chapter 2 - family complexity

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Sociology of Family Life

Chapter 2 Family Complexity

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Chapter 2 - Family Complexity

y Although, belonging to family is a personal concern, the nature of family membership isalso a matter of great public interest.

y 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.

y 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.

y K nowing how different families affect children's educational performance as well as the

risk of behavioural problems, is thought to be important for policy development. y Family composition - the number and kinds of people who belong to a family. y Lone-parent and two-parent families are different kinds of family composition. y The study of composition responds the question: "who are family members?

y 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. y Married couples without children and lone parents with children; mainly sole support

mothers, and other types of families have all increased in relative frequency. y The current trend toward family diversity is remarkable only because of the contrast

with a period of unusual cultural uniformity during the 1950s. y There have always been families of different kinds in past times. y Earlier periods of social change e.g. The Great Depression were often accompanied by

the fragmentation of families.

y 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. y Family complexity takes 2 main forms:

o Cultural diversity - exists when different family practices are produced by peoplewho have different ideals of family living.





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o Situational diversity - occurs when people who share the same family values

engage in different family practices because they must create their lives underdifferent conditions.

y 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 torecognize the sociological processes involved in situational diversity sometimes leads tomistaken judgements about the supposed decline of the family.

y 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 thecultural idea of family life and it has a preferential status in law.

y 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 beincapable of achieving the way they would really like to live. The result is a great deal of situational diversity of family composition.

y 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 indifferent ways in different contexts and at different stages of life.

y 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.

y Cultural diversity is most obvious when we compare societies having different family

values that are supported by distinctive religious traditions.

y Studies, which compare family lives, in which there are different religious traditions suchas a Christian family and an Islamic or Hindu family is called cross-culturalcomparisons.

y 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 foundingparents and their sons, their daughters-in-law, and their grandchildren; who areall living in one household.

o Partners prefer to choose their childrens marriage partners i.e. arrangedmarriages.

o Activities outside the home by wives and sexually mature daughters arerestricted, to reduce contact with members of the opposite sex.





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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.

y Family values in a society such as Australia have been described as stressing autonomy,intimacy, achievement aspiration, and special acceptance.

y Autonomy the personal independence which enables people to direct their own lives,e.g. choosing who they want to marry.

y This desire for interpersonal intimacy draws the members of Australian families closertogether, but at the same time, people do not want social acceptance from the largecommunity. They want recognition for their economic achievements.

y Thus, in Australia today, the ability of a family to facilitate economic achievement by allits members is taken to be an important sign of successful family live.

y McDonald contemporary Australian family values are like family values in otherwestern societies since they emphasize the needs of the individual, rather than thegroup.

y Individualism is one of the strongest values in the cultures of Anglo-American Societies.

y In practise, no major societies consist entirely of people who follow just one culturaltradition, mostly due to immigration.

y Endogamy potential rules for marriage between partners from the same group; asalthough 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.

y When there is intermarriage, migrants have often adapted to practises of people in thehost societies and they have been assimilated into the dominant family culture.However, when there has been little intermarriage, migrants have often retained verydifferent patterns of family living from the majority of the population.

y 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 immigrantsfrom all over the world, and thus such comparison is necessary to understand familydiversity. In addition, this type of comparison is also needed in most parts of theWestern Europe as these countries today have many immigrants.

y Cultural diversity is easy to distinguish from situational diversity.

y It can be hard then to tell whether the main cause of family complexity lies in cultural ormaterial factors. E.g., the family practises of African-Americans and Puerto Ricans in the





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United States. These women have more out of wedlock births and they are more likelyto form sole-parent families.

Cultural Diversity

y Sociologists are often very interested in cultural differences between western societiesand non-western societies, because of questions about the impact of modernalisation.

y It is sometimes suggested that as developing countries modernize, their cultures willinevitability become more like those of the west. This is the convergence thesis of modernization and family change.

y According to this thesis, family practices tend to become more alike in societies, whichundergo modernalisation.

y The idea of convergence has been very influential in cross-cultural comparative studiesof family change in the eastern societies.

y Sanctioned marriage has tended to decline, as has the number of children to whomwomen gave birth.

y Separation and divorce have also increased, as has cohabitation and the number of births born out of wedlock.

y These trends are generally interpreted as consequences of the value attached toindividual choice in western cultures within contexts of increased opportunity forfreedom of expression.

y Greater opportunities for education and employment of women are thought to havebeen especially important in recent family changes.

