The Personal Life Perspective on the Family

The Personal Life Perspective: dogs and dead relatives are part of the family too!

It is increasingly common for people to form close, emotional relationships with their friends, pets and other ‘fictive kin’, and to regard these people (or animals) as part of their family.

People can have close ‘family like’ relationships which provide an emotional and even a financial support network without being in a ‘normal’ family, and if we wish to understand personal life today, we need to focus on the close personal connections which individuals have rather than families in the traditional sense.

The personal life perspective on the family is essentially an Interactionist perspective and criticises structural perspectives such as Functionalism, Marxism and Feminism for assuming the nuclear family is the dominant type of family and taking that as the base unit for analysis.

Rather than studying ‘the nuclear family’ in the traditional sense, we study individuals and take the time to understand their own personal perspective on their own family.

If we do this, we will find multiple definitions and understandings of the family with some people seeing pets, friends, or dead relatives as more important in their personal lives than members of their actual family in the traditional sense of the word.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean people are free to construct whatever family they see fit, they are still constrained by social norms.

Carol Smart is the main thinker associated with this perspective.

A summary of the Personal Life Perspective

mind map summarising the personal life perspective on the family

Criticisms of Structural Perspectives

The Personal Life Perspective makes two main criticisms of structural perspectives on the family such as Functionalism and Marxism

  1. They tend to assume the traditional nuclear family is the dominant type of family. This ignores the increased diversity of families today. Compared with 50 years ago, many more people now live in other families, such as lone-parent families and so on.
  2. They are all structural theories. That is, they assume that families and their members are simply passive puppets manipulated by the structure of society to perform certain functions – for example, to provide the economy with a mobile labour force, or serve the needs of capitalism or of men.

The Sociology of Personal life is strongly influenced by Interactionist ideas and contrasts with structural theories. Sociologists from this perspective believe that in order to understand families, we must start from the point of view of the individuals concerned and the meanings they give to their relationships.’

Personal Life, not necessarily the family!

People can have close, emotional, and meaningful relationships without being embedded in anything like a ‘normal’ idea of a family, thus why we should be looking at personal life from the perspective of individuals rather than focusing on families as the base unit of analysis.

For example, people may have close connections (like we would normally associate with husband-wife, mother-daughter) from all or any of the following:

  • Friends
  • Pets
  • Dead relatives.
  • Fictive Kin

Fictive Kin are people who are regarded as family even though they are not related by blood, marriage or adoption.

HINT: It might be useful to remember the Personal Life Perspective as the one about ‘pets and dead relatives’!

Families are complex yet still ‘constrained’

For those people who do form families, the PLP perspective recognises that family structures are complex and that there are several different ways roles within family life may be divided up making for a huge variety in family diversity.

Moreover, different people within the same family may have different views of WHO is in that family. For example, one person might think a dead relative is still part of it, everyone else might disagree; one divorced partner in a stepfamily may regard their family as divorce-extended, the other partner whose first relationship it is might have a different conception.

However, families are still constrained by at least three factors:

  1. Personal family history
  2. Social norms
  3. Structural factors such as class, gender and ethnicity.

These constraints mean that people aren’t just free to make up and defined their families anyway they see fit, there are ‘normative demands’ on them made by objective reality, so this isn’t a purely postmodern take on family life.

Carol Smart: ‘Personal Life: New Directions in Sociological Thinking’

Carol Smart Sociology of Personal Life

Carol Smart is the main person associated with this perspective. She has become frustrated by the fixation of many commentators with the supposed decline of the possibility of family life. She rejects many of the assumptions about the decline of family life found in theories of individualisation by authors such as Beck and Beck Gernsheim and Giddens.

Instead, her approach prioritises the bonds between people, the importance of memory and cultural heritage, the significance of emotions (both positive and negative), how family secrets work and change over time, and the underestimated importance of things such as shared possessions or homes in the maintenance and memory of relationships.

