FAMILIES

KEY QUESTIONS

• Try to define the term family and draw a picture of your family

• Who is in it? • What does family mean to you?• Who do you define or call family? Is it your

immediate family, extended family, your step mum or dad, your grandmother?

• How many types of families can you think of? • What makes a family a family?

Case study

• Louise was asked to draw a picture of her family at school and this is who she drew

• Nanny, dad, grandmother, sister and brother

• WHY??? Is this a family?

• Create a family tree of your family

• Do you think your family represents the typical nuclear family why/why not

• Over the past several decades Western societies have witnessed shifts in family patterns that would have been unimaginable to earlier generations

• The great diversity of family and household forms has become an everyday feature of our age.

• People are less likely to marry than they once were and tend to do so at a later age

• The divorce rate has risen significantly contributing to a growth in lone parent families

• ‘Reconstituted families’ are formed through second marriages or through new relationships involving children from previous unions

• More and more people are choosing to live together – to cohabit before marrying or instead of marrying

• The world of family looks very different that it did fifty years ago. While the institutions of family and marriage still exist and are important to our lives, their character has changed dramatically

Basic concepts

• A family is a group of persons directly linked by kin connections, the adult members of which assume responsibility for caring for children

• Kinship ties are connections between individuals established either through marriage or through the lines of descent that connect blood relatives (mothers, fathers, siblings, offspring etc)

• Marriage can be defined as a socially acknowledged and approved social union between two adult individuals. When two people marry they become kin to one another: the marriage bond also however connects together a wide range of kinspeople. Parents, brothers, sisters and other blood relatives become relatives of the partner through marriage

• Family relationships are always recognized within wider kinship groups

• In virtually all societies we can identify what sociologists call the nuclear family

• Nuclear family – 2 adults living together in a household with their own or adopted children

• In most traditional societies the nuclear family was part of a larger kinship network of some type

• Extended family – when close relatives other than a married couple and children live either in the same household or in a close and continuous relationship with one another

• Who do you think an extended family include?

• An extended family may include grandparents, brothers and their wives, sisters and their husbands, aunts and nephews.

• In Western societies marriage and therefore the family are associated with monogamy.

• It is illegal for a man or women to be married to more than one spouse at any one time

• This is not the case everywhere however

• In a famous comparison of several hundred societies in the mid-twentieth century, George Murdock found that polygamy which permits a husband or wife to have more than one spouse was permitted in over 80% of them (Murdock, 1949)

• There are two types of polygamy:

Polygyny – in which a man may be married to more than one women at the same time

Polyandry – much less common in which a women may have two or more husbands simultaneously

Family diversity

• Sociologists believe that we can not speak about ‘the family’ as if there is one model of family life that is more or less universal

• The dominance of the traditional nuclear family was steadily eroded over the second half of the twentieth century

• It is important to remember that the work family covers a variety of different forms

THE MODERN FAMILY

• How accepting is society today of the modern family?

• Do you think the modern family is a true depiction of society today why/why not

• How many different types of family are evident in the film

• What do you think defines a parent – does it always have to be biological why/why not?

• Do you think a child is disadvantaged having same sex parents?

• Is the modern family a true depiction of today’s society

Quiz • Reconstituted family• Kinship• Marriage• Extended family• Nuclear family• Polygyny• Polyandry • Cohabit

• Waks family documentary

• Joseph fritl – family??

• Brady bunch

• Wife swap

• My big fat greek wedding

Polygamy

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq_cptHufTQ

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OEaRn3uHsc&feature=related

• Polygamy article

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hGsrITRgm0

•

Socialization

• Socialization – the primary channel for the transmission of culture over time and generations

• Primary socialization – occurs in infancy and most intense period of cultural learning (family is the main agent of socialization during this phase)

• Secondary socialization – takes place in later childhood and into maturity – other agents of socialization take over some of the responsibility from the family (schools, media, peer groups an the workplace become socializing forces for the individual)

Theoretical perspectives

• The study of family and family life has been taken up differently by sociologists of contrasting persuasions

Functionalism

• See society as a set of social institutions that perform specific functions to ensure continuity

• The family performs important tasks which contribute to society’s basic needs and help to perpetrate social order.