y The relevance of the convergence thesis to understanding contemporary family life innon-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.

y The public perception of the decline of the joint family seems to be based on changeswithin a small but highly visible group.

y The urban professional class has adopted a flexible mobile and career-oriented lifestylei.e. tolerant toward small families.

y It accepts geographical separation between the generations as a price to be paid foreconomic success. At the same time, there are many less affluent people (the majority





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of the population), who see the joint daily as a strategy for economic and socialadvancement.

y In addition, one have to note the fact of rapid growth in a number of Asian countrieshas raised questions about the role played in economic development by culture,including family values.

y If Christian family values promoted individualism that was associated with westerneconomic development in the past, then perhaps family values grounded in otherreligious traditions that stress harmony and respect for others may be associated with anew path of economic development in the east.

y 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 theWest.

y The major cross-cultural differences in family life tend to occur on 5 dimensions of groupinteraction, which are:

o Different ideals of family composition

o Different preferences for autonomy and dependence between family members

o Different expectations about transactions within and between families

o Different assumptions about the roles played by men and women within families,especially concerning the division of labour

o Different expectations about the quality of interaction between family members,depending on whether the emphasis is placed upon conformity to the public formof a relationship or upon the emotional content of the relationship

Family Composition

y The most visible difference between families in the East and West are often thecomposition of the family and resulting family size.





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y 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 onerepresentative of the male line in each generation is a permanent member. All the otherdescendants of the head of the household must leave when they marry, if not before,and set up their own households.

y This family is a patriarchal family in which the eldest male is the household head, withhis successor being usually the eldest son. If then there are no sons, the husband of adaughter or failing that a male relative, is adopted into the households.

y The relationship between the family head and his successor is the key relationship withinthe 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.

y The attitude traditionally expected from the eldest son toward his father is one of filialpiety i.e. great respect accompanied by a devout sense of the duty owned towards aparent by a child.

y Cultural legitimating of family continuity during ritual observances for the familyancestors ha son doubt contributed to the durability of the stem family system in Japan.

y The proportion of elderly Japanese living with their adult children has been falling inrecent decades, in parallel with the industrialization and urbanization of Japanesesociety.

y Economic development in Japan has loosened the ties between the generations, in waysthat are consistent with the convergence thesis of family change.

y Migration of young people from rural areas to the cities has clearly reducedintergenerational co residence, since migrant children are likely to leave their parentsbehind.

y In addition, having more disposable income enables both younger and older Japanese tolike independently if they so which.

y Families in Japan gave clearly reduced many of their traditional ways, but family changein 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.

Autonomy V.S Dependence

y In traditional extended families, e.g. the Japanese, individuals are encouraged to findfulfilment for the major needs within the family to put the collective interests of thegroup before their own personal interests.





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y Collective interests are especially strong in rural areas, where the family is a working

group whose members cooperate to meet their economic needs.

y People in urban areas often depend less upon their families since they have moreindependent access to jobs through extensive labour markets.

y Independent income earning is often accomplished by strong desires for individualautonomy.

y The balance between autonomy and dependence in family life is illustrated by the livingarrangements of young adults; in traditional families they live with their parents, thenwhen they marry they can either do like the stem family (the oldest son) and continueto like with their parents or else go and live somewhere else and build a nuclear familyof their own.

y Continuous residence of unmarried adults with their parents is characteristics of allsocieties in which traditional family values are dominant. However, increasedindividualism associated with modernalisim is reflecting in increasing number of peopleliving on their own.

Situational Diversity

y The number of people who live on their own is a useful indicator of cultural preferencesfor individual autonomy in a particular society. However, living alone can also be the

result of difficult or unusual personal situations.

y Temporary separation from family members often occurs among migrants, especiallywhen they move long distances to places, which are unfamiliar to them, or if theybelieve it may be difficult to settle in the new location.





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y Migrantion tends to distrupt social ties, and it is also risky, e.g. there are no guranteesthat 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.

y Initial migration often takes the form of adults moving on their own. Later, they mayreunite with their families if they are successful.

y When immigrants settle in a new location e.g. the US A, they re-establish family groups,either by marrying someone they meet in the new place or by bringing their spousesand children and perhaps other relative to join them.

y The personal lives of migrants illustrate an important point about complexity anddiversity 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.