‘By focusing on people’s meanings, Carol Smart’s personal life perspective draws our attention to a range of other personal or intimate relationships that are important to people, even though they may not be conventionally defined as family. These include all kinds of relationships that individuals see as significant and give them a sense of identity, relatedness and belonging, such as:

  • Relationships with friends who might be like a sister or a brother to you.
  • Fictive kin: close friends who are treated as relatives, for example your mum’s best friend who you call your ‘auntie’.
  • Gay and lesbian ‘chosen families’ made up of a supportive network of close friends, ex partners and others who are not related by marriage or blood.
  • Relationships with dead relatives who live on in people’s memories and continue to shape their identities and affect their actions.
  • Even relationships with pets. For example, Becky Tiper (2011) found in her study of children’s views of family relationships, that children frequently saw their pets as ‘part of the family’.

In short – The Family is not in decline, it is just very very different and much more diverse and complex than ever before. 

Supporting evidence for the Personal Life Perspective

Fictive Kin are often regarded as part of the family

Fictive Kin are people who are regarded as family even though they are not related by blood, marriage or adoption.

According to a 2013 survey of 6500 adults in the Netherlands (1) 35% of older persons aged 61-79 were most likely to have fictive kin, as did 23% of middle-aged people, aged 41-60 and 16% of younger people, aged 18-40 had fictive kin

The paper-and-pencil questionnaire included the following question: “Who do you consider to be part of ‘your family’?” Alternatives included: partner, children, parents, siblings, nieces and nephews, grandparents, grandchildren, uncles and aunts, cousins, other relatives, parents-in-law, siblings-in-law, others-in-law, and, finally, “others (a friend, neighbor, etc.).”

The final category was how ‘Fictive Kin’ was operationalized.

This study has some level of reliability as a previous 1992 Study (2) found that 40% of older people identify fictive kin as family.

Pets are often regarded as part of the family

According to a survey of 1000 households and a further 193 in-depth interviews carried out between May 2001 and December 2003 in Swansea, South Wales (3) 46/193 people spontaneously mentioned pets as part of their family

According to Blue Cross Pet Census 95% of respondents said they view their pets like family, over 70% said they have bought their pet something nice to show them they love them, although I think this may be a case of a biased sample of hardcore pet-lovers when we look at another (2022) survey by the World Animal Foundation 52% of adults in the UK had a pet in 2022, and half of those think they make great companions, which suggests the figure regarding their pets as family is much less than 95%! 

This (2023) UK petition to treat pets like children certainly suggests there is support for pets to be treated like part of the family. It is campaigning to get the law changed around how pets are treated during divorce: currently they are treated like property, treating them like children would mean their welfare has to be taken in to account during a relationship breakdown, which currently isn’t the case under British law.

Evidence of Complex family maps…

Eliza Garwood (4) carried out biographical narrative interviews with twenty-two adult children raised by LGBTQ parents.

She documents case studies of how some respondents were born to two apparently heterosexual parents, and spent their early childhoods in that relationship, but then one parent came out and/ or transitioned, broke up with the other parent and established themselves in a queer relationship, with the child being parented by two LGBTQ parents in their later childhood.

She found that many of these (now adult) children have spent considerable time and effort actively construct their kinship-stories as adults, and their sense of family is thus very complex, and often rooted in a sense of injustice about the discrimination than LGBTQ people face.

Evaluation of the Personal Life Perspective

Positive evaluations

  • It helps us to understand how people themselves construct and define their relationships as ‘family’ rather than imposing traditional sociological definitions of the family from the outside.
  • The personal life perspective rejects the top-down view taken by other perspectives, such as functionalism but it does see intimate relationships as performing the important function of providing us with a sense of belonging and relatedness.
  • It recognises that people are active in constructing relationships. You can use this to criticise the New Right’s view of the nuclear family: the nuclear family may be in decline, but from the PLP it doesn’t matter because there’s all sorts of other relationships that can provide emotional support.

Limitations

  • Taking the personal life perspective can be accused to taking too broad a view, all we can really do is describe or map out relationships.
  • Traditional married and cohabiting nuclear families probably provide more financial support to children than friends and more emotional support than pets, so let’s not exaggerate the importance of certain types of personal relationship.
  • It makes choosing a nationally representative sample of ‘families’ very difficult: there is so much diversity we may not be able to make generalisations from any sample.
  • A recent (2022) Survey on Declining Friendship USA has found that friendship is in decline in America: people report having fewer friends than in the 1990s, and that they rely on them less for emotional support than was the case 20 years ago. This suggests that friendship might not be replacing the family, rather nothing is!
Signposting and Related posts

Late Modern Perspectives on The Family (what Smart criticises)

Understanding Society – A longitudinal study of changing households in the UK (you can use this data to assess the validity of the Personal Life Perspective)

The Personal Life Perspective is one the main perspectives on the family within the A-Level Sociology Families and Households topic

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Further Reading and Sources
Vanessa May Sociology of Personal Life

1 (2013) Fictive Kin just like family

(2) Fictive Kin

3 (2008) My family and other animals 

(4) (2022) Queering the Kinship Story

Why Do so Many Twenty Somethings Live with Their Parents?

