The government regards such poorer families as a “burden to the state” and so forces its own citizens who fall in love with non-EU citizens to shove off and set up their family life elsewhere.
According to research conducted by Oxford University, nearly 40% of the working UK population wouldn’t be eligible to live here with their non-EU partner – that breaks down to 27% of men and 55% of women. The majority of young people don’t earn enough either. And the statistics are worse if you have a child. So, if you’re a young women and you fall for a handsome stranger from a distant land, it is highly unlikely the Home Office will allow you to remain in this country if you want to live together.
This is a nice link to the families and households topic, showing how immigration and cross-cultural marriage is only for the rich. The poor, it seems, are doomed to marry locally. It’s also a nice tie-in with the social class and family sub-topic.
On the surface this seems to be strong supporting evidence for Sue Palmer’s theory of toxic childhood – the idea that a combination of factors associated with (post) modern life are harming children. The article lists three factors which are seen being responsible for increasing sleep deprivation among children
Blue light emitted by smartphones and tablets reduces the production of melatonin, the ‘ sleepy hormone’ – NB I can just imagine a vicious cycle at work here – can’t sleep, get on your phone – which makes it less likely that you’ll get to sleep!
Households where both parents work can be busier in the evenings, pushing bedtimes later – here’s a nice link to the concept of paranoid parenting – because children are the most precious things in parents lives, they have to see them before they go to bed, which does them unintentional harm.
Fizzy drinks high in sugar and caffeine have also made it harder for children to switch off at night – which can also compound the negative effects of sleep deprivation.
Some of the possible harmful effects of sleep deprivation are as follows:
Decreased concentration at school, leading to lower educational achievement
While this appears to be straight-up supporting evidence for Toxic Childhood, you need to be careful how the concepts are operationalised (see * below), also the fact that children are more likely to be taken to hospital doesn’t necessarily mean there is an increase in sleep deprivation, it might mean that paranoid parents are just more sensitive to the issue today, and/ or medical practitioners are happier to diagnose sleep, so this could all be a social construction….
*Actually TBH that statement’s a headline grabber – according to the article, adults and children aged 0-55 (combined) are more likely to be given prescriptions for sleep deprivation, but children are ten times more likely to have hospital appointments for the condition.
Sue Palmer’s (2006) book Toxic Childhood argued that children were being harmed by a combination of technological and social changes such as increasingly screen based lifestyles, a hyper-competitive education system, the decline of outdoor play and the commercialisation of childhood.
Palmer argued that changes to childhood resulted in harms such as higher obesity levels, reduced concentration spans, and increasing mental health problems.
This recent Guardian article (December 2016) demonstrates the continued relevance of this book and the concept of Toxic Childhood –
A group of 40 leading authors, educationalists and child-development experts is calling on the government to introduce national guidelines on the use of screens, amid concern about the impact on children’s physical and mental health. Among them are the author Philip Pullman, and the former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.
Pullman – I guess he’d rather children read his books than watched the movie versions!
The letter calls for the development of kindergarten-style education for three- to seven-year-olds, with emphasis on social and emotional development and outdoor play; and says guidelines on screen-based technology for children up to 12 should be drawn up by recognised authorities on child health and development.
It is 10 years since the group sent its first letter to the media (inspired by Palmer’s book), expressing concern about the way it believes children’s health and well-being. Since then, they say, obesity and mental health problems among young people approaching crisis levels.
Sue Palmer, the author of Toxic Childhood, is among the letter’s signatories, she argues that “Without concerted action, our children’s physical and mental health will continue to deteriorate, with long-term results for UK society that are frankly unthinkable.”
Palmer says there are just two essential ingredients if children are to survive and thrive whatever the future brings: love and play.
Sue Palmer – Author of Toxic Childhood – ‘all children need is love and play’
However, not everyone subscribes to the doom-laden view of modern childhood and the “toxic” environment in which children are growing up. Recent studies have suggested that screen-based technology can encourage reading in boys from low-income families and that there may be a positive link between computer games and academic performance.
Then again, Whitney Houston reminds us that ‘children are the Future’, which pretty much proves Palmer right….
Sue Palmer.co.uk – used to be a great site on Toxic Childhood, but it’s currently under reconstruction (Dec 2016) – hopefully it’ll be just as straightforward when it resurfaces!
