Families and Households - Sociologists Flashcards
G.P. Murdock (1949)
FUNCTIONALIST
> concluded the nuclear family was universal and existed in every known society.
Four Functions
1) Reproductive - children were symbolic of a couple’s emotional commitment to one another. Having children functioned to stabilise both the marital relationship and family life.
2) Sexual - marital sex creates a powerful emotional bond between a couple.
3) Educational - refers to primary socialisation. Murdock argued that culture needs to be transmitted to the next generation , because without culture, social order is not possible. This is beneficial to the individual because they grow up to be a well-integrated citizen.
4) Economic - children are dependent on their parents for a significant number of years. Murdock argued that parents show commitment to the care of their children by becoming productive workers.
Murdock’s definition of the nuclear family is ethnocentric and dated - it was written in America in the 1940s.
Criticisms
> Reproduction - the size of families has declined as getting married and having children have become more optional in the 21st century.
> Sexual - the decline of religious beliefs meant that attitudes towards sex outside of marriage are more relaxed.
> Socialisation - the mass media, especially television and social networking sites, have become more influential than parents as agents of socialisation.
> Murdock’s emphasis on two heterosexual parents is politically conservative.
Parsons
FUNCTIONALIST
Primary Socialisation of Children
> the teaching and learning of the attitudes, values, behavioural norms and traditions that mainly occurs during childhood and prepares a child to take their place as an adult in a particular culture or society.
> saw the family as a crucial bridge connecting the individual child/adult to wider society.
Stabilisation of Adult Personality
> second function of the family is to relieve the stresses of modern-day living for its adult members.
> claimed the family could act like a ‘warm bath’ and that immersion in the family life could relieve the pressures of work just as a warm bath soothes and relaxes the body. (support - Steel and Kidd (2001) )
> argued that this nuclear unit provided the husband and wife with very clear and distinct social roles.
Instrumental role - father and husband is responsible for the economic welfare and living standards of the family group. He is the wage earner and head of the household.
Expressive role - mother and wife should be responsible for the socialisation of children and the emotional care and support of family members
> sexual division of labour is natural as it is based on biological differences. For example, many believe women have ‘maternal instincts’ which make them best suited to be ‘emotional caretakers’.
Parsons Criticism
- Fletcher (1988)
Steel and Kidd (2001)
note that the family fulfils the ‘warm bath theory’ by providing “in the home a warm, loving, stable environment where the individual adults can be themselves and even ‘let themselves go’ in a childish and undignified way”, for example, by playing with their children.
Fletcher (1988)
FUNCTIONALIST
> argues that Parsons was wrong to suggest that the family had lost its functions. He argues that the family performs three unique functions that no other social institution can carry out: 1) satisfying the long-term sexual and emotional needs of parents; 2) raising children in a stable environment; 3) and the provision of a home to which all members can return after work, school, etc.
> accepts that the nuclear family has largely lost its economic function, however, the family does function as a major unit of economic consumption because the modern nuclear family spends much of its income on home-oriented consumer items such as such as family cars and garden equipment.
Cheal (2002)
> notes that functional and loving relationships can easily slip into damaging relationships, and love can often turn into hate in times of intense emotion.
Evidence
> Most recorded murders, assaults, and child abuse take place within the family.
> Radford et al. (2011) in a study carried out on behalf of the NSPCC found that 1 in 20 children had been sexually abused in the UK, while 1 in 14 had been physically abused.
> Stanko’s (2000) survey found that one incident of domestic violence is reported by women to the police every minute in the UK.
Young and Wilmott (1975)
The Symmetrical Family
> based on 2500 interviews with people across London.
> generally confirmed that the nuclear family, which they called the symmetrical family, had become the universal norm in late 20th century Britain
> identified a number of features it is characterised by:
1) composed of two parents plus their children
2) it is privatised (infrequent contact with neighbours and extended kin)
3) women are often in part-time or full-time work
4) often dual-career (both parents in work is essential to their standard of living)
5) it is egalitarian (men and women have economic equality and has led to the rise of joint conjugal roles and family instead of gender-based activities)
6) it is home and child-centred
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> claimed that men and women’s attitudes towards the distribution of labour had undergone a radical change so that in both middle-class and working-class households, conjugal roles were more likely to be jointly shared. This meant that marriage became more egalitarian in the 1970s.
> this change in nature was caused by four major social changes:
1) Slum clearance programmes relocated many-working class families to council estates, removing families from extended kin.
2) Greater educational and job opportunities led to larger numbers of working-class people experiencing geographical mobility.
3) Women started going out to work in greater numbers than ever before and began making significant economic contributions to the standard of living of their family.
4) Women acquired more power, for example, access of contraception gave women more choice over when they started a family.
Harris et al.
> argue their research suggests that extended families emerge when adult children renegotiate their relationship with their parents when they have their own children.
