Families and Households Topic 1

• A consensus theory that emphasizes integration and harmony between the different parts of society and the way these parts work together to maintain society.
• They see the family as a vital 'organ' in maintaining the 'body' of society, just as the heart is an important organ in maintaining the human body.
• They suggest that family prepares young children for an adult society so that they have the basic needs which enable society to survive

He argued that there are 4 functions of the family:

• Sexual
• Reproduction
• socialization- primary socialization 
• economic- family provides food and shelter for family members

He regards these functions as necessary in society and suggests that the nuclear family is found in every society to carry them out.

He argues that there are two basic functions of family that are found in every society. These are the primary socialization of children and the stabilization of human personalities.

The primary socialization of children

He argues that families are factories producing human personalities and only the family can provide the emotional warmth and security to achieve this.

The stablilzation of human personalities 

He suggests that family helps to stabilze personalities by the sexual division of labour in the family. In his view women have an expressive role in the family  providing warmth, security and emotional support to their child and male partner. The male partner carries out an instrumental role as family breadwinner which leads to stress and anxiety and threatens to destabilize his personality. However the wife's expressive role relieves this tension by providing love and understanding: the sexual division of labour into expressive and instrumental roles therefore contributes to the stabilization of human personalities.

• Parson's view of the instrumental and expressive roles of men and women is very old-fashioned. It was true in 1950s however today this is not the case as both parents are likely to be playing expressive and instrumental roles at various times. Women are now breadwinners and men help with childcare and domestic labour. 
• Functionalists tend to ignore the way women suffer from the sexual division of labour in the family. Housework can cause stress and this may lead to mental ilness.
• Its ignoring the harmful effects of the family- Leach (1967) says that in modern society the nuclear family has become so isolated from kin and the wider community that it has become an inward-looking institution that leads to emotional stress. Family members expect and demand too much from one another and this stress generates conflict within the family. 

• The new right supports traditional values and institutions, and its views of the role, importance and functions in society of the traditional family unit are very similar to the functionalist approach.(New right is more political)
• Llike functonalists they see the traditional hetrosexual nuclear family with division of gender roles in the family (men-instrumental, women-expressive) as the best means of bringing up children to become confromist, responsible adults. 
• They see traditional family as under threat from social changes like the rising divorce rate, more stepfamilies, more lone parents, cohabitation as an alternative to the comitment of marriage, births outside marriage, and gay marriage or civil partnership, and welfare state policies that support relationships outside the conventional nuclear family. They argue these changes undermine social stability and cause problems like crime.

Criticism: Ignores the dark side of the family and family diversity.

• They argue that the welfare state has undermined personal resposibility and self-help, and the inportance of support from families. They are particularly scathing about wlfare support for lone parents, as they argue this encourages single women to have children they could not otherwise afford, knowing they can get help from state benefits. 
• They see the decline of the traditional family and particularly growing numbers of lone parent families as contributing to the emergence of a dependency culture and a work-shy underclass which wants to avoid work by living off welfare benefts.

• Also emphasizes this ideological role of the family in propping up capitalism. He sees the family as an escape route from oppression and exploitation at work- a private place where people, particularly male workers, can enjoy a personal life and be valued as individuals, and have some measure of control over their lives. This release in the family helps them to live with their daily oppression in the world of work, and thereby helps to undermine opposition to capitalism. 

Traditional Marxist perspective tends to be old fashioned as:

• The idea that men marry and have children to pass on property ignores other reasons for getting married or forming families.
• Many women now work and have independent incomes, and in many cases they are more successful than men in some areas of the labour market. Women are therefore far less likely to marry for economic security.
• A 2003 report by the institute od Education, Changing Britain, Changing lives, found that people are now more likely to marry for love and affection rather than as a social obligation, with growing emphasis on the emotional aspects of relationships and personal fulfilment both of men and women.

Emphasize the harmful effects of family life upon women, and the role of the family in the continuing oppression of women. For feminists, the family and marriage are major sources of female oppression and gender inequalities in society. In contemporary Britain the family is said to be more 'symmetrical' however feminists emphasize that it is still mainly women who:

• Perform most housework and childcare tasks
• make sacrifices to buy the children clothes and to make sure all the family members are properly fed.
• are less likely to make the most important decisions in the family
• are more likely to give up paid work or suffer from lost or restricted job opportunities as they are expected to look after children and male partners. Many women now work both outside the home and in paid employment and inside the home doing domestic labour.

They recognize that women's position in the family, with women taking on the major responsibility for housework and childcare, can have adverse effects on their power, careers and health. They believe the best way to improve the position of women in the family and society is through reform measures within the present system that remove all forms of discrimination to establish equality of opportuity for women with men, and allow them to make free choices between motherhood, a career or a comibination of both. These measures include:

• establishing and asserting the legal rights of women as individuals, with laws to establish equal pay and stop sex discrimination, such as Equal Pay Act and Sex Discrimination Act
• better and cheaper childcare to enable women and men to combine childcare with successful careers in paid employment
• more sharing of housework and childcare tasks with men
• stronger action against domestic violence- the most serious of which is by men agains women
• the establishment of equality in maternity and paternity leave, so both fathers and mothers have the same legal rights to have time off work when children are born, and parenting is seen as the resposibility of both parents rather than only mother's

They focus on the problem of patriarchy in society and in the family as the main obstacle to women's equality. They see family as a patriarchal institution which benefits men at the expense of women. They believe women are better-off if they steer clear of patriarchal families. Their solution is basically to reject the family and family life, and in many cases to reject relationships with men altogether.

Criticism:

• Women's roles are not the same in all families. Many families now consist of dual-worker couples with both partners in paid employment.
• More women are working and have inpdependent incomes, and this means they may have more power in the familiy than some feminist writers imply.

They see the family, and particularly women's work in the family, as contributing to the maintance of capitalism in the following ways:

The social reproduction of labour power

• by providing a place for eating, drinking and relaxing so that the male is able to go to work each day
• the unpaid housework they do
• by socializing children into the dominant ideas in society and preparing them for the routines of work such as the need to work for living and to be punctual and obedient at work.

They see the family within the framework of a capitalist society, which is based on private property, driven by profit, and riddled with conflict between social classes with opposing interests. Marxists argue that the nuclear family is concerned with social control by teaching its members to submit to the capitalist class, and they emphasize the ways the family reproduces unequal relationships and works to damp down inevitable social conflict.