27% of young adults live with their parents.

27% of 20-34 year olds lived with their parents in 2022, just over one in four adults.

Some of the reasons for this include structural factors such as low wages for younger people and high house prices, but also cultural factors such. as uncertainty over relationships.

This post is designed to help you revise the ‘increasing family diversity‘ of the AS Sociology families and households module

Statistics on young people living with their parents

According to the Office for National Statistics the proportion of 20-34 year olds living with their parents in 2022 was

  • 27% of 20-34 year olds in total
  • 31% of males
  • 22% of females.

So there was a significant gender divide!

The numbers have increased for every age category since 2011, again according to the Office for National Statistics, the number of young adults living with their parents by age in 2021 compared to 2011 was:

  • 56% of 20 year olds, up from 52% in 2011.
  • 37% of 25 year olds, up from 28%.
  • 16% of 30 year olds, up from 12%.
  • 7% of 35 year olds, up from 6% in 2011.

Diversity of experience

However – Not all ‘Kippers*’ are the same! (*Kids living in their parents’ pockets)

It is important to keep in mind that not all ‘adult kids’ are the same; experiences of living at home with your parents into your 30s will vary.

For example, the experience of being a NEET and living at home with your parents may well be different to being one of the ‘Boomerang Kids’ – who move out to go to university but then move back in with their parents afterwards

Some adult kids would have lived at home continuously, but many would have moved out for a period with a partner, and then moved back in again.

Adult-Kids will also vary as to the extent to which they are forced into living with their parents due to financial reasons, or choose to do so for ‘lifestyle reasons’.

Experiences will also differ depending on parental attitudes to having their adult children living with them.

Why are more young adults living with their parents?

We can break this down into two broad sets of explanation:

  • structural structural
  • cultural changes

Structural changes

Many commentators stress that young adults have no choice but to live with their parents, focusing on structural (mainly economic) reasons that force people to live with their parents.

The following structural changes mean it is harder for young people to transition to independent living.

The expansion of higher education

The massive expansion in higher education has seen the number of undergraduate students triple since 1970, from 414,000 to 1.4 million in 2022. This means more young adults are not in work and economically dependent on their parents for longer.

The cost of Living Crisis

The recent sharp increase in young people living with their parents maybe due to the high inflation rates since 2021.

Young people generally earn less and live in rented accommodation and the cost of food, energy and rent prices would have driven many back to live at home with their parents.

Rising house prices

House prices in the UK have risen massively since the 1990s and today less than 50% of 18-35 year olds own their homes compared to to almost 70% in the mid 1990s.

Many will stay living at home longer in order to save up a deposit to buy a first home rather than waste money on rent.

Cultural changes

There are also cultural changes which mean young adults are more likely to choose to live with their parents even when they could move out.

More uncertainty about what a ‘normal relationship’ is.

Changing roles of men and women and changing expectations of relationships and family life result in young people being more reluctant to settle down in a classic long term relationship.

Changing norms about age

The meaning of ‘being 20 something is different today to what it was in the 1970s. Today, we simply want to ‘settle down’ later in life – 20s have become about ‘pulling and dating’, ‘30s about serious long term relationships, and late 30s about children. Of those 20 somethings who do flee the parental nest, they are increasingly likely to either live alone or share with friends. The number of young couple households has been decreasing in recent years.

High rates of relationship breakdowns

The increasing number of ‘kippers’ might also be linked to the increasing instability of relationships. There are plenty of late 20s and 30 somethings who have previously moved in with a partner for a few years, suffered a relationship breakdown, ended up back with their parents and are now reluctant to recommit!

See this Guardian post for further info

Perspectives on the ‘not quite children’

Most of the commentary on this social trend seems to be negative – focussing on such things as:

Some research, however, suggests that adults living at home with their parents can be a positive thingAs this research, based on 500 ‘adult-kids’ in the USA suggests

‘Few 20-somethings who live at home are mooching off their parents. More often, they are using the time at home to gain necessary credentials and save money for a more secure future.

Helicopter parents aren’t so bad after all. Involved parents provide young people with advantages, including mentoring and economic support, that have become increasingly necessary to success.’

Signposting

This is one of the topics within the families and households module, typically taught in the first year of A-level sociology.

Sources/ Find out More

Nice blog post on ‘how returning to live with our parents in our 30s benefited both sides

Barbara Ellen of the Guardian really doesn’t approve – NB most of the commentators don’t approve of her views either!

HESA: Student Higher Education Numbers 2022.

Family diversity by ethnicity in the UK

Asian households are the most likely to married, black households have the highest rates of single parents.

This brief update explores the extent to which family life and attitudes to family-life vary across some of the different ethnic groups in the UK. It looks at such things as marriage, divorce, birth rates, household types, equality and household structure.

Ethnicity data from the 2021 UK census shows that 81.7% of the UK population are classified as ‘white’, 9.3% as ‘Asian’ or ‘Asian-British’, 4% as’ Black’, 2.9% as ‘Mixed’ and 2.3% as ‘other’.

(NB – This represents a significant increase in ethnic minorities compared to the 2001 census. In 2021, 18% of the population were non-white, compared to 9% in 2001.)

Marriage and Divorce Rates by Ethnicity

The ONS does not collect data on ethnicity when divorces are registered, so we have to rely on Census data.

To generalise, Asian adults are about 2.5 times more likely to be married than Black adults, and half as likely to be divorced (1)

Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshis have the highest rates of marriage and Black Caribbean the lowest… Over 60% of Asian adults are married compared to only 25.5% of Black Caribbeans.

Conversely, Mixed White/ Black, mixed White/ Asian and Caribbeans have the highest ‘divorced’ rate, at over 10%, while Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshis have much lower divorce rates, all below 5%.

Source: ONS (2021) Marriage and Civil Partnerships in the UK

Divorce is more common among young Asian couples

Divorce has traditionally been seen as something shameful in Asian culture, with children under pressure to stay in loveless marriages in order to uphold the family’s honour and prevent shame falling on the family.

However, for today’s third and fourth generation Asians, things are much different.. According to this article there is a soaring British Asian divorce rate now that young Asian men and especially women are better educated and increasingly going into professional careers.

Household type by Ethnicity

Some of the most obvious differences of ethnic minority households (compared to white) households include:

  • Asian households are three times less likely to be cohabiting, and have higher rates of marriage
  • Asian households have half the rate of Lone Person households compared to white households.
  • Black and mixed households have twice the rate of lone parent households.
  • Black, Asian and mixed households have incredibly low levels of pensioner couple households compared to White households, and much higher rates of ‘other households’ (could be ‘multigenerational?)
bar charts showing household structure by ethnicity, 2011.
Household types by ethnicity, UK Census 2011

To be more specific:

  • 47% of Asian households are married compared to just 22% of Black households and 33% of White households. 
  • Asian households have very low rates of cohabitation at only 3.5%, half that of Black households (7%) and three times less than White households (10%)
  • 24% of black households are lone parent, compared to only 10% of White households and 8% of Asian households.
  • 32% and 31% of Black and White households respectively are single person households, but only 17% of Asian households. 
MarriedCohabiting Lone Parent One person 
Asian 47%3.50%9%17%
Black 22%7.00%24%32%
White 33%10%10%31%

Source here.
British Asians have more conservative views towards marriage and sexuality

According to a poll in 2018, British Asians are twice as likely to report that ‘sex before marriage’ is unacceptable than ‘all Britons’, they are also more likely to be against same-sex relationships.

Bar chart showing Asian attitudes to same sex relationships, 2018.

Source: BBC News report, 2018

A previous UK National Statistics report showed that the highest proportions of married couples under pension age, with or without children, are in Asian households. Over half of Bangladeshi (54%), Indian (53%) and Pakistani (51%) households contained a married couple, compared with 37% of those headed by a White British person. Demonstrating the importance of marriage for the Brit-Asian communities.


