Sociology of Family Life

Chapter 2 Alessia Family Complexity

Chapter 2 - Family Complexity

Although, belonging to family is a personal concern, the nature of family membership is also a matter of great public interest. Governments keep track of families partly because different types of families pay different amounts of taxes and because they require different amounts and kinds of government services. Public policymakers also want to know about families of different types because of the possibility that different kinds of families produce different outcomes for their members. Knowing how different families affect children's educational performance as well as the risk of behavioural problems, is thought to be important for policy development. Family composition - the number and kinds of people who belong to a family. Lone-parent and two-parent families are different kinds of family composition. The study of composition responds the question: "who are family members?  Family composition has generally become more diverse in recent decades i.e. more people are living in more different kinds of families than they were 50 years ago. Married couples without children and lone parents with children; mainly sole support mothers, and other types of families have all increased in relative frequency. The current trend toward family diversity is remarkable only because of the contrast with a period of unusual cultural uniformity during the 1950s. There have always been families of different kinds in past times. Earlier periods of social change e.g. The Great Depression were often accompanied by the fragmentation of families. What is unique about the present period is that there appear to be fewer legal barriers to increased complexity and it is occurring on a global scale. Family complexity takes 2 main forms: o Cultural diversity - exists when different family practices are produced by people who have different ideals of family living. Alessia 1

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Chapter 2 Alessia Family Complexity

Situational diversity - occurs when people who share the same family values engage in different family practices because they must create their lives under different conditions.

There are always some variations in family composition within any society, even when most people share the same basic ideas about family life. This happens, as failure to recognize the sociological processes involved in situational diversity sometimes leads to mistaken judgements about the supposed decline of the family. In culturally unified societies, there is one underlying model of the family, which is considered a cultural idea. Major social institutions, e.g. organized religion, support the cultural idea of family life and it has a preferential status in law. Not everybody lives in a nuclear family all the time and some people may spend most of their lives in other living arrangements because under certain conditions, people may be incapable of achieving the way they would really like to live. The result is a great deal of situational diversity of family composition. The above diversity does not mean that the cultural idea of family lives has disappeared or that the family has decline, but that shares family values are likely to be enacted in different ways in different contexts and at different stages of life. In cultural diversity, more than one accepted model of family lives exists, and people in different social groups follow quite different paths of family living over their lifetimes. Cultural diversity is most obvious when we compare societies having different family values that are supported by distinctive religious traditions. Studies, which compare family lives, in which there are different religious traditions such as a Christian family and an Islamic or Hindu family is called cross-cultural comparisons. Steve Derne says that family cultures consist of four elements: o A preference for living in joint families, i.e. families that consist of the founding parents and their sons, their daughters-in-law, and their grandchildren; who are all living in one household. Partners prefer to choose their children s marriage partners i.e. arranged marriages. Activities outside the home by wives and sexually mature daughters are restricted, to reduce contact with members of the opposite sex.

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Chapter 2 Alessia o Interaction between husbands and wives is limited by gender segregation, i.e. women and men tend to engage in different activities in separate places. Family Complexity

Family values in a society such as Australia have been described as stressing autonomy, intimacy, achievement aspiration, and special acceptance. Autonomy the personal independence which enables people to direct their own lives, e.g. choosing who they want to marry. This desire for interpersonal intimacy draws the members of Australian families closer together, but at the same time, people do not want social acceptance from the large community. They want recognition for their economic achievements. Thus, in Australia today, the ability of a family to facilitate economic achievement by all its members is taken to be an important sign of successful family live. McDonald contemporary Australian family values are like family values in other western societies since they emphasize the needs of the individual, rather than the group. Individualism is one of the strongest values in the cultures of Anglo-American Societies. In practise, no major societies consist entirely of people who follow just one cultural tradition, mostly due to immigration. Endogamy potential rules for marriage between partners from the same group; as although there are many different cultures in one country (mostly popular in America or Australia), people still tend to marry other persons that are part of the same culture, e.g. Negro to Negro; Islam person to another Islam person, etc. When there is intermarriage, migrants have often adapted to practises of people in the host societies and they have been assimilated into the dominant family culture. However, when there has been little intermarriage, migrants have often retained very different patterns of family living from the majority of the population. Sub cultural comparisons of family differences within a society can be very important, e.g. in countries such as America, Australia and Canada, contain decants of immigrants from all over the world, and thus such comparison is necessary to understand family diversity. In addition, this type of comparison is also needed in most parts of the Western Europe as these countries today have many immigrants. Cultural diversity is easy to distinguish from situational diversity. It can be hard then to tell whether the main cause of family complexity lies in cultural or material factors. E.g., the family practises of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the Alessia 3

