Family and Household introduction

Family and households

Household: one person living alone or a group of people who live at the same address and share living arrangements.

Family: a group of people who are blood related or married (oxford dictionary definition) 

The sociologist in 1949 George Murdock defines family as " a group of people who live in the same house. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom have to have a socially approved sexual relationship and one or more children own or adopted."

 (70 years ago =The war ended in 1945, after 4 year this statement was released, a lot of people died and a lot of single parents had to take care of their children.)

On the other hand Anthony Giddens in 1993 defined it to as " a group of person directly linked by kin relationship, the adult member of which assume responsibility for caring for children."

(30 years ago)

Family types:

• Nuclear: consists of parents of opposite sexes and one or more children and may be married or cohabitating. Often referred to as the "cereal packet" family due to the media's saturated stereotypical view of the "conventional" or "model family". The functionalists see the nuclear family as the idealised version of the family.

• Symmetrical family: described by Wilmott and Young who argued that in the later 20th century the families became more symmetrical, they had more joint roles. Women were going out more and men were doing more of the housework.

• Nuclear family with house husbands: the female adult of the family is the breadwinner and the husband does the domestic work.

• Extended family: refers to those family members outside the "nucleus", aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents. They can be:

-vertical: multiple generations live together

-horizontal: same generation living together

• Beanpole family:  a multi-generational extended family, or vertical extended family, but us characterised by each generation having few siblings.
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• Matrifocal lone parent family: the lone…