• With industrialisation the family became less important as a unit of economic production and more focused on reproduction, child rearing and socialisation

• According to American sociologist Talcott Parsons the family’s 2 main functions are 1. primary socialization

2. personality stabilization

Primary socialization

• Primary socialization – the process by which children learn the cultural norms of the society into which they are born

• The family is the most important arena for the development of the human personality

Personality stabilization

• Personality stabalization – role that the family plays in assisting adult family members emotionally

• Marriage between adult men and women is the arrangement through which adult personalities are supported and kept healthy

Stabilizing adult personalities

• In industrial society the role of the family in stabilizing adult personalities is said to be critical

• This is because the nuclear family is often distanced from its extended kin and is unable to draw on larger kinship ties as families could prior to industrialisation

NUCLEAR FAMILY

• Parsons regarded the nuclear family as the unit best equipped to handle the demands of industrial society

• In the ‘conventional family’ – one adult can work outside the home while the second adult cares for the home and the children

The concept of the breadwinner

• Husband adopts the instrumental role of ‘breadwinner and the wife assuming the ‘affective’ emotional role in domestic settings

PROBLEMS/LIMITATIONS

• Inadequate and outdated view• Functionalist theories have come under

heavy criticism for justifying the domestic division of labour between men and women as something natural and unproblematic

• But when viewed in their own historical context the theories are more understandable

• The postwar years saw women returning to their traditional domestic roles and men resuming positions of sole bradwinners

• Emphasizes family as performing certain functions but neglects role of other social institutions such as government, media and schools in socializing children

Feministhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_mGNEVmj9Y – Sadie the

cleaning lady

• Challenges the vision of family as a harmonious and egalitarian realm not always a source of comfort, love and companionship but also a source of loneliness, exploitation and inequality

The problem with no name

• American feminist Betty Freidan wrote of ‘the problem with no name’ – the isolation and boredom that gripped many western suburban housewives who felt relegated to an endless cycle of childcare and housework

• Others called it the phenomenon of the ‘captive wife’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvk1NZDFvZU – sister

suffrogate• Feminism succeeded in directing

attentions inside families to examine the experiences of women in the domestic sphere

• Feminist writers questioned the vision that family is a cooperative unit based on interests and mutual support

• They have sought to show that there is unequal power relationships within the family and certain family members tend to benefit more than others

• Domestic division of labour – the way in which tasks are allocated between members of a household

• Unequal power relationships – domestic violence

• Sought to find answers for why does the family serve as an arena for gender oppression and physical abuse

• The study of caring activities – not only do women shoulder concrete tasks such as cleaning and childcare but they also invest large amounts of emotional labour in maintaining personal relationships

Modern • Second shift – women’s dual

role at work and at home

New perspectives – draw on feminist perspectives

• Second shift – referring to women's dual roles at work and at home

• Beck and Beck-Gernsheim – examined the chaotic nature of personal relationships, marriages and family patterns against the backdrop of a rapidly changing world

• The traditions, rules and guidelines which used to govern peronal relationships no longer apply- individuals are now confronted with an endless series of choices as part of constructing, adjusting, improving or dissolving the unions they form with others

Modern perspective

• Fact that marriages are now entered into voluntarily rather than for economic purposes brings both freedoms and new strains

• They demand a great deal of hardwork and effort

• Todays age is one filled with colliding interests between family, work, love and the freedom to pursue individual goals

• Both men and women today now place emphasis on their professional and personal needs

Modern perspective

• Beck and Beck-Gersheim conclude that relationships in modern age are about negotiations

• not only are love, sex, children, marriage and domestic duties topics for negotiation but relationships are now about work, politics, economics, professions and inequality

• Beck and Beck-Gersheim claim that the ‘battle between the sexes’ is the ‘central drama of our times’ as evidenced in the growth of marriage counseling. Family courts, marital self help groups and divorce rates.

