Changing Pattern of the Family

• Household - the place of domesticity where resources are shared
• Kinship - relationship based on biological or marital ties
• Family - a group of persons drectly linked by kin connections, the adult member of which assumes responsibility for caring for children

FAMILIES

• Nuclear
• Gay
• Polygamy
• Female-carer core
• Reconsituted 
• Single parent
• Childless couples

• Marriage is in decline
• Changing attidues: dont have to get married to have children
• Secularisation :church has less influence
• Decling stigma: alternative to marriage
• Changes in the position of women: women dont need support
• Fear of divorce: unhappy marriages end in divorce 

• Divore rates are increasing
• Rising expectation of marriage: we ask too much from marriage
• Changes in the position of women: no longer dependent and dont have to stay in unhappy marriages
• Changes in the law: equal rights, desertion, empty shell marriage, 1969 irretrievable breakdown
• Declining stigma: divorce is now a misfortune
• Secularisation: less influence of the church 

• Cohabitation: 2 million couples, decline in stigma of marriage, younger people simply move in and forget about marriage
• Same sex: gay and lesbians can get married and adopt legally easily (5-7% of the population) more flexible, but less stable
• One person households: divorce makes lone people and fewer couples, seperation
• Reconstituted families: divorced parents often remarry (10% of the population)
• Extended families: normally only exist within ethnic minorities
• Ethnic diverse families: less stigma in mixed race couples

• Functionalist and New Right
• Lone parents are a threat to traditional 
• The neo-conventional family of dual earners, alternatives to the nuclear family are never long term and we all live in nuclear families at one time Chester
• The Rapoports: the five types of diversity:  organisational (family roles), cultural (religious and ethnicity), social class (income differences), life stage (life cycle) and generational (different attitudes)  

• CHOICE
• Life course analysis, what is important to family members, studies relationships not families
• Giddens - greater choice has been caused by easy access to contraception and changing position of women, roles have changed
• Beck - risk society, tradition is less of an influence, greater gender equality and greater individualism has created the negotiated family 
• Weeks - shift in attitudes since the 50s, sexual morality and acceptance, yet still mainly traditional