Forced Marriages are more common among Asian Families

There is also a dark-side to Asian family life, and that comes in the number of Forced Marriages associated with Asian communities.

In 2018 the British authorities dealt with 1500 cases of Forced Marriage, with there being over 1000 cases a year for most of the last decade.

Nearly half of all cases involve victims being taken to or originating from Pakistan, with Bangladesh being the second most involved country.

Only 7% of Forced Marriages take place entirely in the UK, so there’s an interesting link to (negative) Globalisation and family life here.

Source: ONS Forced Marriage Statistics


Immigrant women have higher fertility rates

In 2021 the Total Fertility Rate for UK born women was 1.5 compared to 2 for non-UK women. This means the birth rate for non-UK born mother is about 25% higher.

The percentage of babies born to women from outside the UK has increased considerably over the last 20 years, but has recently leveled off and could now be declining.

Around 28% of births are to women who were born outside of the UK in 2018.

Source: ONS statistics: Births by Parents Country of Birth

The number of interracial relationships is increasing

The fact that interracial relationships are increasing might make it more difficult to make generalisations between ethnic groups in the future…..

Overall almost one in 10 people living in Britain is married to or living with someone from outside their own ethnic group, the analysis from the Office for National Statistics shows.

But the overall figure conceals wide variations. Only one in 25 white people have settled down with someone from outside their own racial background. By contrast 85 per cent of people from mixed-race families have themselves set up home with someone from another group.

Age is the crucial factor with those in their 20s and 30s more than twice as likely to be living with someone from another background as those over 65, reflecting a less rigid approach to identity over time.

A brief history of South-Asian Family Life in the UK

This historical study by Ballard (1982) noted that most South-Asian families had a much broader network of familial-relations than a typical white-British family and one individual household might be only one small part of a complex global network of kin-relations.

Ballard argued that in order to understand South-Asian family life in the UK in the 1980s, you had to look at the ideal model of family life in Asia which is Patriarchal, being based on tight control of women, collectivist (the group is more important than the individual) and obsessed with maintaining family honour (primarily through not getting divorced/ committing adultery or having children outside of wedlock) because maintaining honour was crucial to your being able to do business in the wider community.

Ballard also stressed the importance of Honour and its Patriarchal nature….. The complexity of the question of the asymmetry of the sexes is nowhere better illustrated than in the concepts of honour, izzat and shame, sharm. In its narrower sense izzat is a matter of male pride. Honourable men are expected to present an image of fearlessness and independence to the outside world, and at the same time to keep close control over the female members of their families. For a woman to challenge her husband’s or her father’s authority in public shamefully punctures his honour. To sustain male izzat wives, sisters and daughters must be seen to behave with seemly modesty, secluding themselves from the world of men.

One of the key questions A-level sociology students should ask themselves is the extent to which the above research is true today, or the extent to which things have changed!

Source: The Guardian, 2015

Other stuff

This is interesting: When will we stop blaming single black mother households.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com

Sources and Signposting

This material is mainly relevant to families and households module, usually taught in the first year of A-level sociology.

Evaluating the view that the nuclear family is in decline (part 3/3)

criticisms of the view that the nuclear family is in decline.

Some commentators argue that the extent of ever increasing family diversity has been exaggerated.

Robert Chester – The Neo-Conventional Family

Robert Chester (1985) recognises that there has been some increased family diversity in recent years. However, unlike the new right, he does not regard this as very significant, nor does he see it in a negative light. Chester argues the only important change is a move from the dominance of the traditional or conventional nuclear family, to what he describes as the ‘neo conventional’ family.

The Conventional Family – (declining) The Traditional nuclear family with ‘segregated conjugal roles’ – Male breadwinner and female homemaker.

The Neo-Conventional Family (the new norm) – a dual-earner family in which both spouses go out to work – similar to the symmetrical family of Young and Wilmott

Chester argues that most people are not choosing to live in alternatives to the nuclear family (such as lone parent families) on a long term basis and the nuclear family remains the ideal to which most people aspire. He argues that many people living alone have been or one day will be part of the nuclear family. Chester identifies a number of patterns that support his view:

  • Most children are still reared for most of their lives by their two natural parents
  • Most marriages still continue until death.
  • Cohabitation has increased, but for most couples it is a temporary phase before marrying.
  • Some ethnic groups are very likely to live in nuclear family households – Pakistani and Bangladeshi especially.
graph showing trends in married couple families
Married couple families are still the main type of family!

