Family:
Functions of family - social (Durkheim, Parsons), cultural, psychological (Parsons, Bob Edwards), economic. Main characteristics of family:
Parsons - Family has become structurally differentiated - it acts as an interface between the personality system and cultural system.
According to Burgess and Lock, the family is a group of persons united by ties of marriage, blood, or adoption constituting a single household interacting with each other in their respective social roles of husband and wife, mother and father, brother and sister, creating a common culture.
Nimkoff says that the family is a more or less durable association of husband and wife with or without children or of a man or woman alone with children.
According to Maclver, the family is a group defined by sex relationships sufficiently precise and enduring to provide for the procreation and upbringing of children.
Kingsley Davis describes the family as a group of persons whose relations to one another are based upon consanguinity and who are therefore kin to one another.
Malinowski opined that the family is the institution within which the cultural traditions of a society are handed over to a newer generation. This indispensable function could not be fulfilled unless the relations between parents and children were relations reciprocally of authority and respect. The family is the cornerstone of every human society. Society can exist without any other institution except the family.
Durkheim - The family is a society in miniature. It is also driven by conscience collective, has division of labor, checks deviance. Social fact.
Haralambos - In the study of Blacks, central Americans - woman and dependent children better unit as family. The mother-child relationship is an atom of every society.
John Bowlby's study of delinquent kids revealed that all the delinquent kids lacked intimacy with their mothers and had insensitivity towards the pains of others, thus don’t hesitate before violence.
Bob Edwards - In modern nuclear families, physical punishment is replaced by counseling services. This is a new role of the family.
Israeli Kibbutz - Children don’t live with parents as collective rearing in dorms.
Vogel and Bell have presented a dysfunctional explanation based on findings of an extensive study of American families containing an emotionally disturbed child. They argued that often the tension and hostility of unresolved conflict between parents are projected onto the child. The child is thus used as an emotional scapegoat by the parents to relieve their tension. Scapegoating the child served as a personality stabilizing process for the parents and keeps the family united. But the cost of such unity is paid by the child.
Edmund Leach has concentrated on the kin and wider community in "A Runaway World." Today the domestic household is isolated, and the family looks inward upon itself; there is an intensification of emotional stress between husband and wife and parents and children. This strain is greater than most can bear. Thrown back almost entirely on its resources, the nuclear family becomes like an overloaded electrical circuit. The demand upon it is too great, and the fuse blows. In Leach's words, the parents and children huddled together in their loneliness, take too much out of each other. "The parents fight, the children rebel."
R.D. Laing in "The Politics of Family" referred to the family group as a nexus. He argued that the highest concern of the nexus is reciprocal concern. Each partner is concerned about what others think, feels, and do. Within the nexus, there is the constant unremitting demand for mutual concern and attention. As a result, there is a considerable potential for harm; family members are in an extremely vulnerable position. Thus, if a father is angry over his son, given the nature of nexus, the son is concerned about his father's opinion and cannot brush it off lightly. In self-defense, he may run to his mother who offers protection. In this way, Laing argues, a family can act as gangster protection, each other mutual protection against each other's violence. According to Laing, the family is the root of all problems in society. Some families live in perpetual anxiety of an external persecuting world. Moreover, the most dangerous feature of the family is the inculcation of obedience in the minds of siblings. Later in life, they become officials, blindly and unquestionably following orders.
Anthony Giddens - It is premature to say that modern industrial societies are going for nuclear family. Rather upper-class Brits go for extended families (guided by culture and heredity), middle class go for nuclear families (with expressive love), and the lower class is always on the move (unstable marriage, unstable family, poverty, residence shift). Hence, the family differs from one class to another, and there is no uniform family size.
David Popenoe says change in societal institutions also depends on state ideology, support, and politics. For example, Scandinavian countries have more live-in or same-sex households due to liberal state policy.
William Goode in a cross-cultural comparison of change in the institution of family finds how woman-headed households are on the rise in the Philippines, rise in nucleated households in South Africa, and almost no change in countries like Iran.
Madness and Civilization - Materialism is injected into a child's mentality even before he knows about it, through the "culture of gifts" by parents who try to compensate for the lack of time.
Nuclear family = prolonged childhood - because the child remains a constant focus of attention, and hence remains emotionally dependent. Peter Laslett - Census 1851 data in England showed only 10% joint families. Anderson later studied recent census data and found 23% - hence joint family increased - mainly to share rent. Sussman similarly found no tendency of decline in the joint family in the USA.
Kingsley Davis - Functions of family:
Functions of the family - Horton and Hunt:
But they say that today:
Marriage:
Macionis - Legally sanctioned relationship, involves economic cooperation, sexual activity, childbearing - expected to be enduring - love marriages are less stable than arranged because based on only emotion which waxes and wanes.
Incest is not allowed universally - Malinowski says if incest, then nurturing and socializing suffer.
Samuel Johnson - Monogamy prevalent mostly because the ratio is 1:1. No man can have 2 wives but by preventing somebody else from having one.
Polyandry is so rare that Murdoch calls it an ethnographic curiosity, Todas of South India, Namib Bushmen, Yaruro of Venezuela - happens when resources are limited, to avoid division. Mainly fraternal polyandry.
Kinship: