'The family is an endangered species in Britain.' Discuss

(Source: Social Trends, 1984, Pg. 36)

Britain has one of the highest divorce rates in the European Union, and 40 percent of marriages in the 1990s were likely to end in divorce. Rising divorce rates must be treated with considerable caution, and assessed against legal changes, higher expectation of marriage, the growing secularization, the escalate of life expectation and also the growth of the privatized Nuclear family. Living together is not yet established as a significant choice to marriage. In some country, like Britain, the law now recognizes that people living together have rights similar to those of married couples.

However, since the fear of marriage and impact of the changing status of divorce, the increase of a single-parent household is also a major indicator of the broke down in the family species. In the past, it is difficult for a person to love comfortably alone. On the contrary, in recent years, there has been a significant increase in single- or one-parent households due to divorce, death of spouse and the births outside of marriage. Historically, women are inclined to live with their parents or relatives until married. Any younger woman who wished to live alone was suspected of evil intentions. Nevertheless, today one’s own an apartment and vehicles have become almost the symbols of passage into adult status. Hence, it is controversial for a person with stable income and network of friends and other family members to help with childcare, raising a child alone can be an emotional and fanatical burden. According to sociologists Sara McLanahan and Karen Booth, children from mother-only families are more likely than children in two-parent families to have poor academic achievement, higher school absentee and dropout rates. Does living in a one-parent family cause all of this? Certainly not, many other factors including poverty, discrimination, unsafe neighborhoods and high crime rates are also contribute to these problems. Single mothers can often be the target of unfavorable press attention in which single parenthood is associated with ‘welfare scrounging’. Indeed the fact that a single-parent household became popular is because a special social provision. Government policy is much more favorable to the widowed parent than the divorced parent, though their situations are very similar.

In view of the fact that marriage has became decreasingly, and due to the fear of marriage, men and women tend to lives together without married. This is called the cohabitation. There have always been some unmarried couples that lived together openly as lovers rather than husband and wife. As described by Giddens, cohabitation is where a couple lives together in a sexual relationship without being married. It seems that the increase in cohabitation is part of a new pattern of marriage, including the postponement of the formal ceremony, rather than any fundamental change in social values.  In Britain cohabitation was generally regarded as somewhat scandalous. During 1970s the number of unmarried men and women sharing a household had went up to 300 percent. It is to be said that cohabitation is a part of an experimental stage before marriage. Therefore, it has become extensive towards university students.  Young people living together almost always anticipate getting married at some date, but not necessarily to their current partners. The cohabitation may contribute to people’s individualistic attitudes and values while making them more aware those alternatives to marriage exist.

No institution is more closely interrelated with other institutions than the family, but the direction of the interrelationships is highly one-side. Other institutions affect the family far more than the family affects other institutions. The fear of marriage became a major topic. According to the changing status of divorce, high divorce rate does effect the people onwards to think carefully about getting married, therefore, cohabitation is increasing in order to experience the life and to consider their partners before saying “I do”. Therefore the single-parent household also affect the lives of their children, as a result, people become more ‘single’ in this modernized society. The survival of the family is in little doubt, but the directions of future family change cannot be predicted with any certainty. If there is no family, what institution that we the sensitive primitive could rely on?

Reference

1. Axinn, William G., and Arland Thornton, The Relationship between Cohabitation and Divorce: Selectivity or Casual Influence?, Demography, 1992
2. Diana Kendall, Sociology in Our Times (Third Edition), Wadworth, a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Thomson LearningTM, USA, 2001
3. Anthony Giddens, Sociology, Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell, 1989
4. Michael Haralambos, Sociology: Themes and Perspectives, Urwin Hyman Limited, London, 1985
5. Nicholas Abercrombie and Alan Warde with Keith Soothill, John Urry and Sylvia Walby, Contemporary British Society: A New Introduction to Sociology, Polity Press, Oxford, UK, 1994
6. Rose Laub Coser, editor,  The Family: Its structures & functions, New York, St. Martin Press
7. David A. Schulz, The Changing Family: Its Function and Future, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972
8. William M. Dobriner, Social Structures and Systems: A Sociological Overview, Goodyear Publishing Company, Inc., Pacific Palisades, California, 1969
9. Chris. Livesey, , Unit 4: Is the family life decline?