Family Diversity

Question 1

Previous Predominate Type of Family

Answer 1

Nuclear Family: A family that consists of two adults, one male and one female, who are married and have either adopted or biological children

Question 2

Introduction Statistics

Answer 2

In 1960 38% of families were nuclear, making it the most common. It remains the most common today (2017) at 35%. Percentages of other families have increased; single parents (one adult with children), reconstituted (step and dependent children), one person and cohabiting couples (not married with or without children).

Question 3

Reasons for % Increase

Answer 3

There are many reasons for this including social/cultural changes, economic changes, religious changes, legal changes, the Welfare state and the changing status of women.

Question 4

SOCIAL CHANGE: Changing Social Attitudes (Divorce)

Answer 4

Up until the 1960s, there was a strong stigma attached to divorce, but more recently most people in Britain (apart from some with strong religious or moral views) appear to view divorce as normal and acceptable. The British Social Attitudes Survey 2006 (Duncan and Phillips 2008) found that 63 per cent of respondents agreed that ‘Divorce can be a positive step towards a new life’ and only 7 per cent disagreed. Seventy-eight per cent also agreed that ‘It is not divorce that harms children, but the conflict between their parents’, with again only 7 per cent disagreeing.

Question 5

SOCIAL CHANGE: Changing Social Attitudes (Religion)

Answer 5

The decline of religious beliefs may also have contributed to the greater social acceptability of divorce. Colin Gibson (1994) argues that Britain has undergone a process of secularisation, whereby religious values have weakened in society, including the influence of the traditional teaching of the church about the value of lifelong marriage. Though divorce appears to have become normalised in Britain and other Western societies.

Question 6

SOCIAL CHANGE: Changing Social Attitudes (Chambers 2012)

Answer 6

Highlights a range of evidence that ‘divorce, cohabitation and lone parenthood are still viewed within dominant public discourses as signs of moral decline, despite being widespread’. For example, lone parents are often defined by the tabloid press as ‘undeserving scroungers’, and there is still a widespread belief that divorce leads to bad parenting. This would suggest that the stigma attached to divorce has not entirely disappeared.

Question 7

SOCIAL CHANGE: Secularisation

Answer 7

Is the process whereby, especially in modern industrial societies, religious beliefs, practises and institutions lose social significance

Question 8

SOCIAL CHANGE: Secularisation (Gill and ONS)

Answer 8

GILL found that those who identified themselves as not being religious rose from 23% in 1950 to 43% in 1996. ONS says 25% say no religion in 2011 compared to 15% in 2001. So there is less pressure and stigma and people no longer feel the need to be married to live together, have children together and have sex.

Question 9

SOCIAL CHANGE: Secularisation (Babies Outside of Marriage)

Answer 9

The percentage of babies born outside of marriage or civil partnership in 2016 was 48%; of these, two-thirds had parents who lived together. The percentage of births outside of marriage or civil partnership has remained relatively unchanged since 2012, following a notable increase from 5% in the mid-1950s. This increase coincided with cohabitation becoming more common as an alternative to marriage, particularly at younger ages.

Question 10

SOCIAL CHANGE: Secularisation (Cohabitation)

Answer 10

increased substantially since the 1980s due to this. The second largest family type was the cohabiting couple family at 3.3 million families in 2017. The fastest growing family type over the 20-year period was the cohabiting couple family, which more than doubled from 1.5 million families in 1996 to 3.3 million families in 2017. This may be explained by an increasing trend to cohabit instead of marry, or to cohabit before marriage, particularly at younger ages. So marriage rates fall.

Question 11

ECONOMIC CHANGES: Positive

Answer 11

The long term increase in wealth and overall rising standards of living explains the long-term increase in single person households. Generally wealthier countries have a higher proportion of single person households, and it is only wealthy countries where significant numbers of people can afford to live alone because it is expensive compared to two adults sharing the cost of a mortgage, bills, and food. It seems that when people can afford to do so, they are more likely to choose to live alone.

Question 12

ECONOMIC CHANGES: Negative

Answer 12

Not everyone has benefitted from increasing wealth in the UK because at the same time as increasing wealth, the cost of living, and especially the cost of housing has increased. This explains the recent increase in multigenerational households and Kidult Households: at the lower end of the social class scale there are millions of people who cannot afford to buy or even rent their own houses, and so they stay living with their parents.

Question 13

RELIGIOUS CHANGES: Statistic

Answer 13

53% of all adults describe themselves as having no religious affiliation, up from 48% in 2015. The latest figure is the highest since the BSA survey began tracking religious affiliation in 1983, when 31% said they had no religion.

