Chapter 11: Families

1. Chapter 11:Families Melanie Hatfield Soc 100

2. The nuclear family: Consists of a cohabitating man and woman who maintain a socially approved sexual relationship and have at least one child. • The traditional nuclear family: A nuclear family in which the wife works in the home without pay, while the husband works outside the home for money.

4. Functional Theory • Since the 1940s, functionalists have argued that the nuclear family is ideally suited to meet society’s challenges. • In their view the nuclear family performs 5 main functions: • sexual activity • economic cooperation • reproduction • socialization • emotional support.

5. Conflict Theory • Sociologists influenced by conflict and feminists traditions, see the creation of non-nuclear families as a response to changes in power relations between women and men. • Engels argued that the traditional nuclear family emerged along with inequalities of wealth. • Once a man had wealth, he wanted to ensure it was transmitted to his sons. • Men could do this by controlling his wife sexually and economically.

6. Conflict Theory • Engels concluded that only the elimination of private property and the creation of economic equality – in a word, communism – could bring an end to gender inequality and the traditional nuclear family. • Engels was wrong to think communism would eliminate gender inequality. • Inequality in the family has been as common in communist societies as in capitalist societies.

7. Feminist Theory • Because gender inequality exists in non-capitalist societies, most feminists believe something other than, or in addition to, capitalism accounts for gender inequality and the persistence of the traditional nuclear family. • In their view, patriarchy – male dominance and norms justifying that dominance – is more deeply rooted in the economic, military, and cultural history of human kind than the classical Marxist account allows. • For them, only a “genuine gender revolution” can alter this state of affairs.

8. Love and Mate Selection • Most Americans take for granted that marriage ought to be based on love. • The idea that love should be important in the choice of a marriage partner first gained currency in 18th-century England with the rise if liberalism and individualism. • The linkage between love and marriage that we know today emerged only in the early 20th century, when Hollywood and the advertising industry began to promote self-gratification on a grand scale. • Today wherever individualism is highly prized, love has come to be defined as the essential basis for marriage.

9. Marrying for Qualities Instead of Love

10. Social Influences on Mate Selection • Three sets of social forces influence whom you are likely to fall in love with and marry. • Marriage resources • Third parties • Demographic and compositional factors

11. Marital Satisfaction • Marital stability also came to depend more on having a happy rather than merely a useful marriage. • This change occurred because wm in the US and many other societies have become more independent, especially since the 1960s. • Many factors have contributed to their autonomy • the introduction of the birth control pill in the 1960s. • the entry of millions of women into the system of higher education and the paid labor force.

12. Family Satisfaction and the Family Life Cycle, US

13. Reproductive Choice • We have seen that the power gained from working in the paid labor force put women in a position to leave a marriage if it made them deeply unhappy. • Another aspect of the gender revolution women are experiencing is that they are increasingly able to decide what happens in the marriage if they stay. • Reproductive choice

14. Housework and Childcare • Despite many changes and progress, housework, child care, and senior care are areas that has remained resistant to change. • Arlie Hochschild sates women work a “second shift”. • Two main factors shrink the gender gap in housework, childcare, and senior care. • The smaller the difference between the husband’s and wife’s earnings • Attitude

15. Family Diversity • Heterosexual Cohabitation • Same-Sex Unions and Partnerships • Single-Mother Families • Zero-Child Families

16. Families with Own Children under 18 by Race

17. Family Policy • Do two-parent families provide the kind of discipline, role models, help, and middle-class lifestyle that children need to stay out of trouble with the law and grow up to become well-adjusted, productive members of society? • The decline of the traditional nuclear family can be a source of many social problems, but it does not have to that way.

18. Family Policy in Sweden • In Sweden, the proportion of births outside of marriage in Sweden is twice as high as in the US. • In Sweden: • Children enjoy higher average reading scores than in the US. • The poverty rate in 2 parent families is only one tenth the US rate, whereas the poverty rate in single parent families in only 1/12 as high. • The rate of infant abuse is 1/11 the US rate. • The rate of juvenile drug offenses is less than half as high in Sweden as in the US. • The decline of the traditional nuclear family has gone further in Sweden than in the US, but children in Sweden are much better off because Sweden has something the US lacks: a substantial family support policy.