Charles Murray’s Underclass Theory – the idea that there is a ‘hardcore’ of a few hundred thousand families and individuals who are welfare-dependent and responsible a disproportionate amount of crime in society has a long history:
In Victorian times there was a concern about a ‘social residuum’, and shortly afterwards it was ‘unemployables’ who were the target of social reformers and politicians.
The Eugenics Society was influential in promoting the ‘social problem group’ in the 1930s and the idea of ‘problem families’ in the years following the Second World War.
In the 1960s, Oscar Lewis, the cultural anthropologist, popularised the heavily racialised ‘culture of poverty’ theory in the USA.
Sir Keith Joseph, former Conservative MP, raised the issue of a ‘cycle of deprivation’ in the 1970s.
In the 1980s and 1990s, American academic Charles Murray suggested that a ‘plague’ had crossed the Atlantic in the form of an ‘underclass’.
New Labour expressed concern about 2.5% of people who were ‘socially excluded’ in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The development of the Respect agenda in the 2000s raised the issue of ‘problem families’ once again.
However, these ideas have flourished, despite no robust evidence which supports the idea of an ‘underclass’, whatever it is called. Professor David Gordon, who led the recent Poverty and Social Exclusion in the United Kingdom study, the largest ever research project of its kind, has offered the following view of such concepts:
These ideas are unsupported by any substantial body of evidence. Despite almost 150 years of scientific investigation, often by extremely partisan investigators, not a single study has ever found any large group of people/households with any behaviours that could be ascribed to a culture or genetics of poverty … any policy based on the idea that there are a group of ‘Problem Families’ who ‘transmit’ their ‘poverty/deprivation’ to their children will inevitably fail, as this idea is a prejudice, unsupported by scientific evidence. (Gordon, 2011)
A couple of not very pleasant news-items which relate to the problems of the ‘ageing population’:
The U.K. is on the brink of a social care crisis according to The Independent (November 2016) – with local authorities saying they could face a £2.6 billion funding gap by 2020.
According to The Guardian (December 2016), this is because funding has been slashed by 10%; there has been a 25% reduction in the number of people receiving help, and a third of all care homes face bankruptcy after cuts in the fees paid by local authorities.
All of this of course means that elderly people receive a lower quality of care, either in care-homes, or through reduced numbers of home-visits, but Age UK (Sept 2015) further calculates that up to a million people who have difficulties with basic activities such as getting dressed get no help at all.
All of this suggests that the problems of the ageing population are very much real, and given the present government’s neoliberal ideology, seem likely to get worse.
Tinder and other dating apps certainly seem to be changing the way we meet people in the postmodern age, but does the normalisation of these technologies represent a significant change in the nature of intimate relationships more generally?
Some basic stats on Tinder certainly suggest its use is very widespread, and growing….
Tinder boasts 9.6 million daily active users
20% of Tinder users say they’re looking for a hookup, 27% said they’re looking for a significant other, and 53% said they are looking to find friends.
Only 13% of Tinder users reported relationships lasting beyond the one month mark.
In 2016 Tinder expects to double the number of subscribers it has.
On average Tinder Users spend 35 minutes a day on the app and swipe (left or right) 140 times.
The Washington Post reported one man’s success rate on Tinder. He swiped right 203,000 times and got 150 first dates. That is a success rate of 0.6%.
Tinder is valued at $1.2 billion according to Deutsche Bank.
Qualitative research suggests that there are a diverse number of ways in which people use these dating apps – somewhat obviously the major reason people use them is to to meet people, with the possibility of a hook up, but within this there is a huge variety of experiences – from people who use them several hours a day without a single catch, to those who use them successfully to enrich their sex-lives, or materially, by only dating rich guys who buy them things.
Two interesting documentaries to check out which explore dating apps (albeit in a non-representative way) are the BBC’s ‘addicted to dating apps‘ (only available until November 2016) and Vice’s ‘Mobile Love Industry’
The relationship between Postmodernity, dating apps and changing relationships
The types of relationship facilitated by dating apps certainly illustrate many aspects of life in a postmodern society – such as individuals having more choice, and relationships being shorter lived, and thus more unstable and more insecure; while the fact that women are just as likely to use them as men demonstrates increasing gender equality and breaking down of traditional gender roles.
To what extent are dating apps changing intimate relationships?
The question of whether the normalisation of these apps affects relationships and family life more generally remains to be seen – as it stands, it seems that it’s mainly younger people who use these apps before they ‘settle down’, and thus most people see them as something to use in your 20s, before looking for a serious long term partner later on in life.
However, it could be that now these apps offer the possibility of a life of continuous hook-ups, that fewer people see the need to settle down with a life-long partner, but that remains to be seen.
A further question we could ask is whether or not Marxist or Feminist analysis of these dating apps might be applied to better understand their impacts? To what extent are these apps really about promoting consumption, for example, or to what extent might they perpetuate or challenge traditional gender norms?
The New Right believe that the traditional nuclear family is best and are critical of other ‘non-standard’ family types such as lone parent and reconstituted families.
CIVITAS is one of the best examples of an organisation which represents the New Right View of the Family, and the decline of the nuclear family and increase the the number of single parent families is one of the social trends it focuses on.
In one of it’s documents, entitled ‘Experiments in Fatherless Living‘ CIVITAS focuses on the consequences of rising number of single parent families for both children and society. Just some of the problems they single out include the fact that:
Problems with Lone mothers
Are poorer – one mothers are twice as likely as two-parent families to live in poverty at any one time (69% of lone mothers are in the bottom 40% of household income versus 34% of couples with children).
Are more likely to have mental health problems – At the age of 33, divorced and never-married
were 2.5 times more likely than married mothers to experience high levels of psychological distress.
may have more problems interacting with their children. Young people in lone-parent families were 30% more likely than those in two-parent families to report that their parents rarely or never knewwhere they were
Children from Lone Parent families
Among children aged five to fifteen years in Great Britain, those from lone-parent families were twice as likely to have a mental health problem as those from intact two-parent families (16% versus 8%).
Have more trouble in school – After controlling for other demographic factors, children from lone-parent households were 3.3 times more likely to report problems with their academic work, and 50% more likely to report difficulties with teachers
Analysis of 35 cases of fatal abuse which were the subject of public inquiries between 1968 and 1987 showed a risk for children living with their mother and an unrelated man which was over 70 times higher than it would have been for a child with two married biological parents.
Are more likely to run away from home – children from lone-parent families are twice as likely to run away from home as those from two-birth-parent families (14% compared to 7%).
Criticisms of the New Right view of single parents
This text, Charles Murray and The Underclass (especially from page 62 – ‘The Focus on Single Mothers’) provides some useful criticisms of the above statistics – As follows:
‘Murray’s thesis may have been exaggerated for effect, so as to get his main point over, but making scapegoats of single mothers for society’s ills does not help us to approach the serious issues raised by the growing proportion of one-parent families.
This growth has to be seen in the context of changes in social attitudes across the wider society. We live in an age when over 90 per cent of those aged between 18 and 34 do not consider pre-marital sex to be particularly wrong, and when divorce and cohabitation are increasing and are being seen as acceptable at all levels of society.
We may want to seek ways to counter these developments at an individual level, but is not easy to see how we can turn back the clock to a less permissive age—short of a massive religious revival or draconian laws which attempt to control private behaviour between adults.’
Related Links
NB – It’s not just single parents that CIVITAS have got it in for – in their ‘The facts behind cohabitation Fact Sheet‘ they provide more misleading statistics on how marriage is better than cohabitation
The overview below is taken directly from the AQA’s scheme of work and broken down further into more sub-topics to make it more teachable/ learnable. Within each ‘module’ there are about 7 sub-topics, and any of which could (although not necessarily) form the basis of one essay question, so you need to be able to write on each sub-topic for a solid 30 minutes.
This will relevant to most teachers and students teaching the AQA syllabus, unless you do an alternative option to families and households (which I don’t cover!)
My advice is that students generally need at least one side of revision notes for each of the subtopics below, with three-five points/ explanations/ examples and with evaluations (e.g. one side for Functionalism, another for Marxism etc…)
Education
Perspectives on Education
Functionalism
Marxism
Neoliberalism and The New Right
New Labour (a response to the New Right)
Postmodernism
In school process and education
Teacher Labelling and the Self Fulfilling Prophecy
School organisation (banding and streaming)
School Type, School Ethos and the Hidden Curriculum
School Subcultures
Pupil Identities and the Education System
Education Policies
The strengths and limitations of successive government education polices:
1944 – The Tripartite System – brief
1965 – Comprehensivisation – brief
1988 – The 1988 Education Reform Act
1997 – New Labour’s Education Policies
2010 – The Coalition and the New New Right’s Education Policies
Evaluating Education Policies
To what extent have policies raised standards in education?
To what extent have policies improved equality of opportunity?
Perspectives on selection as an educational policy
Perspectives on the increased privatisation of education
How is globalisation affecting educational and educational policy?
Social Class and Education
Material Deprivation
Cultural Deprivation
Cultural Capital Theory
In-School Factors
The strengths and limitations of policies designed to tackle working class underachievement
Gender and Education
Out of school factors which explain why girls do better than boys in education
In-School factors which explain why girls do better than boys in education
Explanations for gender and subject choice
Feminist Perspectives on the role of education in society
The strengths and limitations of policies designed to tackle gender differences in educational achievement
Ethnicity and Education
Cultural factors which might explain ethnic differences in educational achievement
In-School Factors which might explain ethnic differences in educational achievement
The strengths and limitations of policies designed to tackle ethnic differences in educational achievement
Methods in Context
Here you need to be able to assess the strengths and limitations of using any method to research any aspect of education.
The different methods you need to be able to consider include –
1. Secondary Documents
2. Official statistics
3. Field Experiments
4. Lab experiments
5. Questionnaires
6. Unstructured Interviews
7. Overt Participant Observation
8. Covert Participant Observation
9. Non Participant Observation
The different aspects of education you might consider are
•Researching how the values, attitudes, and aspirations of parents contribute to the achievement of certain groups of children
• Why boys are more likely to be excluded than girls
• Why white working class boys underachieve
• Exploring whether teachers have ‘ideal pupils’ – whether they label certain groups of pupils favourably!
• Assessing the relative importance of cultural deprivation versus material deprivation in explaining underachievement
• Assessing the success of policies aimed to improve achievement such as ‘employing more black teachers’
Families and Households
Perspectives on Families
1.1 Functionalism
1.2 Marxism
1.3 Feminisms
1.4 The New Right
1.5 Postmodernism and Late Modernism
1.6 The Personal Life Perspective
Marriage and Divorce
2.1: Explaining the trends in marriage
2.2: Explaining the trends in divorce
2.3: Perspectives on the consequences of declining marriage and increasing divorce
2.4: Examining how marriage, divorce and cohabitation vary by social class, ethnicity, sexuality and across generations.
3. Family Diversity
3.1 – The underlying causes of the long term increase In Reconstituted families, Single parent families, Multi-generational households, Single person households and ‘Kidult’ households.
3.2 Perspectives on the social significance of the increase of all of the above (covered in 3.1).
3.3 – The extent to which family life varies by ethnicity, social class and sexuality.
4. Gender Roles, Domestic Labour and Power Relationships
4.1. To what extent are gender roles characterised by equality?
4.2. To what extent is the Domestic Division of Labour characterised by equality?
4.3. Issues of Power and Control in Relationships
4.4. To what extent has women going into paid work resulted in greater equality within relationships?
5. Childhood
5.1 – To what extent is ‘childhood socially constructed’
5.2 – The March of Progress view of childhood (and parenting) – The Child Centred Family and Society?
5.3 – Toxic Childhood and Paranoid Parenting – Criticisms of ‘The March of Progress View’
5.4 – Is Childhood Disappearing?
5.5 – Reasons for changes to childhood and parenting practices
Topic 6 – Social Policy
6.1 You need to be able to assess the effects of a range of policies using at least three key perspectives
• The New Right
• New Labour
• Feminism (Liberal and Radical)
6.2 You need notes on how the following policies affect men and women and children within the family
• Changes to the Divorce law
• Tax breaks for married couples
• Maternity and paternity pay
• Civil Partnerships
• Sure Start – early years child care
Topic 7: Demography
7.1: Reasons for changes to the Birth Rate
7.2: Reasons for changes to the Death Rate
7.3: The consequences of an Ageing Population
7.4: The reasons for and consequences of changes to patterns of Migration
Research Methods
The Factors Affecting Choice of Research Method – Theoretical, Ethical and Practical Factors.Introduction to Research Methods – Basic types of method and key terms
Secondary Quantitative Data – Official Statistics
Secondary Qualitative Data – Public and Private Documents
Experiments – Field and Laboratory
Interviews – Structured, Unstructured and Semi-Structured
Observational Methods – Cover and Overt Participant and Non-Participant Observation
Other methods – e.g. Longitudinal Studies
Stages of the Research Process
Crucial to the above is your mastery of the TPEN structure
Practical factors –Time, Money, funding, opportunities for research including ease of access to respondents, and the personal skills and characteristics of the researcher.
