THE FAMILY - PERSPECTIVES Flashcards
(37 cards)
What did Parson’s argue about the development of families?
In pre-industrial societies, the family carries out a whole variety of functions yet as societies industrialised, they became more complex and structural differentiation occurred
This is whereby specialised institutions develop to perform functions formerly carried out by families (eg businesses produce food and products people need, the welfare state looks after those in need and schools educate children)
Because the family has fewer functions, the big extended family is not needed anymore, and the nuclear family performs all the functions that are needed
What two roles does the family achieve, according to Parsons?
Socialisation of children: primary socialisation and internalisation of shared norms and values to maintain a consensus
Stabilisation of adult personality: married couples rely on each other for emotional support and can also act childish with their children to release stress
What is Parson’s warm bath theory?
family provides comfort to the breadwinner role while the wife assures he comes home to a calm, clean, comfortable environment where his needs are met
What four functions does the nuclear family achieve, according to Murdock?
Sexual function: channel their sex drives into socially acceptable relationships such as marriage (minimalists conflict and provides fulfilling relationships)
Economic function: a unit of production and consumption, individuals benefits by having their needs met and society benefits from economic contribution
Reproduction: children and reproduced to ensure society continues
Education: main agency of primary socialisation, where the children learn the shared norms and values
What does Popenoe argue about the nuclear family?
There are biological imperatives that underlie the way families are organised - for example men and women are biologically different which results in their different conjugal roles
We need a ‘cultural script’ which is a set of guidelines for what families should be like asked on ‘bio social reality’ - therefore implies that some family types are less functional than others as they are not based on the biological needs of human beings
What is Willmott ad Young’s ‘March of Progress’?
Look at how society develops and modernises over time, with four stages of family development relating to the process of industrialisation
Stage one: pre-industrial family - a unit of production with no separation between work and home
Stage two: the early industrial society - home and work are separated as men go out to work, and women form the domestic role
Stage three: the symmetrical family - less gender segregation and joint conjugal roles , and becomes a unit of consumption, as well as becoming more isolated from kinship networks
Stage four: the asymmetrical family - men increasingly spending their leisure time outside the home and without their partners, yet this stage didn’t really occur
What do Dench, Gavron and Young argue about Willmott and Young’s ‘March of Progress’?
It does suggest stratified diffusion, where the working class has become privatised, no longer extended and more geographically mobile
However, large scale immigration had changed the demographic of the population and there was now a high South Asian population
What are the functionalist key names for the nuclear family?
Parsons, Murdock, Popenoe, Willmott and Young
What are criticisms of the functionalist perspective on the nuclear family?
Ignores the dark side or the negative aspects of families (eg child abuse, domestic violence)
Ignores the fact that the family can be dysfunctional
Oliver James argued that many of the problems we face in adult life can be traced back to early childhood
Ignores the diversity in family life, meaning it is out of date in today’s society
Feminists argue Parson’s view is sexist, as he assumes mean and women will naturally perform different roles with equal status, yet in reality nuclear families are based on male power and dominance
Interactionists believe Parson’s view of socialisation is a top-down process whereby parents instil the norms and values of society onto children, however it is a two way process where children socialise their parents as much as they are socialised by them
According to the new right perspective, what has the break down of the nuclear family lead to?
Poorly socialised children who underachieve in education
Increased crime
Increase in lone mothers who are dependent on benefits instead of absent fathers
They want a return to traditional family life which is the nuclear family
What does Charles Murray argue?
New right
An underclass has edged made up of the poorest people at the bottom of society who are dependent on welfare benefits rather than work
Lone parent families (headed by women) forms a significant section of this underclass
Children, especially boys, growing up without a father figure are likely to fare worse at school and turn to crime
Lays blame on the successive government who rewarded irresponsible behaviour by giving over generous benefits creating welfare dependency
Created a cycle of deprivation, leading to a culture of poverty
What does Dennis and Erdos argue?
New right
Children raised by single mothers on average have lower educational achievement and poorer health
Boys grow up without learning that adulthood involves taking responsibility for a wide and children so develop into immature, irresponsible and antisocial young men
What are criticisms of the new right perspective of family?
