SOC101: Introduction to Sociology

Week 12

Selim Reza, PhD

Associate Professor of Sociology
Department of Political Science and Sociology
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• A family is a group of people directly linked by kin connections, the adult
members of which take care of the children.

• Kinship ties are connections among individuals, established either

through marriage, the lines of descent that connect blood relatives
(mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, etc.), or adoption.

• Marriage can be defined as a socially acknowledged and approved sexual

union between two adult individuals.

• When two people marry, they become kin to each other; however, the
marriage bond also connects a wider range of kins people. Parents,
brothers, sisters, and other blood relatives become relatives of the
partner, or “in-laws,” through marriage.
 Social Institution: Family and Kinship
• What families actually look like in the twenty-first century?

• Are all family forms equally healthy and desirable?

• Some family forms are superior to others: “what’s best for the children”?
David Popenoe
• Sociologists David Popenoe and Judith Stacey have been engaged in a decades-long debate
over this very question.

• Popenoe (1993, 1996) argues that families have changed for the worse since 1960.

• Over the past five or six decades, divorce, non-marital births, and cohabitation rates have
increased, while marriage and marital fertility rates have decreased.

• He claims these trends underlie social problems such as child poverty, adolescent
pregnancy, substance abuse, and juvenile crime.

• Increasing rates of divorce and non-marital births throughout the latter half of the
twentieth century created millions of female-headed households and have removed men
from the child-rearing process—a situation that is harmful to children, Popenoe argues.
• According to Judith Stacey (1998, 2011), the “modern
family” with “breadwinner father and child-rearing mother”
perpetuated the “segregation of the sexes by extracting
men from, and consigning white married women to, an
increasingly privatized domestic domain.”

• The modern family has been replaced by the “postmodern

family”—single mothers, blended families, cohabiting
couples, lesbian and gay partners, dual-career families, and
families with a breadwinning mother and stay-at-home dad.
The postmodern family is well suited to meet the challenges
of the current economy and is an appropriate setting for
raising children, who need capable, loving caretakers—
regardless of their gender, marital status, employment
status, or sexual orientation, argues Stacey.
 Role of parents: Popenoe vs. Stacey
• Popenoe agrees that children need capable, loving caretakers, yet he maintains that “two
parents—a father and a mother—are better for a child than one parent.”

• He claims that biological fathers make “distinctive, irreplaceable contributions” to their

children’s welfare.

• Fathers offer a strong male role model to sons, act as disciplinarian for trouble-prone
children, provide daughters with a male perspective on heterosexual relationships, and,
through their unique play styles, teach their children about teamwork, competition,
independence, self-fulfillment, self-control, and regulation of emotions.

• Mothers, on the other hand, teach their children about nurturance and communion, the
feeling of being connected to others.

• Both needs can be met only through the gender-differentiated parenting of a mother and
father, Popenoe argues.
• Stacey retorts that the postmodern family is better suited to the postmodern
economy, in which employment has shifted from unionized heavy industries to
nonunionized clerical, service, and new industrial and high-tech sectors.

• The loss of union protected jobs means that many men no longer earn enough
to support a wife and children.

• During the recessionary years of the early twenty-first century, men who
suffered long term unemployment often relied on their wives to fully support
their families.

• At the same time, demand for clerical and service labor, escalating
consumption standards, increases in women’s educational attainment, and
high and steady divorce rates have led the vast majority of women, including
mothers of young children, to seek employment outside the home.
• Popenoe elevates the married, two-parent family as the “ideal” family form.

• Claiming that “marriage must be re-established as a strong social institution,”

Popenoe argues that employers should stop relocating married couples with children.

• Stacey also disagrees with media rhetoric and claims by conservatives.

• Rather than condemning nontraditional family forms, Stacey reasons, family

sociologists and policy makers should develop strategies to mitigate the harmful
effects of divorce and single parenthood on children.

• She suggests restructuring work schedules and benefit policies to accommodate

familial responsibilities; redistributing work opportunities to reduce unemployment
rates; enacting comparable worth standards of pay equity to enable women as well
as men to earn a family wage; providing universal health care, prenatal and child
care, and sex education; and rectifying the economic inequities of divorce (Biblarz
and Stacey, 2010).
 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF FAMILIES
1) FUNCTIONALISM

2) SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST APPROACHES

3) FEMINIST APPROACHES
 1) Functionalism
• The functionalist perspective sees society as a set of social institutions that perform specific
functions to ensure continuity and consensus.

• According to this perspective, families perform important tasks that contribute to society’s basic
needs and help perpetuate social order.

• Sociologists in the functionalist tradition regard the nuclear family as fulfilling specialized roles in
modern societies.

• With the advent of industrialization in the late nineteenth century, families became less important
as a unit of economic production and more focused on bearing, rearing, and socializing children.

• According to American sociologist Talcott Parsons, the two main functions of families are:
A) Primary socialization is the process by which children learn their society’s cultural norms and
expectations for behavior. Because this process happens during early childhood, the family is
the most important site for the development of the human personality.
B) Personality stabilization refers to the role of the family in assisting adult family members
emotionally.

