Defining

• 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 (husband and wife, mother and father, brother and sister etc); and creating and maintaining a common culture. (Burgess and Locke, THE FAMILY:FROM INSTITUTION TO COMPANIONSHIP, 1945.)
• A group of people related by blood, live together, form an economic unit, and bear/raise children. (Benekraitis, 1999)
• Families are relationships in which people live together with commitment, form an economic unit and care for any young and consider the group critical to their identity. (ex Kendall)
• Kin - a social network of people based on common ancestry, marriage or adoption.

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Family Structure/Roles

• changing rapidly in American society - Nelson's and Huxtable's structure now a minor form - "Leave it to Beaver" Cleevers is history.
• Families that do have children within them can be 3-generational, single parent, sequentially step-parented.
• Life span of many families (using Kendall definition) not as long as the length of a childhood.

  ? What drives the changes? What social forces operate on immediate/nuclear type families that have resulted in changing structure. Check Koontz "The Way We Never Were" - her assertion is the double-parented with kids and dog, was never the majority type of American family.

Conjugal families - based on marriage

• marriage, wedlock, matrimony
• Alliance theory of marriage
• Love theory of marriage - differential rates of 'happiness' measures over years of marriage comparing South Asian arranged marriages to American lovers marriages.

Consanguine families

Wedlock, Marriage, Matrimony

Blood ties, ancestors, heirs, descendants.
Matriline, Patriline
Patriarchical, Matriarchical
Matrilocal, Patrilocal, Neolocal
Gens, Gentes, Clans, Lineages - societal organization reflecting Kinship ties.

Family Functions

What does a family accomplish within/for a larger society?

• sexual regulation - an area of quickly changing norms if not behavior (incest, consanguinity, exogamy/endogamy, double standard cheating, medical reproductive controls)
• reproduction of citizens
• care/training/formation of young dependents (not much care of old anymore),
• care/comfort/'fulfillment' of conjugal pair - increasingly definitive.
• consuming demand unit within economy (not so important a unit of production anymore)
• social placement ) - provision of statuses and social opportunity as well as identity - name, religion, national/ethnic allegiances, lineage or racial status, class position (95% of children born in poor families are poor at the end of their lives, 95% of kids born in rich families end up rich), occupational placement (of changing importance as schools take over such work

Family Norms

• different than objective description of extant family structures - this is a sort of ideal, or template or model that is held commonly by most of a society.
• These norms change but in a different way, and at a different pace than on-the-ground families.
• Our American norms now are more about affective ties that bind members of a kin group, less so about common household, economic unit, sexual legitimation, care/training of dependents (functions of family), or particular roles/structures that comprise a family (mom, dad, my first step mother, aunt, mistress, scapegoat child, half-brother, grandmother, teenage daughter).

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

•     Family Ecology - influences and is influenced by environment in which it is a part.
•     Family Policy - an institution governed by law, tradition, custom, regulations, subsidies, policies. This theory of family defines an ideal or a few variants on ideals and attempts to remediate any examples.
•     Family Development Perspective - group itself is unit of analysis and explanation - family life cycle, stages of development of family (e.g. young couple, two-parent with children, family with adolescent, empty marriage family, empty nester) a typology of family often 'stages' theory
• Structural-Functional perspective - Family from the point of view of their utility to larger society.
•         a) reproduction
•         b)economic support to members
•         c) education, indoctrination, value inculcation of new citizens
•         d) regulation of sexual activity
•         e) social placement
• Interactionist Perspective - family dynamics and relationships as a coherent system of messages and communications. Families as 'telecommunication systems'
• Family Systems - family dynamics as an interlocking set of systems managing, well or poorly, its own continuance - roles as feedback loops, replicating problem sets, homeostatic equilibrium - families as 'clockworks and computers'.
• Feminist Perspective - Conflict Perspectives - families as historical developments that reproduce and maintain hierarchical relationships mirroring larger social classes and conflicts.

 

Family Issues and Problems

In US, later age at marriage, fewer people are married - in year 2000, 52% of households have a married couple. In 1950, 78% of US households had a married couple.

Household size decreasing. Number of people living alone increasing ( a la Seinfeld, Sex and the City quartet), also singlehood less abnormal than in 50's. Proportion of never-marrieds in US has increased ever since '60's
Average number of children per woman in US declining. Also average number of children per family decreasing. In 1900, American women averaged nearly 4 live births, now down near 2.

Bonding - formation of intentional communities

Intimate groupings other than marriage or blood

Promises	Vows	Commitments
vowed to poverty, chastity, obedience, stability

Non-reproductive (no kids) familiation, long-term, with/without sanctions

DINKS, cohabitants, gaydom, post-college housemates, convents, monasteries, military

Family and workplace

In 2000, three quarters of all women with child under three were employees - working in economy

Families and Kids

Reproductive technologies - birth controls, terminations, avoidances, in-vitro, adoptions, fostering, apprenticeships, surrogations,
Divorce, separation, - avg US marriage lasts 7 years. About 50% of marriage terminate at divorce rather than death of spouse

Saturday Dads/Deadbeat Dads


• from homeless guy who told me 'gave my pay to my lady for the kids', to scene of saturday morning in McDonald's - dads divorced from their family taking kid to breakfast and the zoo.
• Paternity replaces Fatherhood - not yet so in Delaware court -case of Joe Z and his son with the wrong DNA. - support of offspring.

Stats regarding American marriages

• Age at first marriage significant correlate to likelihood of divorce
• Religious commitment correlates to lower divorce rate
• More years of schooling -lower divorce rate
• SES - richer correlates with increased marriage, lower divorce
• Race/Ethnicity - AsianA lowest, Cauc, Latino, then Af-A with highest rates of divorce (Kendall)
• Reliance on smaller number of committed parents (increases toward single-parenting, or marketplace parenting, diminishment of uncle-ing, aunting, grandparenting, mom-dad-and-the-kids type families)
• In some 'single-parent' families, second parent is grandmother, not father. Sometimes grand- is doing primary parenting.
• a half a million children born each year in US to women between ages of 13 and 19. 75% of these mothers are not married to fathers. (Holmes)

   

Abuses within Families

Abuse/neglect of dependents (children)
Abuse of spouses

"May be a dysfunctional family but its the only family I got."