Pat Thane – A Historical Perspective on the ‘myth of the nuclear family’

This is a slightly different criticism to Chester – rather than criticising the idea that the nuclear family is in decline, Pat Thane challenges the idea that the nuclear family was ever the ‘norm’ in the first place. 

Family diversity was the norm up until world war two, then there was a brief period of thirty years from the 1940s -to the 1970s where nearly everyone got married and lived in nuclear families, and now we are returning to greater family diversity.

If we look at Marriage and Divorce – the decades after the end of the Second World War were an abnormal period, with much higher marriage rates than usual. Previously, in the 1930s for example, 15 percent of women and 9 percent of men did not marry. Similar numbers had long been normal.

If we look at lone parenthood –  In the early 18th century, 24 percent of marriages were ended by the death of a partner within ten years. As a result, a mixture of lone-parents, step-parents and step-children were commonplace in Britain.

Signposting and related posts

This material is relevant to the families and households module, usually taught in the first year of A-Level Sociology.

The preceding two posts to this one are:

Explaining the increase in family diversity part 1/3 – detailed class notes covering changing patterns of marriage and divorce, postmodernisation and economic factors.

Explaining the increase in family diversity part 2/3 – detailed class notes covering Feminism, social policies and late modernism

Sources

Pat Thane (2010) Happy Families? History and Family Policy.

Graph from the ONS families and households publication, 2022.

Explaining the increase in family and household diversity (part 2/3)

Feminism and changing gender roles, social policy changes and individualisation.

Three factors which can explain the increase in family and household diversity are:

  • The impact of Feminism and changing gender roles
  • Social policies
  • Increasing individualisation with the shift to Late Modern society.

This is the second part of explaining these trends, you might also like to read the first part which covers the decline in marriage, postmodernisation and economic factors.

Feminism: Changing Gender Roles

Liberal Feminists and Late Modernists would point to the increasing number of women going into work as one of the most important underlying structural shifts in Late Modern Society.

The proportion of women in employment has risen from 52% in the early 1970s to 72% today, with women having closed the gap on men significantly over the last 40 years.

Rather than needing to depend on men for their financial independence, women are now much more likely to focus on building a career before ‘settling down’ and starting a family. This goes some way to explaining the increase in single person households. The increased earning power of women also explains the growth of the number of never-married women who choose to have babies on their own. While this only accounts for a relatively small proportion of single parent households, such numbers are increasing.

Women’s increased financial independence has also led to relationships becoming more fragile and thus helps explain the increase in single parent households and single person households following divorce.

Evaluation: It is important not to overstate the extent of ‘women’s liberation’ – In 2022, women accounted for 84 per cent of lone parents with dependent children and men the remaining 16 per cent. Women are more likely to take the main caring responsibilities for any children when relationships break down, and therefore become lone parents.

Social Policies

There are two important policies which lie behind many of the above changes – the 1969 Divorce Act and the 1972 Equal Pay Act.

In addition to the above, The New Right believe that overly generous welfare benefits have created an underclass in the UK, and a subsection of this underclass consists of teenage girls who choose to get pregnant in order to get a council house and live a comfortable life on welfare.

Evaluations (of the New Right): In reality, only 2% of single parents are teenagers, which is hardly a significant proportion compared to the overall numbers.

Also, it is not so much the benefits system which is to blame – The money is simply not enough to encourage someone to have a child to get housed – If you are on benefits, whether you have a child or not, you get enough to exist rather than to have a comfortable life. Also, Universal Credit encourages people into work today and the proposed changes to provide childcare for children as young as 9 months should accelerate this trend.

Late Modernism

Late Modern Sociologists argue against Postmodernists. The increase in family diversity is not simply a matter of individuals having more freedom of choice and choosing to live alone or become a single parent, people are forced into these options because of structural changes making life more uncertain.

Firstly, most people don’t choose to live with their parents until they are 30, and most people don’t choose to live in a multigenerational household, they do so because they have to out of economic necessity.