• Marriage between two adults is the arrangement through which personalities are supported and
kept healthy. In industrial societies, families may play a critical role in stabilizing adult personalities
because the nuclear family is often geographically distant from its extended kin and cannot draw
on larger kinship ties.
• Parsons regarded the nuclear family as
best equipped to handle the demands of
industrial society.

• In the “conventional” family, one adult

can work outside the home for pay while
the second adult cares for the home and
children.

• In practical terms, this specialization of

roles has historically meant the husband
adopts the “instrumental” role as
breadwinner and the wife assumes the
“affective,” or emotional support, role in
the home.

• Stability and social order

 2) SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONIST APPROACHES
• Symbolic interactionism emphasizes the contextual, subjective, and
even ephemeral nature of family interactions, power relations, and
interpersonal communication (LaRossa and Reitzes, 1993).

• Sociologist Ernest Burgess (1926) was one of the earliest scholars to

apply symbolic interactionist approaches to the family, which he
described as “a unity of interacting personalities” in which the
behavior or identities of individual family members mutually
shaped one another over time.

• Power differentials in romantic relationships.

• More contemporary work emphasizes the ways that family members

continually negotiate, define, and redefine their roles.
• Parent-child relationships: Whereas scholarship on functionalist
traditions took a “top down” approach to socialization and
presumed that parents taught and socialized their children, symbolic
interactionist studies find that children often shape, influence, and
guide their parents in particular social situations.

• Several recent studies of immigrant and refugee families, for

instance, show that parents and children often must renegotiate
their roles when they inhabit unfamiliar contexts (e.g., Katz, 2014).

• Children may have relatively higher status than their parents,

especially if they have a better understanding of the language and
practices in the United States.

• This knowledge allows them to serve as the family’s liaison to school

teachers and health care providers.

• Symbolic interactionist scholars offer provocative insights into family

dynamics, but this perspective is critiqued on the grounds that it
places too much emphasis on cooperation and consensus.
 3) Feminist approaches
• For many people, families provide solace and comfort, love and companionship.

• Yet families can also be sites of exploitation, loneliness, and profound inequality.

• Feminism has challenged the vision of families as harmonious and protective.

• In 1965, the American feminist Betty Friedan wrote in The Feminine Mystique of “the
problem with no name”—the isolation and boredom of many suburban American
housewives trapped in an endless cycle of child care and housework.

• Other writers followed, exploring the phenomenon of the “captive wife” (Gavron, 1966) and
the damaging effects of “suffocating” family settings on interpersonal relationships (Laing,
1971).

• Feminism directed attention inside family dynamics to examine women’s experiences in the
domestic sphere.

• Many feminist writers questioned the vision of families as cooperative units based on
common interests and mutual support, arguing instead that unequal power relationships
within families meant that certain family members benefited more than others (Ferree,
2010).
First theme:

• The domestic division of labor—the way in which tasks are allocated among household
members, where women often specialize in homemaking and child rearing and men
specialize in breadwinning. Feminists disagree about the historical emergence of this
division.

• Some see it as an outcome of industrial capitalism, where factory work would take men out
of the home to work for pay (unlike earlier agricultural economies) and women would be left
to manage the home front.

• Others link it to patriarchy and thus see it as predating industrialization. Although a domestic
division of labor probably did exist before industrialization, capitalist production caused a
sharper distinction between the domestic and work realms.

• This process resulted in the crystallization of “male spheres” and “female spheres” and the
power relationships that persist today.

• Until recently, the male breadwinner model has been widespread in most industrialized
societies.
Second theme:
• Unequal power relationships within many families, especially the phenomenon of
domestic violence, including intimate partner violence.

• Spousal abuse, marital rape, incest, and the sexual victimization of children have all
received more public attention as a result of feminists’ claims that the violent and
abusive sides of family life have long been ignored in both academic contexts and legal
and policy circles.

• Feminist sociologists consider how the family serves as an arena for gender
oppression and physical abuse.

• For example, through much of U.S. history, a husband had the legal right to engage his
wife in coerced or forced sex. For most of the twentieth century, marital rape was
considered an exemption to rape laws, although the exemption was repealed in all
states as of 1993. Yet, a dozen American states still maintain laws that handle marital
rape in quite different ways from rape outside of marriage.
Third theme:
• Caring activities constitute a third theme that feminists address. This broad realm encompasses a
variety of processes, from attending to a family member who is ill to looking after an older relative
over a long period. Sometimes caring means simply being attuned to someone else’s psychological
wellbeing.

• Not only do women shoulder concrete tasks such as cleaning and child care, but they also invest
significant emotional labor in maintaining personal relationships (Pinquart and Sorensen, 2006).
While caring activities may be grounded in love and deep emotion, they also require an ability and
willingness to listen, perceive, negotiate, and act creatively.

• Caring activities often involve long spells of unpaid labor, and these responsibilities often limit
women’s ability to work for pay outside the home.

• In these ways, caregiving indirectly contributes to women’s relative economic disadvantage in

society.

• Research shows persuasively that women’s economic disadvantage relative to men, especially
among older adults, is due in part to their tendency to cut back on paid work when caring for their
families, thus reducing the pensions that they are entitled to in old age (Harrington, Meyer, and
Herd, 2007).
EDUCATION
1. ASSIMILATION

2. CREDENTIALISM

3. HIDDEN CURRICULUM
Any questions?