Contemporary society includes a wide variety of family patterns. Discuss with reference to sociological research.
The family has often been regarded as the cornerstone of society. In pre-modern and modern societies alike, it has been seen as the most basic unit of social organisation and one that carries out vital tasks such as socialising children. From the 1960s, an increasing number of critical thinkers began to question the assumption that the family was necessarily a beneficial institution. In the following decades the family was not just under attack from academic writers- social change also seemed to be undermining traditional families. Rising divorce rates, cohabitation before marriage, increasing numbers of single-parent families and single person households and other trends have all suggested that individuals may be basing their lives less and less around conventional families.
In ‘World Revolution and Family Patters’ William J.Goode argues that many of the functions once performed by the family have been taken over by outside agencies such as schools, business and welfare organisations. This has greatly reduced the importance of the family in contemporary society. Fletcher however commences that the family has not lost functions for they were never performed to the standards of today. If any the family has more functions than before.
Today there is the emergence of the nuclear family. The extended family became a nuclear family due to space and privacy, and in an industrial society people need to move from one country to another for different/ better job opportunities. It is possible to move four members of a family from one country to another (nuclear family) rather than fifty members (extended family). Talcott Parsons says that the isolated nuclear family is the typical family in modern industrial society, since it does not form an integral part of a wider system of kinship relationships. However, sociologist’s view of the family are no longer influenced by the idealised image of a perfect unit of members living in the same social space. Nowadays the family is influenced by the wider social structure and the cultural context. The idea that the family lives in isolation from the social context was largely plausible up to the mid-twentieth century. Eugene Litwak argues that a new term, the modified extended family, should be introduced to describe the typical family in modern industrial society. Litwak says that the modified extended family is a coalition of nuclear families in a state of partial dependence. Such partial dependence means that the nuclear family members exchange significant services with each other, thus differing from the isolated nuclear family, as well as retaining considerate autonomy and therefore differing from the classical extended family.
