What is the family for? Five answers

• Functionalism. Murdock, from a survey of 250 societies, claimed the nuclear family is universal because it performs four essential functions: sexual, reproductive, economic and educational (socialisation). Parsons narrowed this: in modern industrial society the family has lost functions to other institutions and is left with two 'basic and irreducible' functions — the primary socialisation of children and the stabilisation of adult personalities (the 'warm bath' that lets the breadwinner relax). Parsons also argued the isolated nuclear family fits industrial society because it is geographically and socially mobile.
• Marxism. Engels (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) argued the monogamous nuclear family arose with private property, to guarantee the legitimate inheritance of wealth through a known male line. Marxists add that the family reproduces labour power, absorbs discontent (Zaretsky: it offers only an illusion of a private haven) and is a unit of consumption.
• Feminism. Liberal feminists see gradual progress towards equality through law and changing attitudes. Marxist feminists (Ansley) argue women absorb the anger capitalism generates in male workers. Radical feminists (Delphy & Leonard, Greer) see the family itself as the key institution of patriarchy, in which men exploit women's unpaid labour. Difference feminists insist there is no single 'the family' — class and ethnicity change the experience entirely.
• The New Right. Murray argues welfare has created a dependency culture and lone-parent families without male role models; only the conventional married nuclear family, they say, works. Critics reply this romanticises a family form that conceals abuse and inequality.
• The personal life perspective. Smart starts not from structure but from the meanings people give their relationships — including friends, fictive kin, even pets — and argues sociology should study 'families of choice', not one imposed definition.

Parsons' two functions

Is there still a 'normal' family?

• Rapoport & Rapoport identified five types of family diversity: organisational (different divisions of labour), cultural (ethnic differences), class, life-course (stage of life) and cohort (the period you were born into). Diversity, they argued, is now the norm — the family has been de-standardised.
• Chester disagrees. He accepts most families have changed but argues the significant shift is only to a neo-conventional family — still a married couple with children, but now dual-earner. Most people, he says, still live in a nuclear family for most of their lives.
• Stacey's Silicon Valley interviews found women driving family change and described the divorce-extended family, in which ex-partners and their new partners remain connected.
• Postmodernists (Weeks, Giddens, Beck) see family life becoming a matter of choice. Giddens: contraception and women's independence produced the pure relationship, held together only by satisfaction and lasting only as long as it delivers. Beck: the negotiated family in a risk society is more equal but far less stable.
• Changing patterns: more divorce (helped by the 1969 Divorce Reform Act's 'irretrievable breakdown' ground, secularisation, and women's economic independence — Allan & Crow), more cohabitation, more lone-parent families, more people living alone, later marriage, more same-sex families following civil partnerships and equal marriage.

Exam craft: set Chester's neo-conventional family directly against the Rapoports and the postmodernists. Has the family diversified, or has it merely been modified?

The pure relationship

Who does the housework?

• Young & Willmott proposed a 'march of progress': the family has evolved into the symmetrical family, privatised, nuclear and with roles that are increasingly joint rather than segregated.
• Oakley demolished this. Her interviews with housewives found only a small minority of husbands gave a high level of participation in housework or childcare; 'help' with the pram or an occasional meal had been counted as symmetry. Her wider work on the housewife role showed it to be socially constructed, isolating and unpaid.
• Boulton distinguished 'helping' from taking responsibility for children — men do the first, women the second.
• Duncombe & Marsden added emotion work, arguing women perform a triple shift: paid work, housework, and the emotional labour of keeping everyone happy.
• Dunne's study of lesbian households found a far more equal division of tasks, suggesting the imbalance in heterosexual couples flows from gender scripts, not from logistics.
• Money and power. Pahl & Vogler distinguish the allowance system from pooling, and find that even where couples pool, men often retain the decisive say. Barrett & McIntosh note men gain more from women's domestic labour than they give back materially.
• Domestic violence. Dobash & Dobash's Scottish interviews showed violence was frequently triggered by a husband's sense that his authority had been challenged — evidence, for radical feminists, that it flows from patriarchy rather than from disturbed individuals. Official statistics badly understate it, because much is never reported.

Whose view of the family?

Tap a claim, then tap the perspective behind it.

Is childhood disappearing — or getting better?

• The social construction of childhood. Pilcher notes the modern idea of childhood is defined above all by separateness — a distinct, protected, non-adult status. Aries (Centuries of Childhood), studying paintings, diaries and documents, argued that in the Middle Ages childhood as we know it did not exist: children mixed and worked with adults and were treated as 'little adults'. Modern childhood, he argued, is an invention of the last few centuries.
• Cross-cultural evidence (Punch, Firth, Malinowski) shows children in other societies take on responsibility earlier and are given more sexual and behavioural autonomy — so childhood is not a fixed biological stage.
• The march of progress view: childhood today is better than ever — laws on labour and education, child protection, medicine, the child-centred family. Some go further and warn of the 'toxic childhood' (Palmer) of junk food and screens, or of over-protected 'cotton wool kids'.
• The conflict view: Firestone and Holt argue the 'protection' of children is really control and a form of age patriarchy (Hockey & James) — hence child liberationism. Inequalities between children by class, gender and ethnicity are large, and inequalities of power between adults and children include neglect and abuse.
• Is childhood disappearing? Postman argues it is: television and now the internet destroy the information hierarchy that print culture created, so the boundary between adult and child dissolves. Opie's lifelong research on children's games, rhymes and songs argues the opposite — a separate children's culture is alive and well. Jenks takes a middle line: childhood is changing, not vanishing, and in an insecure adult world children become the one stable source of love.

