencies in the 1960s
• Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has detailed the many harms and societal damage the residential schools brought to many Indigenous individuals and groups