Question 14

RELIGIOUS CHANGES: Explanation

Answer 14

While the fall in religious affiliation is being driven by the young, the proportion of people over 75 saying they have no religion is 27%. A much higher proportion, 40%, identify as C of E or Anglican.
Despite the rapidly shrinking proportion of the public identifying as Anglican, the C of E continues to enjoy a privileged status as the established church, with 26 seats in the House of Lords reserved for bishops. Many within the C of E have warned that its resistance to same-sex marriage, and the difficulty of some churches in accepting LGBT Christians, have alienated almost an entire generation of young adults. Some young people also view the C of E as failing to embrace and represent the diversity of 21st-century Britain. Religions such as Christianity prevents the family from changing too rapidly, for example, because it tends to support traditional “family values” and discourage alternatives such as promiscuity, homosexuality, and childlessness.

Question 15

RELIGIOUS CHANGES: (Functionalism)

Answer 15

This conservatism is seen by Functionalists as positive and desirable as it maintains society and prevents it from fragmenting. Durkheim argues that the function of religious ritual is to maintain social solidarity by affirming the moral superiority of society over its individual members. Durkheim believed that social life could only exist if values were shared and socially integrated into a coherent whole. Religion is an important aspect of this process not only providing a set of unifying practices and beliefs, but also by providing a way in which people can interpret and give meaning to the world.

People are freer to choose non-nuclear families because of the decline of tradition and religion.
There is much less social pressure to get married, have kids and stay married, so all other options become more viable.Secularisation means that less and less people are religious and becoming increasingly less important to people and consequently so do there values

Question 16

LEGAL CHANGES: (Divorce)

Answer 16

Legal changes led to the removal of legal and finical barriers to getting divorced. Until the 1923 Matrimonial Causes Act divorce was handled outside the legal system and it was unfair to women who had to prove adultery and desertion while men only had to prove adultery. So only matrimonial offences could grant a divorce up until the Divorce Reform Act 1969 that made the sole ground for divorce is ‘irretrievable breakdown’ which it can be proven in five different ways. This change led to a spike in divorces in 1971 to 125,000 compared to 27,000 a decade earlier. Subsequently, this has led to an increase in reconstituted families as people get divorced and remarry. Increasingly so now that as the church allow second marriages (40% of all marriages). No more social stigma and leaving is now a better option than staying and suffering. According to the ONS the fastest-growing household type was households containing two or more families, increasing by 39 per cent from 206,000 households in 2003 to 286,000 households in 2013.

Question 17

LEGAL CHANGES: (Same-Sex Families)

Answer 17

Legal changes have led to a new type of family, same sex families, with and without dependant children. It is estimated that between 5 and 7 per cent of the population are homosexual. Therefore it is no surprise that attitudes towards same-sex relationships have changed; in general there is much greater tolerance. This shift is remarkable and due to great efforts made by organisations such as Stonewall. These changes are reflected in state policies, which now include extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. This trend is of great interest to sociologists who are interested in investigating the types of patterns in roles and relationships that exist between same-sex couples. The latest ONS statistics reveal that 7037 civil partnerships were formed in the UK in 2012, an increase of 3.6 per cent since 2011. The Civil Partnership Act 2004 came into force on 5 December 2005 and enabled same-sex couples to obtain legal recognition of their relationship. The Government Equalities Office originally estimated that there would be between 11,000 and 22,000 civil partners in Great Britain by 2010, but there were actually over 79,000 people in civil partnerships at the start of 2010.
Marriage (Same Sex) Act 2012 and Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill allowed lesbian parents to have their own children as well allowed anti-discriminatory laws have allowed them to get married and have children. WEEKS observed that there are more openly gay and lesbian couples but they are still a minority.

Question 18

THE WELFARE STATE: (The New Right)

Answer 18

The New Right believe that overly generous welfare benefits have created an underclass in the UK, and a subsection of this underclass consists of teenage girls who choose to get pregnant in order to get a council house and live a comfortable life on welfare. Has made it more socially acceptable to be unemployed.

Question 19

THE WELFARE STATE: (The Reality)

Answer 19

In reality, only 2% of single parents are teenagers, which is hardly a significant proportion compared to the overall numbers. Also, it is not so much the benefits system which is to blame – The money is simply not enough to encourage someone to have a child to get housed. If you are on benefits, whether you have a child or not, you get enough to exist rather than to have a comfortable life. The current weekly Jobseekers allowance is under £60 per week.