> mutually beneficial for grandparents to babysit their grandchildren, strengthening the qualititative nature of their relationship and allowing the parents to go out to work.
> these supports may be reciprocated as grandparents proceed into old age.
Engels
MARXIST
> claimed that the monogamous nuclear family only became popular after the industrial revolution because the ruling class encouraged it in order to protect their property and wealth.
> claimed that monogamous marriage was useful to the elite’s as legitimate children could easily inherit the wealth of their direct descendants.
> argues we originally lived in ‘promiscuous hordes’, who were groups or tribes with no restrictions on sexual relationships.
Zaretsky (1976)
MARXIST
> challenges Talcott Parsons by claiming that the modern nuclear family mainly benefits capitalism and the ruling class at the expense of other members of society.
> sees the family as a crucial agent in the socialisation of children, who are socialised into capitalist values (obedience, conformity, showing respect for authority). These children grow up into conformist citizens and passive workers.
> argues that the role of the family is more sinister than Parsons suggested because its real function is to help manage their resentment of the capitalist workplace.
> argues that the nuclear family is an essential component of capitalism as it is a major unit of consumption. Parents are encouraged to teach their children that the main route to happiness lies in consumerism and material possessions.
CRITICISM
> Zaretsky rarely considers that some working-class parents do resist ruling-class ideology by teaching their children values and norms that come with knowledge of capitalist inequality and exploitation.
> Marxists tend to neglect the very real emotional and social satisfaction some people get from being part of a family.
Benston (1972)
MARXIST FEMINIST
> suggests that the nuclear family, and women’s nurturing role within it, is important to capitalism as it produces and rears the future workforce at little cost to the capitalist state.
> support - Office of National Statistics (ONS) estimated in 2014 that laundry and ironing in the home was worth an estimated £343 billion in 2010.
Ansley (1972)
MARXIST FEMINIST
> suggests that capitalism has stripped male workers of dignity, power and control at work. This results in men taking their frustrations out on their wives. Ansley describes women as ‘takers of shit’.
> argues that domestic violence is the product of capitalism.
Millett (1970) and Firestone (1971)
RADICAL FEMINISTS
> argue that men and women constitute separate and often conflicting ‘sex classes’ and it is the interaction between these classes, especially in marriage and the family, that is responsible for the most important and long-standing gender inequality.
> Firestone argues that women should be using IVF to exclude men from families as she believes women’s dependence on men derives from their childbearing and child-rearing functions.
Delphy and Leonard (1962)
RADICAL FEMINISTS
> claim that husbands exploit their wives despite genuinely loving them.
> argue that a woman’s role within a marriage is to ‘flatter’ her husband and provide emotional support to him.
Redfern and Aune (2013)
RADICAL FEMINISTS
> conclude that male violence against women takes many forms, including FGM, marital rape, and domestic violence.
Greer (2000)
RADICAL FEMINIST
> argues in favour of matrifocal households (all-female).
Oakley (1981)
LIBERAL FEMINIST
> developed sex-role theory to argue that there are distinct gender roles that come from culture rather than biological differences between men and women. These roles are learned through childhood and continue on into adulthood and tend to maintain male dominance and female subservience.
Wilkinson
LIBERAL FEMINIST
> notes that the economy has undergone tremendous change in the last 50 years because of recession and globalisation. The UK economy has evolved from being dominated by heavy industry (male work) to a service economy. The rise of the service sector was accompanied by the feminisation of the British workforce.
> argues that these economic changes have led to a dramatic cultural change in women’s attitudes that she calls a ‘genderquake’.
Corsaro (2011)
> is critical of liberal feminism as he argues that there is little research on parent-child interaction at home, and there is no real and convincing evidence and analysis of how toys are used or symbolically valued.
Calhoun (2003)
BLACK DIFFERENCE FEMINISM
> points out that women in lesbian relationships cannot be exploited by men.
Murray
NEW RIGHT
> argues that one-parent families are more likely than other family types to produce crime, hooliganism, drug abuse, and educational failure.
> developed the concept of an ‘underclass’ to describe a social group that is workshy and dependent on welfare benefits. ‘Underclass’ was underpinned by: 1) dissolution - because divorce was too easy to obtain; 2) dysfunction - because parents were not taking responsibility for the behaviour of their children; 3) and dad-lessness - because too many fathers were losing contact with their children and/or were refusing to take responsibility for them.
Morgan
NEW RIGHT
> argues that gay families are unnatural because children cam only be the outcome of what she describes as the natural loving sexual union of a man and woman.
> suggests that the motivation of lesbians and gay men for children is questionable. She claims that they only desire children to acquire the benefits of a life that imitates heterosexuality: children are merely prizes to be shown off to other gay couples.
> is critical of the welfare state’s policies towards families. She argues that two-thirds of the average income of one-parent families comes from benefits and tax credits.