Victim blaming approach - victims are blamed for their own poverty which is not their fault and actually caused by the unequal society
Putting value judgement on the nuclear family being the ‘best’ encouraged discrimination and prejudice towards other family forms
Chambers described fears about lone parents as a moral panic whipped up by the media and politicians to justify cuts in spending on benefits
Rose-tinted nostalgia speculation view of ‘golden age’ without cohabitation, single parents or sex outside of marriage
Links to crime and underachievement could be explained by poverty, not the family
What is the general marxist view of the nuclear family?
Reject the view that the nuclear family is the best form of family, as the society the children are being raised in is a society based on inequality and conflict
The capitalist society has created families as an institutions designed to serve capitalism
Family is a ‘safety valve’ (response to the warm bath theory) where the family ensures that the parents stay submissive to capitalism
What are the new right key names for the family?
Charles Murray, Dennis and Erdos
What did Zaretsky argue?
Marxist
With the rise of capitalism industrial production in the nineteenth century, work and family life became separated
Under capitalism, work became an alienating experience, meaning that workers had little control over work and were unable to achieve real satisfaction from it
Individuals can only experience really satisfying family relationships when capitalism is abolished so families are organised around the needs of the members not the needs of the economic system
The family supports capitalism in two ways:
Women in the family reproduce and bring up children (new work force)
The family acts as a unit of consumption, buying the products of capitalism
What did Cooper argue?
Marxist
Family relationships reflect the property relationships of capitalism in that individuals develop a sense that they own their partners and children, which in his view restricts the ability of people to develop as individuals
Also sees the family as an ‘ideological conditioning device’, which means that we live in a hierarchical and unequal society where those higher up control those below them - which the family is a miniature version of
Children learnt to submit to the capitalist ideology which teaches those at the bottom that they must accept their position and be obedient to those above them
What was Rosemary Crompton’s argument?
families ensure a process of class reproduction whereby most children end up in a similar class position to their parents
Links to Cooper
What did Hochschild argue?
Marxist
Argues that there has been a ‘commercialisation of intimate life’ which means that many services that were provided by families for their members have been taken over by commercial organisations, meaning that these service are provided by money instead of love
This has happened because women have increasingly moved into the world of paid work, they have been forced to hire other people to do the jobs that they formerly performed unpaid
The ‘time bind’ is where adults are putting in longer hours than any other industrialised nation which means that less time is spent raising children and homemaking.
Capitalism benefits from this as people spend more time supporting the bourgeoisie and being exploited, and spend more money on services for the family acting as a unit of consumption and a unit of production
What did Engels argue?
Marxist
In early society there were no restrictions on sexual behaviour and women held the power
However, as people learnt to head animals, men took control of the livestock and became the property owners, and as society became more complex polygyny was introduced
Monogamy developed and ensured that an child born were the legitimate heirs, which eventually became the nuclear family
Nuclear family means property can be passed down from the father to their sons, supporting capitalism as the rich stay rich and leads to class reproduction
What is the Kibbutz and what does it show?
Tried to abolish the nuclear family by the child not living with their parents, and instead being separated from their mother at birth and being looked after by a specialised ‘caregiver’
This shows how the nuclear family is not needed for a successful family, however it did lead to individuals having greater difficulty making strong emotional connections
What are criticisms of the marxist perspective of the family?
Marxism tends to suggest that individuals’ personal lives are largely shaped or even determined by economic forces such as the needs of capitalism, however social action theories argue that this ignores the fact we can make choices about our own lives (eg more people reject the nuclear family
Marxism can also be seen as outdated as it focuses on the nuclear family rather than it’s alternatives - say little on family diversity
Highlights the extent of class inequalities in family life but fails to consider the importance of other social divisions such as gender, ethnicity, and sexuality and their effects in personal relationships
Mainly focuses on family life in western capitalist societies and has little to say about the nature of families in other parts of the world
What are the marxist key names?
Zaretsky, Cooper, Engles, Hochschild
What did Betsy Stanko find?
Carried out a survey on domestic violence in the UK, and based her findings on phone calls to the police forces across the country together with referrals to help organisations and found:
Acts of domestic violence are committed every six seconds and 999 calls reporting attacks are made every minute
More than 80% of victims were women were attacked by men
8% of incidents involve men being assaulted by women
⅓ women will experience domestic abuse in their lifetime
This disproves the function of the nuclear family as the stabilisation of adult personalities, as domestic violence shows that the home doesn’t provide a comfortable, safe environment