• Even though marriage and family life seems more ‘flimsy’ than ever before, they still remain very important to people.

Changing families Changing Times

• Read pg 1 (Changing families, changing times, Marilyn Poole) re: Bali bombings

• Families are shaped by society-by place, time and culture’ (Keren Reiger, p3)

Demographic changes

• Demographic changes that have taken place in Australia have significantly impacted on our lives

• Demography – not just about the numerical changes in our population but changes in categories of people such as migrants, changing rates of marriage and divorce, decline in fertility rates and shifts in age groups

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CFldTTDNm0&feature=related

Goodbye assumptions!

• Can no longer assume that a family consists of a husband, a wife and two or three dependent children

• While many people in Australia do marry – marriage rates are falling overall and cohabitation rates are rising

• WHY?

• In the past it was assumed that women would have children

• However due to effective contraception and the availability of abortion many women are now choosing not to have children

• More and more people live alone

• Growing acceptance of same-sex relationships and increasingly legislation is being enacted giving same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexuals

• Prior to industrialization the household was an economic unit in which family production was assisted by non-kin such as apprentices living in the household or servants

• Following industrialization and the development of waged work outside the home, the family home become separated from the public sphere.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbG1t46_jmw&feature=related

Social trends - 1950’s and 1960’s – the shaping of the nuclear family

• Economic, political and social upheavals following WWII resulted in major long term changes to Australian Society

• Australia experienced large intakes of migrantsinitially many settlers were from English-speaking countries (up until 197- almost half, 46% of settler arrivals were born in the UK or Ireland (ABS, 2003)

• Other settler migrants came from former Yugoslavia, Italy, Greece and New Zealand

• In the last two decades Asian countries have become an important source of migrants

• Different waves of migrants provided new cultural and religious influences on the predominantly Anglo- Celtic traditions which characterized Australia in the postwar period

• Post war period few households except the very wealthy had domestic servants

• Jobs were created in manufacturing and retail

• Younger women – many of whom in former times would have been domestic servants – took up these jobs or a trade

• Households grew smaller and it was during the 1950’s and 60’s that the nuclear family became the dominant form

• For people marrying in the 50’s and 60’s• ‘age at first marriage was exceptionally

low’• Sexual activity began by marrying early• For women marrying meant leaving paid

employment• ‘children thus came early and fast and

social life revolved around baby health centres and schools’

Family in the late 1970s and 80’s

• Great social changes occurred which had implications for families

• Increasing diversity – ethnic and cultural mix of population

• Time of new cultural attitiudes and values – sexual liberation, civil rights movements in the US, womens liberation movements, introduction of contraceptive pill, abortion rights and increasing use of recreational drugs

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XtPOu2IC7c&feature=related

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTGWKHWbxgg&feature=related

• By the 1970’s the necessary conditions for changes to marriage and fertility already existed

• Oh no we forgot to have kids!!!!

• A decline attributed to women's ‘selfishness’

Why decline in fertility?

• The declining fertility rate is attributed to a number of factors

• Efficient contraception, changing attitudes to family size, access to abortion, increased participation of women in education and paid employment and greater choice about lifestyle (such as increased emphasis on personal goals and fulfillment

• It is hypothesized that people are much more individualistic and prefer to spend their income on a wide range of consumer goods and lifestyle products and services rather than on the costs of raising children.

• What is the nuclear family• To what extent is the nuclear family now the

preferred form of family in Australia• What factors best explain some of the changes

taking place in Australian Families• How do children cope with the separation of their

parents• What do you think are the effects of diversity in

families

• Create an in depth interview with a partner about their family and write it up as an anonymous case study

• Do they have brothers and sisters are they the eldest what does each role feel like

• What are the functions of a society’s family institution? E.g. teaching values, physical care and teaching independent learning skills see pg 7