Topic 10: The Family Diversity Debate

Question 1

1) Families are increasingly diversifying

Answer 1

Post modernism

Giddens’ arguments 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.

beck and beck Risk:– since marriages and children (the nuclear family) present various risks (e.g. divorce, difficult children, loss of happiness), people are increasingly choosing to live alone, not marry (cohabit), meaning that there are a wider variety of family forms.
Individualisation: we will divorce if it suits us, have children outside of wedlock if we ike, pursue lone parenthood or childlessness.
Jon Bernardes; these features often produce diversity.

Question 2

Key Study: Judith Stacey: Pam and Dotty and the Postmodern family

Answer 2

-both women eventually left their husbands.
-Pam remarried and enjoyed a more egalitarian second marriage
-Dotty took her first husband back after he had a heart attack, but only on condition that he did most of the housework.
-He eventually died and she also lost two of her adult
children.
-She successfully fought for custody of one of her deceased daughter children r, and then formed a household with one of her surviving daughters,

Question 3

Diversity has been exaggerated
The neo-conventional family – Robert Chester
(chest of safety)

Answer 3

-minority that ;excited disproportionate attention’ from sociologists - most people still aspired to bring up children in a two- parent family.
-variations of the theme of the nuclear family - two parents with dependent children.
-statistics as snapshots [focused on a single point in time]
individuals move in and out of different households

Question 4

Gittins: Family ideology
kittens waiting to be taught

Answer 4

-An ideology is a set of ideas, and can
sometimes offer a misleading view, based on value
judgements, defining what is normal and desirable
-politicians have frequently attacked those who deviate from the conventional nuclear family.

Question 5

Leach: The cereal packet family

Answer 5

-mass media also tends to portray nuclear families as the norm, such as in advertising.
-it portrays happy smiling families, where mothers typically cook and perform domestic chores for husbands and children.