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Trends in Family Structure - Coggle Diagram
Trends in Family Structure
In 2011, in England and Wales, there were 544,000 step families with dependent children.
The number of step families has increased since the 1950s, but have decline (631,000 in 2001)
In 2012, nearly 2 million lone parents with dependent children, from 1.6 million in 1996.
289,000 concealed families (multigenerational) in 2011. This is a multi-family household, in addition to primary.
34% of UK households have 1 person living in them.
Nearly 1/3 of men, and 1/7 of women live with their parents.
Functionalists and Marxists theorised the nuclear family to be central to most people’s experiences in modern industrial society.
Yet postmodern societies are characterised by plurality of household types.
Ann Oakley
describes the conventional family as nuclear families composed of legally married couples, choosing parenthood of one or more children.
Leach
called this the ‘cereal apcket’ family as it was most prominent in advertising.
Chambers
argued a moral panic of non-nuclear families, especially single parent families.
Realities of nuclear families such as female dissatisfaction, domestic violence, empty shell marriages , it is not as ideal as projected.
The Rapoport highlighted 20% of families in UK consisted of married couples with children with a single breadwinner. .
The Rapoports 1982
Increasing family diversity was a global trend, especially divorce, decreasing marriage a Europe-wide phenomenon.
They highlighted five distinct elements of family diversity in the UK
Cultural Diversity
Variations by ethnicity, South Asian families are more traditional and patriarchal, more likely to be extended families.
African Caribbean were more likely to be matrifocal.
Life Course Diversity
Newly married couples without children have a different family life to those whose children have achieved adult status
there are more life stages no than in the 1950s.
Organisational Diversity
Variations in family structure, household type, and divisions of labour
For instance, reconstituted families or dual worker families.
Class Diversity
In terms of socialisation (mc more pro-school) and in terms of support networks.
Working class families more likely to be embedded within a modified extended family network, middle class more isolated (increased geographic mobility)
Cohort Diversity
Those in the same cohort have shared experience of historical events influencing family life.
Couples entering into marriage in the 1950swould have had an expectation that marriage was for life and traditional gender roles were the norm.
Allan and Crow
There is no clear family cycle through most people pass because of the extent of diversity.
Each individual follows a more unpredictable family course, complicated by cohabitation, divorce, remarriage.
Diversity is based on increased choice.
4 Changes contributing to increased family diversity.
The divorce rate has risen
Lone parent families increased
Cohabitation outside marriage is more common
Marriage rates have declined.
Beck
Patchwork families where adults go through life with a series of different partners, adding to the complexity of life.
Beck- Gernsheim
People today call thei relationships different things.
Being coupled up does not constitute living together.
Individualisation has resulted in an array of relationships, so it is impossible to define what the family is or should be anymore.
Modern reproductive technologies are changing our ideas about family life altogether
Frozen eggs and sperm donors allow for ‘sing parents by choice’, where women can have children alter on when more financially secure.