Question 20

THE WELFARE STATE: (Murray)

Answer 20

Believes that social policy has led to the decrease of the Nuclear family and the rise of social problems. The welfare state consists of social security, free healthcare. housing and benefits and made it socially acceptable to be unemployed. Single mothers in particular are blamed for juvenile delinquency. Rose from 8% in 1971 to 26% in 2011. Little evidence as most single parents aren’t so by choice but instead bereavement or relationship breakdown.

Question 21

CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN: (Allan and Crowe)

Answer 21

Argue that the changing position of women in society has been one of the main factors influencing a rise in the number of divorces. In the 1940s, around two-thirds of divorce petitions were initiated by men. Women often did not have the financial resources to fund divorce cases and were likely to find themselves much worse off without the economic support of a husband. In 2012, 65 per cent of divorces were initiated by women (ONS 2014a). Since the 1970s, far more married women are employed, giving them a degree of financial independence, and welfare benefits for women with dependent children have improved. However, most women still find themselves financially worse off after divorce.

Question 22

CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN: (Cooke and Gash)

Answer 22

found no clear relationship between women’s employment and earnings and their likelihood of divorcing. For some feminists, the large number of women seeking to escape from marriage reflects the problematic nature of traditional marriage more than the fact that life as a lone parent is easier for women than it was in the past.

Question 23

CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN: (Duncombe and Marsden)

Answer 23

which found that many of the women they interviewed who had been married for some years became increasingly dissatisfied with their husbands’ inability to take on responsibilities in marriage, leaving them to not only perform housework but also to care for the family’s emotional needs.

Question 24

CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN: (Liberal Feminists and Late Modernists)

Answer 24

say that the increasing number of women going to work is the reason that there are more lone person households as they are no longer reliant on men so don’t need to get married quickly and can focus on establishing careers which consequently leads to them delaying settling down and childbirth. SHARPE “love and marriage” in 1974 to “jobs and careers” in 1996, showcasing that womens priorities changed. ONS findings for the first time show more women over 30 having babies than under 30. IVF has extended childbearing but this has still led to women having less children.

Question 25

POST MODERNISTS

Answer 25

We are now in the era of late modernity where traditional norms and structures that constrained individuals to fit into certain structures and roles have started to dissolve. This can be seen most clearly in the role of women in society where traditional norms that limited women’s opportunities and dictated that married women’s place was in the home have become less restricting.

Question 26

POST MODERNISTS: (Giddens)

Answer 26

argues that life in late modernity is characterised by reflexivity, by which he means that individuals constantly question what they are doing in life and reflect on possible alternatives. They create their own life-scripts rather than following a script laid down by society based on their gender, social class or other characteristics. This means that individuals have much greater choice about their lives in general and more specifically about how they construct their own domestic arrangements. The nuclear family has therefore become simply another option rather than the social norm. Increasingly, we are seeing more people choosing other options such as singlehood, cohabitation, lone parenting, reconstituted families and gay and lesbian relationships. 
He suggests that the idea of romantic love, which emphasised finding a special person, falling in love and spending the rest of your life with them, has been replaced by confluent love. Confluent love is based on a deep emotional intimacy in which partners reveal their needs and concerns to each other. Giddens argues that couples today seek what he calls a ‘pure’ relationship. By this he means a relationship that is pursued for its own sake, especially for the emotional fulfilment it offers. In the past, husbands and wives often stayed together for practical reasons; women needed men to support them financially, and men needed women to run the home and look after children. Today these concerns are less important. This means that when relationships work, they are potentially much more fulfilling, especially for women who were often expected to provide emotional support in traditional marriages while receiving little
in return from their husbands. However, confluent love is also far more fragile as individuals only stay in relationships while their emotional needs are being fulfilled and are likely to look for love elsewhere when they are no longer satisfied. 
Giddens’ arguments certainly help to explain the high rates of separation and divorce that we are witnessing in the UK today. They also help to explain the growth of family diversity as reflexive individuals choose to look for confluent love in a whole range of relationships outside traditional marriage and the nuclear family.

Question 27

CONCLUSION

Answer 27

Despite social changes resulting in equality for women and greater choice, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the decline of the Nuclear Family is a bad thing for both society and individuals. For example, despite cohabitating couples accounting for 19% of parents, they account for 50% of family breakdowns with only 7% of parents staying together until the child reaches 18. Also 65% of children with divorced parents saying that the divorce affected thier GCSE results. Women still do the majoirty of the housework.