Assess the View that Family Diversity is leading to a Weakening of Traditional Family Values.

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Rebecca Cartwright                Access to HE

Assess the View that Family Diversity is leading to a Weakening of Traditional Family Values

Given the culturally diverse character of the United Kingdom today, there are considerable variations in family and marriage within the country.  The structure of families has altered over time and is still changing today.  Changing relationships between spouses in the family, and in particular, the changes in the position of women in the family.  The family in the UK today reflects a range of factors, including Britain as a multi-ethnic society, differences in social class, and as a society in which women choose or are forced to head families by themselves.  A significant section of the population chooses not to marry at all; are these people posing as an alternative to the family?

   A definition of the family is a group of persons directly linked by kin connections, the adult members of which assume responsibility of caring for children.  Kinship ties are connections between individuals, established either through marriage or through the lines of descent that connect blood relatives (mothers, fathers, offspring, grandparents, etc.  The nuclear family is traditionally defined as a basic family unit of adult partners and their own or adopted children.  The extended family has been defined as ‘A grouping broader than the nuclear family which is related by decent, marriage or adoption. (Bell and Vogel, A modern introduction to the family).  The family has evolved to a variety of new family types within the last century.  

   (Laselett, The World we have Lost), The family in pre- Industrial Britain was nuclear and not extended as once thought.  The other major characteristic, primogentive – the term used to describe the situation where the eldest child (or more usually the son) inherited all land and property from the parents.  This had two consequences according to (Harris, The Family). Ownership of land stayed intact and the male who inherited was likely to be well off and that the sons and daughters who did not inherit formed a mobile labour force which went in search for employment.  (Parson) and, separately (Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns) claim that the Industrial Revolution weakened the extended family by taking away crucial economic and social functions from the family.  However an alternative approach from (Anderson, Approaches to the History of the Western Family) who has argued that early Industrial family actually helped to form extended families.  Using data from 1851 Preston Census, Anderson found 23 percent of household members contained family members other than those in nuclear families.

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  There are a number of factors that have contributed to the increasing diversity of family and household forms; every thing in society has a function to perform.  In sociological theory Sociological Action theorists support the belief that human action is based on choice.  This approach emphasizes that people can chose/negotiate alternative lifestyles in the light of their understanding of their situation, and within the limits that their circumstances allow.  People choose the sorts of family arrangements that they want.  We now have more freedom because choice is now written in our social scripts, it’s allowed.  We are not slaves to ...

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