Secondly, most people still want to get married and have children, but fewer people do so because of an increase in ‘risk consciousness’ – There is more uncertainty about what a ‘normal relationship’ is. Changing roles of men and women and changing expectations of relationships and family life result in young people being more reluctant to settle down in a classic long term relationship.

Thirdly, Ulrich Beck also talks about indivdualisation – a new social norm is that our individual desires are more important than social commitments, and this makes marriage less likely. People are more likely to go through a series of monogamous relationships (serial monogamy) – which means cohabiting for a few years and then back to living alone again and then so on.

Finally, Anthony Giddens argues that the typical type of relationship is the ‘pure relationship’… it exists solely to meet the partners’ needs and is likely to continue only so long as it succeeds. Couples stay together because of love, happiness of sexual attraction rather than for tradition or for the sake of the children. In short, we have increased expectations of marriage, and if it doesn’t work for us, then we get a divorce, increasing the amount of single person and single parent and then reconstituted families.

Other Factors Explaining the Increase in Family and Household Diversity

  • Fewer people today are living in couples; there has been a big rise in the number of people living alone, and in 2022 almost three in ten households contained only one person. Half of all one person households are people of pensionable age. Many women in their 70s and 80s live alone simply because there are too few partners available in their age group – women marry men who are older than them and men die younger.
  • The massive expansion in higher education has seen the number of undergraduate students triple since 1970, from 414,000 to well over a million in 2023: this means more young adults are not in work and economically dependent on their parents for longer.

Signposting and related posts

This material is relevant to the families and households module, and a good next post to read would be this:

Evaluating the idea that there is increasing family diversity (part 3 of 3)

Explaining the increase in family diversity (part 1/3 )

Covering marriage, divorce, postmodernisation and economic factors

Declining marriage and increasing divorce, the shift to a postmodern society and changing distributions of wealth can all help to explain why families and households in the UK have become more diverse in the 2000s.

Explaining the long term increase in family diversity

Changing patterns of marriage and divorce

The long term decline in marriage and increase in cohabitation and divorce can explain the increase in many types of family diversity.

The fact that people are getting married later explains why there are more Kidult and single person households: those who can afford it move into their own houses on their own, young people who can’t afford to move out stay living with their parents into their 30s, which has become increasingly common in recent years.

Any divorce which involves children is very likely to create one single parent household and one single person household for a period of time, and then many of these people will go on to form reconstituted families.

Relationship breakdown is more common amongst cohabiting rather than married families, and the cohabiting family household is the fastest growing family type in the UK.

Higher rates of divorce might also explain the increase in multigenerational households – as single mothers move back in with their parents, thus forming a multigenerational household.

Postmodernism and Postmodernisation

Postmodernists argue that the increase in the diversity of family household structures reflects the fact that we live in a diverse, tolerant society in which people are free to choose any type of family.

More people choose to stay single and hence there is an increase in Single Person Households Kidult households and because people are more tolerant it is easier than it was to be a single parent today because there is less stigma associated with being a single parent.

Another related factor here is that people are freer to choose non-nuclear families because of the decline of tradition and religion – there is much less social pressure to get married, have kids and stay married, so all other options become more viable.

Evaluation: Other perspectives argue that people do not simply choose to go into ‘alternative family structures’ – For example, Burghes and Browne’s 1995 research with 31 single parents found that not one of them had planned to become single parents, and all of them attributed their single parent status to the fact that their male partners had been either violent or too immature for parenthood

Economic Factors

The long term increase in wealth and overall rising standards of living explains the long-term increase in single person households. Generally wealthier countries have a higher proportion of single person households, and it is only wealthy countries where significant numbers of people can afford to live alone because it is expensive compared to two adults sharing the cost of a mortgage, bills, and food. It seems that when people can afford to do so, they are more likely to choose to live alone.

However, not everyone has benefitted from increasing wealth in the UK because at the same time as increasing wealth, the cost of living, and especially the cost of housing has increased. This explains the recent increase in multigenerational households and Kidult Households: at the lower end of the social class scale there are millions of people who cannot afford to buy or even rent their own houses, and so they stay living with their parents.

Read next:

Explaining the increase in family diversity part 2 of 3

Signposting

This material forms part of the families and households options within A-level sociology.