Change Over the Life Course

y The lives of migrants who move from living in a family group to living alone, and thenback to living in a family group, illustrate an important type of situational diversity.

y An individuals life course consists of a series of social positions, through which she/hemoves during the course of his/her life.

y In some social situations, individual life courses take the form of a predictable sequenceof 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 everyonewill be living in the same family situation at the same time. An e.g. of this is theJapanese life.

y Family structure in contemporary Japan has been described as the modified stemfamily. In this family, a person experiences the modern nuclear family and thetraditional stem family alternately throughout the life course.

y 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 willlive 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.

y In addition, since this family is the family where her life begins, it is referred to as herfamily of origin. However, at that time she leaves her family of origin for her familyof orientation. When her first child arrives, we may refer it the family group in whichshe lives as her family of procreation.





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y 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 intergenerationaldependence on the other hand.

y Situational diversity can also occur because of economic pressures that produce different economic interests.

y In Japan, in the past, the traditional only existed in the small upper class, for which theinheritance of property was a major concern. Most of the population followed a moreflexible type of extended family system. Here, intergenerational hierarchy was lessimportant than ability to contribute to the family economically, through leadership andhard work.

Class, Race and Family

y Japanese history shows that in the past the family system of the upper class tended tobecome publicity defined as the cultural idea, which was then imposed upon the lowerclasses.

y Less structured family practices of the lower classes were seen as being of inferior socialvalue. However, after the Second World War a new Civil Code was imposed on Japan bythe United States.

y Within the abolition of the position of the household head (that was made from the newCivil Code), husband, and wife were given equal legal rights in the family.

y Talcott Parsons (functionalist sociologist), believed that the nuclear family was the typeof 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 amongpeople who had relatively low incomes and low education. That included large numberof African-Americans, who had historically been disadvantaged by a rigid system of racial stratification.

y Here, the strains of struggling to make ends meet as well as to gain social approval, andthe experience of sometimes failing, produced what Parsons called family

disorganization, i.e. the weakening and breaking of family ties, especially throughmartial separation and divorce.

y Charles Murray (researcher into situational diversity), claimed that most of the differencein family composition between black and white populations in the United States wasreally due to class differences. He also claimed that the increase in families with childrenheaded by only one parent was largely due to reforms to the welfare system made inthe 1960s and in the 1970s, as he believed that a more genius and relaxed welfare





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system had undermined the family, because it provided incentives to marry or staymarried.

y Murray concluded that from an economic point of view getting married is dumb. Hethought that this was a simple economic explanation for much of the familydisorganisation, which they observed in the lower classes between 1960 and 1980.

y Sociologists who study social stratification argued that the major influence on familypatterns in the lower classes is a narrowing of occupational opportunities. There arefewer jobs for people with little education in a period of rapid economic change.

y 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 African-

American families. He believed that there is no evidence to show that the welfaresystem 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 labourmarkets in an ear of globalization, led many inner city black women to expect less fromblack 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).

y Thus, men are more likely to seek social recognition and support through activities that are disconnected from nuclear family life.

y In addition, a decline in community norms that would otherwise legitimate and sanctionmarriage means that relationship decisions are increasingly made on personal criteria of

sexual attraction and economic interests.

Individualisation

y Changing norms of family formation are not limited to inner-city African-Americancommunities, nor are they found only in the United States.

y 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 divorcein most communities.

y Decisions about the formation and dissolution of families are made because of personalpreferences, rather than in response to communal or social expectations.

y The likelihood that unmarried individuals of any age will live alone is positivelyassociated with income, and the historical increase in single person households at allages is largely attributable to increasing affluence.





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y Individualisation the growth of a style of decision-making in which individuals respond

only to their own immediate situation.

y Increased complexity of the life course is associated with subjective changes in howpeople think about themselves and how they think about family life.

y In an individualized-world, people self-consciously reflect upon their own needs andtheir 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 asobstacle to, certain kinds of self-development.

y Individualisation is the result of increased social complexity, and adds to the complexityof family life because more people have short-term relationships in order to satisfychanging needs and desires.

y A belief that continuing to live with a particular person has become a barrier to self-fulfilment is often a basis for breaking off a relationship. In addition, being with a personwho creates unique conditions for self-development can proved the basis for forming anew relationship.

y 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 apure relationship for the benefits that it is expected to bring, and they stay in onlyinsofar as it continues to provide enough satisfactions for both parties. Pure

relationships may be sexual or non-sexual, they may involve living together, or livingseparately, and they may involve either marriage or cohabitation.

chapter 2 - family complexity

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