Aries on childhood

Births, deaths, migration and the ageing population

• The birth rate has fallen over the long term. Reasons: the changed position of women (education, employment, contraception, changing attitudes), the fall in the infant mortality rate (so parents need fewer births to be confident of surviving children), children becoming an economic liability rather than an asset once child labour was banned and schooling made compulsory, and greater child-centredness. Effects: a smaller 'dependency ratio' of children, more women in paid work, fewer schools needed.
• The death rate has fallen and life expectancy risen. McKeown argued improved nutrition did more than medicine to cut deaths from infectious disease; public health and sanitation, better housing and higher living standards all mattered too. Medical improvements came later.
• The ageing population follows. Consequences: more one-person pensioner households; a rising dependency ratio; pressure on pensions and health and social care; and, argues Hirsch, a need to rethink policy. Postmodernists (Hunt) note that age, like childhood, is becoming a matter of choice and consumption rather than a fixed status — but Pilcher reminds us that old age still carries structured inequality of class and gender.
• Migration. Immigration and emigration change the size and composition of the population. Vertovec describes contemporary Britain as super-diverse — migrants come from many more countries, with many more legal statuses, than in the past. Globalisation has produced the feminisation of migration and 'transnational' identities that are neither wholly here nor wholly there.

The falling birth rate

Sociologist to concept

Match each sociologist to their key idea.

How the state shapes family life

• Functionalists (Fletcher) see policy — health, education, housing — as helping the family perform its functions better. Critics: this assumes all family members benefit equally, and ignores policies that harm families.
• Donzelot, following Foucault, rejects the march-of-progress story. Policy is the policing of families: professionals (social workers, health visitors, doctors) exercise surveillance and disciplinary power, and it falls disproportionately on poor families, who are labelled 'problem families'.
• The New Right (Murray) argue welfare provision has undermined the conventional family by rewarding lone parenthood and creating a dependency culture; policy should therefore cut benefits and support marriage. Critics (Abbott & Wallace) reply this drives lone-parent families into poverty and idealises a family form in which women are unequal.
• Feminists see policy as built on assumptions that constitute a self-fulfilling prophecy — for example, tax and benefit rules that assume a male breadwinner, or maternity provision far more generous than paternity provision, which reinforce the very division of labour they assume. Land argues policy assumes the conventional family and thereby helps to maintain it.
• Comparative cases the specification expects you to be able to use: China's former one-child policy, which restricted family size through incentives and sanctions; Nazi Germany's policy of encouraging 'racially pure' Aryan women to have children while sterilising and murdering others; and Communist Romania's pro-natalist restrictions on abortion and contraception. All three show the state actively shaping family structure.

Donzelot

Putting it together

• The march of progress story (Young and Willmott, Fletcher, Willmott's dispersed extended family) says the family has become more equal, more symmetrical and better supported. The conflict story (Marxist, feminist, Donzelot) says the change is far more limited and the family remains a site of exploitation and control.
• On diversity, Chester's neo-conventional family is the essential counterweight to the Rapoports and the postmodernists. Ask what the evidence actually shows about how most people live over the life course, not at a single moment.
• On childhood, hold Aries, Postman, Palmer, Opie and Jenks in tension: constructed, yes — but disappearing, improving, or simply changing?
• The personal life perspective (Smart) is the newest addition to the specification and the easiest way to look sophisticated: it rejects the very idea of a single structure called 'the family' and studies instead the relationships people say actually matter to them.

Exam craft: the 20-mark question always rewards a judgement. Don't stop at 'sociologists disagree' — say which evidence you find most persuasive, and why.

The personal life perspective

Divorce, cohabitation and living alone

• Why has divorce risen? Legal changes — the 1969 Divorce Reform Act made 'irretrievable breakdown' the sole ground and equalised access; legal aid lowered the cost. Secularisation (Wilson) weakened the religious stigma. Rising expectations of marriage: Fletcher argues we divorce more because we expect more of marriage, and Giddens's pure relationship has no external glue at all. Women's growing economic independence means fewer are trapped — and the large majority of petitions are brought by women. Hart notes that women's dual burden of paid work and housework is itself a source of conflict.
• How is a rising divorce rate interpreted? The New Right read it as a symptom of moral decline and a cause of the underclass; feminists read it as evidence that women are no longer willing to accept oppressive marriages; postmodernists read it as freedom of choice; functionalists (Fletcher) read it as a sign that marriage is valued more highly, not less — hence high remarriage rates.
• Cohabitation has grown sharply. For some it is a trial marriage; for others a permanent alternative. Chester would insist that most cohabitants marry eventually.
• Living alone and lone-parent families have both grown; lone-parent families are headed overwhelmingly by women and are markedly more likely to be in poverty. Cashmore found some women actively chose lone parenthood over an abusive relationship — against the New Right's picture of feckless dependency.

Explaining divorce

The big ideas to know

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