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Chapter 2 Alessia United States. These women have more out of wedlock births and they are more likely to form sole-parent families. Family Complexity

Cultural Diversity
y Sociologists are often very interested in cultural differences between western societies and non-western societies, because of questions about the impact of modernalisation. It is sometimes suggested that as developing countries modernize, their cultures will inevitability become more like those of the west. This is the convergence thesis of modernization and family change. According to this thesis, family practices tend to become more alike in societies, which undergo modernalisation. The idea of convergence has been very influential in cross-cultural comparative studies of family change in the eastern societies. Sanctioned marriage has tended to decline, as has the number of children to whom women gave birth. Separation and divorce have also increased, as has cohabitation and the number of births born out of wedlock. These trends are generally interpreted as consequences of the value attached to individual choice in western cultures within contexts of increased opportunity for freedom of expression. Greater opportunities for education and employment of women are thought to have been especially important in recent family changes. The relevance of the convergence thesis to understanding contemporary family life in non-western societies is debatable, i.e. there is evidence both for it and against it. E.g. in India, there appears to be no clear and consistent trend toward the disintegration of the traditional joint family. The public perception of the decline of the joint family seems to be based on changes within a small but highly visible group. The urban professional class has adopted a flexible mobile and career-oriented lifestyle i.e. tolerant toward small families. It accepts geographical separation between the generations as a price to be paid for economic success. At the same time, there are many less affluent people (the majority Alessia 4

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Chapter 2 Alessia of the population), who see the joint daily as a strategy for economic and social advancement. y In addition, one have to note the fact of rapid growth in a number of Asian countries has raised questions about the role played in economic development by culture, including family values. If Christian family values promoted individualism that was associated with western economic development in the past, then perhaps family values grounded in other religious traditions that stress harmony and respect for others may be associated with a new path of economic development in the east. Asian immigrants often adapt to life in the host country in different ways and recent migration from Asia has therefore added to the diversity of living arrangements in the West. The major cross-cultural differences in family life tend to occur on 5 dimensions of group interaction, which are: o o o o Different ideals of family composition Different preferences for autonomy and dependence between family members Different expectations about transactions within and between families Different assumptions about the roles played by men and women within families, especially concerning the division of labour Different expectations about the quality of interaction between family members, depending on whether the emphasis is placed upon conformity to the public form of a relationship or upon the emotional content of the relationship Family Complexity

Family Composition
5 y The most visible difference between families in the East and West are often the composition of the family and resulting family size.

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Chapter 2 Alessia In Japan, the ideal family is the stem family; a stem family consists of a succession of males, together with their wives and dependent children, who all live in one household. It is like a joint family as is an intergenerational group, however; only one representative of the male line in each generation is a permanent member. All the other descendants of the head of the household must leave when they marry, if not before, and set up their own households. This family is a patriarchal family in which the eldest male is the household head, with his successor being usually the eldest son. If then there are no sons, the husband of a daughter or failing that a male relative, is adopted into the households. The relationship between the family head and his successor is the key relationship within the stem family. It is the basis for intergenerational continuity of the household and it establishes who has the most say in the family decision-making. The attitude traditionally expected from the eldest son toward his father is one of filial piety i.e. great respect accompanied by a devout sense of the duty owned towards a parent by a child. Cultural legitimating of family continuity during ritual observances for the family ancestors ha son doubt contributed to the durability of the stem family system in Japan. The proportion of elderly Japanese living with their adult children has been falling in recent decades, in parallel with the industrialization and urbanization of Japanese society. Economic development in Japan has loosened the ties between the generations, in ways that are consistent with the convergence thesis of family change. Migration of young people from rural areas to the cities has clearly reduced intergenerational co residence, since migrant children are likely to leave their parents behind. In addition, having more disposable income enables both younger and older Japanese to like independently if they so which. Families in Japan gave clearly reduced many of their traditional ways, but family change in Japan is occurring slowly now by comparison with most western societies. On present trends, any convergence remains far off in the future, if indeed it will ever occur. 6 y In traditional extended families, e.g. the Japanese, individuals are encouraged to find fulfilment for the major needs within the family to put the collective interests of the group before their own personal interests. Alessia Family Complexity

