The Family – The Key Concepts

What does it mean?

The family is the smallest social unit in society. The families are divided into several different types. These are as followed:

• The Nuclear Family. Usually regarded as parents and dependent children.
• The Extended Family. The three generations, parents, and children, plus aunts, uncles and cousins.
• Lone-parent Family. A parent who is raising a child or children alone.
• Cohabiting Couple. Is an arrangement where two people who are not married, live together in an emotionally and/or sexually intimate relationship on a long-term or permanent basis.
• Empty-nest Family. The stage in a family’s cycle when the children have grown up and left home to begin their own adult lives.
• Civil Partnership Family. Same sex family who have adopted their own child.
• Family of Origin. The family that a person has grown up in – your parents and siblings. It may also include a grandparent, other relative, or divorced parents who lived with you during part of your childhood. These people strongly influence who we become.
• Beanpole Family / Verticalised Family. Historically, families have usually had more children than their parents. In recent years however, especially in Western countries, the number of children per generation has steadily decreased, and the life-span has increased. This has led to the shape of the family tree, which some researchers have likened to a beanpole – tall and thin, with few people in each family.

Why is it important?

The way families are constructed, and the roles people play within them, have implications for the way society operates. The different family structures found in a society underpin much social policy. The family is where primary socialisation takes place – where children learn the language, norms and values of their society. A person’s family of origin affects their life chances, and their primary socialisation influences attitudes and beliefs in later life.

Functionalists such as Murdock 1940s and Parsons 1960s have a positive view and see the family as beneficial to individuals and society as a whole. They believe that the family is essential for all societies and that some form of family can be seen in all societies. Murdock saw the family as providing four basic functions that benefited the individual and society; these are:

• Education (Socialisation)
  • Individual
    • Teaches norms and values such as language, and accepted behaviours.
  • Society
    • Provides a consensus of norms and values which maintains harmony in society.
• Economic (Financial support)
  • Individual
    • 
      Shares financial burden.
  • Society
    • Unit of consumption.
• Reproduction (Producing the next generation)
  • Individual
    • Maternal needs.
    • The parents will invest time and money into their own children.
    • Reflected glory
  • Society
    • Provides the next generation.
• Sexual (Sexual Needs)
  • Individual
    • Safe sex. Prevents STI’s
  • Society
    • Provides a stable sexual relationship for adults.
    • The state does not have to pick up the health costs of STI’s

Issues and Debates surrounding this Topic.

• How much a particular family structure ‘fits’ a particular type of society.
  
• Changing roles within the family, especially conjugal roles.
  
• The implications of growth in lone parenthood, cohabitation, divorce, and increased life expectancy.
  
• Older mothers and smaller family sizes.
  
• The growing proportion of ‘working mothers’, and issues around benefits, childcare and the role of fathers.
  
• Whether growing cohabitation, divorce, remarriage, and one-person households mean the family is in decline.
  
• The ‘demonisation’ of certain types of families by politicians and the mass media (eg. Lone-parent families; families where the main breadwinner is unemployed)
  
• The relationship between the family and other social institutions (eg. Education).
  

REFERENCES

Class notes taken from Nina Henry.

Sociology Review. Volume 23.