Families & Households Flashcards
(27 cards)
Murdock
Primary socialisation
Stabilisation of the sex drive
Parsons
Primary socialisation
Stabilisation of adult personalities
Gender socialisation
Murray & Marsland
By creating a welfare state and investing in benefits, we undermine responsibility
Dependency culture - people don’t take responsibility
Engels
Sees the nuclear family as a way to ensure inheritance
Althusser
Sees the family as having an ideological role - passes on ideas of value to capitalism
Part of the ideological state apparatus
Zaretsky
Sees the family as an escape from oppression and ‘alienation’
Feeling disconnected from your work, family provides a haven
Giddens
We are much more individual and we have much more choice
The ‘pure’ relationship based on actual love and liking - more choice, higher standards and expectations, more divorce
Reasons for decline in birth rate
Changes in women’s positions
Decline in infant mortality
Children as an economic liability
Child-centredness
Effect of changes in fertility
The family - smaller families so women are free to go out to work
The dependency ratio - children make up a large part of this, reduction in ‘burden of dependency’
‘Vanishing children’ - children may become lonelier, fewer voices speaking in support of children’s interests
Public services and policies - fewer schools are needed, effect on cost of maternity leave
Reasons for decline in the death rate
Reduction in deaths from infectious diseases
Improved nutrition
Medical improvements
Smoking and diet
Public health
Effect of ageing population
Public services - older people consume a larger proportion of services
One person pensioner households
The dependency ratio - non-working old are economically dependent
Causes of demographic changes
Changes in women’s position in society
Child centred parenting
Better healthcare
Better housing/living conditions
Increased life expectancy
Changes to lifestyle
Higher life expectancy
Lower infant mortality rate
Globalisation
Changing patterns of divorce
40% of all marriages end in divorce
Fewer people are marrying in the first place and are choosing to cohabit instead
Explanations for the increase in divorce
Changes in the law - ‘no fault’ divorce
Declining stigma and changing attitudes
Secularisation - religious institutions lose their influence
Rising expectations of marriage
Women’s increased financial independence
Reasons for changing patterns of marriage
Changing attitudes to marriage
Secularisation
Declining stigma attached to alternatives to marriage
Changes in the position of women
Fear of divorce
Reasons for the increase in cohabitation
Decline in stigma attached to sex outside of marriage
The young are more likely to accept cohabitation
Increased career opportunities for women
Secularisation
Chosen families
‘Friendship as kinship’
Childbearing
Nearly half of all children are born outside of marriage
Women are having children later
Women are having fewer children - women have more options than just motherhood
Lone-parent families
90% of these families are headed by a woman
A child living with a lone parent is twice as likely to be in poverty as a child with 2 parents
Increase in divorce and separation
Ethnic differences in family patterns
Black families - higher proportion of lone-parent households
Asian families - larger than those of other ethnic groups, value placed on the extended family
The extended family today
Willmott - continues to exist as a ‘dispersed extended family’
Continue to provide support despite being dispersed
Beanpole family
Extended vertically through 3 or more generations
Not extended horizontally - doesn’t include aunts, uncles
Increased life expectancy and smaller family sizes
Functionalism - nuclear family
There is a ‘functional fit’ between the nuclear family and modern society
The New Right - nuclear family
There is only one correct or normal family type - tradition patriarchal nuclear family
Clear cut division of labour between the breadwinner husband and homemaker wife