Autonomy V.S Dependence

Sociology of Family Life

Chapter 2 Alessia Family Complexity

Collective interests are especially strong in rural areas, where the family is a working group whose members cooperate to meet their economic needs. People in urban areas often depend less upon their families since they have more independent access to jobs through extensive labour markets. Independent income earning is often accomplished by strong desires for individual autonomy. The balance between autonomy and dependence in family life is illustrated by the living arrangements of young adults; in traditional families they live with their parents, then when they marry they can either do like the stem family (the oldest son) and continue to like with their parents or else go and live somewhere else and build a nuclear family of their own. Continuous residence of unmarried adults with their parents is characteristics of all societies in which traditional family values are dominant. However, increased individualism associated with modernalisim is reflecting in increasing number of people living on their own.

Situational Diversity
y The number of people who live on their own is a useful indicator of cultural preferences for individual autonomy in a particular society. However, living alone can also be the result of difficult or unusual personal situations. Temporary separation from family members often occurs among migrants, especially when they move long distances to places, which are unfamiliar to them, or if they believe it may be difficult to settle in the new location. 7

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Chapter 2 Alessia Migrantion tends to distrupt social ties, and it is also risky, e.g. there are no gurantees that one is going to find any employment and if living accommodation is uncertain, then the possibility of failure may be too serious for a completely family group to move all at once. This is especially the case if children are involved. Initial migration often takes the form of adults moving on their own. Later, they may reunite with their families if they are successful. When immigrants settle in a new location e.g. the USA, they re-establish family groups, either by marrying someone they meet in the new place or by bringing their spouses and children and perhaps other relative to join them. The personal lives of migrants illustrate an important point about complexity and diversity in family life. Living arrangements e.g. living alone do not necessarily reflect different family values. Rather, they are often the result of situational diversity. Family Complexity

Change Over the Life Course

y The lives of migrants who move from living in a family group to living alone, and then back to living in a family group, illustrate an important type of situational diversity. An individual s life course consists of a series of social positions, through which she/he moves during the course of his/her life. In some social situations, individual life courses take the form of a predictable sequence of stages i.e. family life cycle. In other social environments, life pathways are less certain and individual life courses are less predictable. In either case, we can expect that most people will live in different ways at different times of life, and that not everyone will be living in the same family situation at the same time. An e.g. of this is the Japanese life. Family structure in contemporary Japan has been described as the modified stem family. In this family, a person experiences the modern nuclear family and the traditional stem family alternately throughout the life course. During the post-second world period, nuclear families became more popular in Japan and thus today Japanese women will be likely to be born in a nuclear family. She will live like this until her parents will come to live with her, as they will be old, and thus not capable to live on their own. Here, her family would become a stem family. In addition, since this family is the family where her life begins, it is referred to as her family of origin. However, at that time she leaves her family of origin for her family of orientation. When her first child arrives, we may refer it the family group in which she lives as her family of procreation. Alessia 8

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Chapter 2 Alessia Family Complexity

In the life courses of Japanese people, situational diversity is a result of the changing needs for autonomy of the married couple on the one hand and for intergenerational dependence on the other hand. Situational diversity can also occur because of economic pressures that produce different economic interests. In Japan, in the past, the traditional only existed in the small upper class, for which the inheritance of property was a major concern. Most of the population followed a more flexible type of extended family system. Here, intergenerational hierarchy was less important than ability to contribute to the family economically, through leadership and hard work.