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> is concerned about the decline of marriage because, in her view, marriage contributes to social stability. She argues that married people make better lovers, parents, workers and citizens because marriage reinforces and promotes the sharing of the same legal and social duties and obligations to the community.
> refers to cohabitation as ‘marriage-lite’ because she claims evidence suggests that cohabiting couples are less happy and less fulfilled than married couples, more likely to be unfaithful, abusive, stressed and depressed, and therefore more likely to split up.
Butler (2010)
NEW RIGHT
> argues that strong and durable families are important to the stability of society as ‘broken families’ are more likely to produce children who will break the law, be unemployed, and/or be dependent on benefits.
Labour Govt 1997-2010
> Lewis (2007) points out that before 1997, UK governments, unlike their European counterparts, did not explicitly formulate family policy.
> Finch (2003) argues that Labour’s election victory in 1997 marked a change in family social policy from a ‘familiaristic’ regime to a more ‘individualistic’ outlook.
> Morgan (2007) argues that the Labour government’s family policy undermined both marriage and the traditional family because it was biased towards single-parents and gay people, at the expense of single-earner nuclear families.
> Judge (2012) points out that between 1999 and 2011, the number of children in poverty was reduced by 900,000, while another 900,000 were prevented from falling into poverty in the same period.
> Bradshaw (2012) also claims that the Labour governments family policy was successful because child abuse and neglect fell and subjective child wellbeing improved.
Levitas (2012)
> argues that the language used by the New Right is punitive and vindictive. She notes that it blames and labels the behaviour of poor families, and fails to appreciate that poor families are often unemployed and in poverty through no fault of their own.
Barrett and McIntosh (1982)
> argue that familial ideology is anti-social because it dismisses alternative family types as irrelevant, inferior, and even deviant.
> argue that familial ideology may have over-idealised the nuclear family - New Right sociologists fail to recognise that divorce and one-parent families may be ‘lesser evils’ than living in dysfunctional nuclear families.
Donzelot (1979)
> in ‘The Policing of Families’, notes that familial ideology is part of a wider process of surveillance and social control operated by the state.
> argues that family social policies are mainly targeted at ‘controlling’ problem social groups, such as the ‘underclass’.
> families are used in order to keep potentially problematic individuals under surveillance.
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> argues that poor families and their children are more likely to be controlled and regulated by the state. For example, the state monitors the quality of parenting and childhood through health visitors and social workers.
Cangiano (2014)
> estimates that between 1991 and 2012, net migration accounted for 54% of the increase in the UK population.
Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1995)
> suggest that in late-capitalist society, there are simply more choices available to young women and that they are choosing freedom and independence rather than restricting themselves to childbearing and parenthood
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> argue that increasing divorce rates are the product of a rapidly changing and postmodern world, in which the traditional rules and rituals of love, romance, and relationships no longer apply. They argue that the postmodern world is characterised by three important social influences:
1) Individualisation - people now have the freedom to pursue their individual goals, which makes them more selfish.
2) Conflict - more potential for conflict between men and women because there is a natural clash of interest between the selflessness required of marriage, and the selfishness that stems from individualisation.
3) Choice - cultural and economic changes mean that people have a greater range of lifestyle choices and living arrangements made available to them.
Hakim (2010)
> argues that voluntary childlessness is a relatively new lifestyle choice, which could only have been brought about by the contraception revolution.
> notes that a woman’s fertility status is still very much considered public property.
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> argues that some women choose to give more commitment to family and children, and so have less commitment to work. She argues that these women are more than happy to support their husband’s careers by taking on the bulk of domestic work and aren’t interested in wielding equal power in the home.
Gillespie (2003)
> identifies two motivational factors for voluntary childlessness: 1) ‘pull’ factor in that being child-free means increased freedom and better relationships with partners; 2) ‘push’ factor away from motherhood as they saw parenting as conflicting with their careers or leisure interests (Park 2005).
McKeown (1976)
> identified six factors that can explain the decrease in death rates and the corresponding increase in life expectancy:
1) Rising wages lifted many people out of poverty and improved their standard of living, and particularly their diets, in the early part of the 20th century.
2) Public health policy, especially the introduction of clean piped water into people’s homes and improved sewage and sanitation systems in the 19th century.
3) The provision of social housing for the poor - council flats and homes with good ventilation contributed to the near eradication of tuberculosis in the late 20th century.
4) Maternity care services were improved in the early part of the 20th century.
5) The introduction of the welfare state after WWII resulted in poorer sections of society being provided with a range of social and economic services and supports, such as free school meals, income support, old age pensions etc.
6) The introduction of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948 resulted in the provision of better and free healthcare.
Wall (1998)
> found that in the 1950s, 40% of the elderly had been taken in by their relatives, but this had dropped to only 5% by the mid-1990s.