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Trends in Family and Household Diversity in the UK

The diversity of families and households in the UK has been slowly increasing since 2012. Types of families on the rise include cohabiting households, reconstituted families, single-parent families, and ‘kidult’ households where adults live with their parents. There’s been a slight decrease in traditional ‘cereal packet’ families. Multigenerational households, however, saw a minor decrease, making up only 1% of households in 2022. Single-person households and lone-parent families also increased marginally yet represent significant proportions of UK households.

Families and households in the UK have become more diverse since 2012, although the rate of change is relatively slow paced. The types of family and households which have increased since the 1950s include:

  • cohabiting rather than married households
  • reconstituted or step families
  • lone parent families
  • single person households
  • Kidult households, where adult children live with their parents.

The statistics below focus more on the trends in the last decade.

A slight decrease in ‘cereal packet’ families

  • The proportion of opposite-sex non-married cohabiting family households increased in the last decades, from 15.7% of all family households in the UK to 18.4% of all households in the UK.
  • There was a corresponding decrease in opposite-sex married family households: from 67% of all households to 65.2% of all households (2).
bar chart showing slight decrease in married family households
The proportion of ‘cereal packet families’ is slowly declining.
  • An important analysis point here is that the rate of decline is not particularly fast or significant.
  • Opposite-sex married and cohabitating families together make up 81% of all family households.
  • In other words around 80% of households with children are still heterosexual two parent households!

Trends in Reconstituted Families

  • In 2011 there were 544,000 step families with dependent children in England and Wales.
  • This means that 11% of couple families with dependent children were step families.
  • The Number of step families has increased since the 1950s.
  • However, the number of step families has declined recently dropping from 631,000 in 2001 to just 544,000 in 2011.
  • If there is only one biological parent in the step-family, that parent is the mother rather than the father in 90% of cases.
  • NB it is more difficult to get up to date stats on step-families! However according to this Guardian article from 2021 an estimated 1 in 3 families are blended families. NB this is probably including families with non dependent children.

Trends in Lone Parent Households

  • There were 2.9 million lone-parent families in the UK in 2022, which is 15% of all families.
  • This is down slightly from 2012 when there were 3.0 million lone-parent families, representing 17% of all families
  • 84% of lone-parent families were lone-mother families in 2022.
  • See source (2) below.

Separated Families

  • A separated family is defined as ‘one parent with care of a child 16 or under, or child aged under 20 if they are in full time Further Education, and with a non-resident parent’.
  • In 2020 there were an estimated 2.3 million separated families in Britain, with an estimated 3.6 million children.
  • 89% of parents with care in 2020 were female and under the age 50, and 86% of the non-resident parents male and 80% were under 50.
  • Methodological note: Lone parent and separated families are not quite. the same thing!

Trends in Single Person Households

  • 29.6% of all households in the UK were single person households in 2022.
  • This is equivalent to 8.3 million people or 13% of people who live in households.
  • This is up slightly from 2012 when 29% of all households were single person households.
  • According to Euromonitor International, the number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing, rising from about 153 million in 1996 to 277 million in 2011 – an increase of around 80% in 15 years.

Trends in ‘Kidult’ Households

The number of adults living with their parents rose by over 14% between 2011 and 2021 to 4.9 million adults.

Young adult males are more likely to live with their parents than young adult females.

In 2022 31% of males aged 20-34 lived with their parents compared to only 22% of females aged 20 to 34. (Source).

bar chart showing number of adults living with their parents UK

Overall, around 1/3 of adult men and 1/5th of adult women in the UK now live with their parents.

Trends in Multigenerational Households

  • Only 1% of households were multigenerational in the UK in 2022.
  • This is down slightly from 2012 when the figure was 1.1%.
Signposting and related posts

You can find a fuller range of stats in this post: Families in the UK: Interesting Statistics!

The next logical post after this one is:Explaining the increase in family diversity – part 1 of 3

For more posts on this topic area more generally please see my page on families and households, one of the options within the first year of A-level sociology (AAQA).

Sources

(1) Gov.UK (accessed June 2023) Separated Families Statistics April 2014 to March 2020.

(2) ONS: Families and Households in the UK 2022 (accessed June 2023)