Class, Race and Family

y Japanese history shows that in the past the family system of the upper class tended to become publicity defined as the cultural idea, which was then imposed upon the lower classes. Less structured family practices of the lower classes were seen as being of inferior social value. However, after the Second World War a new Civil Code was imposed on Japan by the United States. Within the abolition of the position of the household head (that was made from the new Civil Code), husband, and wife were given equal legal rights in the family. Talcott Parsons (functionalist sociologist), believed that the nuclear family was the type of family that was best adapted to life in a mobile society such as the United Sates. Parsons observed that nuclear family living in the United States was least stable among people who had relatively low incomes and low education. That included large number of African-Americans, who had historically been disadvantaged by a rigid system of racial stratification. Here, the strains of struggling to make ends meet as well as to gain social approval, and the experience of sometimes failing, produced what Parsons called family disorganization, i.e. the weakening and breaking of family ties, especially through martial separation and divorce. Charles Murray (researcher into situational diversity), claimed that most of the difference in family composition between black and white populations in the United States was really due to class differences. He also claimed that the increase in families with children headed by only one parent was largely due to reforms to the welfare system made in the 1960s and in the 1970s, as he believed that a more genius and relaxed welfare Alessia

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Chapter 2 Alessia system had undermined the family, because it provided incentives to marry or stay married. y Murray concluded that from an economic point of view getting married is dumb. He thought that this was a simple economic explanation for much of the family disorganisation, which they observed in the lower classes between 1960 and 1980. Sociologists who study social stratification argued that the major influence on family patterns in the lower classes is a narrowing of occupational opportunities. There are fewer jobs for people with little education in a period of rapid economic change. William Jones Wilson argued that it was the rise in male joblessness in inner-city areas, which was the major situational factor, begin growing female headship in AfricanAmerican families. He believed that there is no evidence to show that the welfare system is a major factor in the rise of childbearing outside marriage. He says that increased jobless among African-Americans males, caused by the restructuring of labour markets in an ear of globalization, led many inner city black women to expect less from black men. Also, then men stopped looking for social status, as they were left with none (as the women were taking over and not expecting much from them). Thus, men are more likely to seek social recognition and support through activities that are disconnected from nuclear family life. In addition, a decline in community norms that would otherwise legitimate and sanction marriage means that relationship decisions are increasingly made on personal criteria of sexual attraction and economic interests. Family Complexity

Individualisation
y Changing norms of family formation are not limited to inner-city African-American communities, nor are they found only in the United States. The intact nuclear family is less of a cultural ideal in America than it once was, and thus there is fewer stigmas attached to out-of-wedlock births, marital separation, and divorce in most communities. Decisions about the formation and dissolution of families are made because of personal preferences, rather than in response to communal or social expectations. The likelihood that unmarried individuals of any age will live alone is positively associated with income, and the historical increase in single person households at all ages is largely attributable to increasing affluence. Alessia

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Chapter 2 Alessia Family Complexity

Individualisation the growth of a style of decision-making in which individuals respond only to their own immediate situation. Increased complexity of the life course is associated with subjective changes in how people think about themselves and how they think about family life. In an individualized-world, people self-consciously reflect upon their own needs and their plans for the future as the bases for social action. Goals of realizing the inner self become prominent. Personal relationships are looked at as opportunities either for or as obstacle to, certain kinds of self-development. Individualisation is the result of increased social complexity, and adds to the complexity of family life because more people have short-term relationships in order to satisfy changing needs and desires. A belief that continuing to live with a particular person has become a barrier to selffulfilment is often a basis for breaking off a relationship. In addition, being with a person who creates unique conditions for self-development can proved the basis for forming a new relationship. Pure relationships intimate relationships, in which the participants take little or no account of community norms or the expectations of others. Each person enters into a pure relationship for the benefits that it is expected to bring, and they stay in only insofar as it continues to provide enough satisfactions for both parties. Pure relationships may be sexual or non-sexual, they may involve living together, or living separately, and they may involve either marriage or cohabitation.

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