Ethical factors – Thinking about how the research impacts on those involved with the research process: Informed consent, ensure confidentiality, be legal and ensure that respondents and those related to them are not subjected to harm. All this needs to be weighed up with the benefits of the research.
The Nature of the Topic studied. Some topics lend themselves to certain methods and preclude others!
Functionalist sociologists tended to define the family as consisting of two parents in a committed relationship living together with their children. Postmodern and other sociologists have much broader definitions.
Sociologists do not agree on one standard definition of ‘the family’.
Functionalist sociologists traditionally used narrow definitions of the family, in which the family unit had to consist of a “man and a woman in a committed sexual relationship living together with their children“.
More contemporary Postmodern sociologists prefer much broader definitions of the family which extend the concept to include anyone an individual thinks of as being ‘part of the family’, such as friends or even pets.
From a postmodern perspective there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ definition of the family, but you do need to know how different sociologists define the family to really understand their perspective on the family, and to be able to evaluate the different perspectives.
The rest of this introductory post explores how the concept of ‘the family’ has been used by different sociologists, and aims to get you thinking about what the family is.
Functionalist Sociologist George Peter Murdock used the following definition of the family as a starting point in his classic cross national study of families in more than 250 societies.
‘A social group characterised by common residence, economic cooperation and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults’ (Murdock, 1949).
Today, many Sociologists criticise the classic functionalist definition of the family as being too narrow because (both today and historically) too many groups of people who regard themselves as a family would not be included in this definition, such as reconstituted or step-families and same sex families.
A broader definition is provided by The Oxford English Dictionary which defines ‘the family’ as ‘a group consisting of one or two parents and their children’. (1)
The above definition includes step-families, single parent families and doesn’t even mention sex or sexual orientation of the parents, so includes same-sex families too.
Families and Households
We often think of families as living in one household, however the Oxford definition above says nothing at all about households, so in the above definition it’s feasible that a family spans multiple households, which, from the perspective of families themselves is quite normal.
For example, a couple in their 70s with one adult daughter who have moved out and is living on her own would probably all regard themselves as one family.
Similarly with families and households across the generations: grandparents are usually regarded as part of the broader or extended family, for example, and if grandparents and then parents each have two children, from the perspective of the older generation their family will extend across several households.
The problem with accepting these subjective definitions is that we quickly lose track of how many families there are, especially when we factor in divorce and step-families, the concept of family starts to become very complex, hence why for statistical purposes it might be easier to define the family at a household level, which is what the ONS does in its annual research.
The Office for National Statistics (2) defines a family as:
“A married, civil-partnered or cohabiting couple with or without children, or a lone parent with at least one child, who lives at the same address; children may be dependent or non-dependent.”
One advantage of the above is that we have an objective definition of what counts as a family and so we we can compare the number of family-households over time, which is one of the aims of the ONS.
However a weakness is that it limits the definition of the family so that it is something different to subject definitions. For example, in the above definition the couple in their 70s with one childless daughter who has moved out to live alone isn’t a family.
Households are broader than families
A household is simply a group of people (or single person) who share a residence in common and share such things as meals, bills, facilities or chores, or one person living alone.
The main household types in the UK include:
family households (as defined above)
couple households
single person households
mutli-family households
Shared households (such as student households).
Different types of family
One way around the problem of defining a family is to distinguish carefully between different ‘family arrangements’ when we discuss them. It is also generally good practice to define your concepts tightly in the early stages of conducting research, or when writing essays on the concept.
There is nothing wrong with limiting your research or analysis to just one specific type of family, you just need to make sure you are clear about limiting your discussion. (It’s often necessary to focus more tightly just for the sake of time!)
Some of the most common family types in modern Britain include.
The Nuclear Family – two parents with biological children living in one household.
The reconstituted family – two partners living in one household sharing parental duties for one or more children, but only one of them is the biological parent.
The single parent family – one adult with one or more children living in one household
The extended family – where relatives such as uncles/ aunts or grandparents reside permanently in the same household as those making up the nuclear family.
Postmodern definitions of the family
Because of the diversity within family life in contemporary Britain, post-modern thinkers suggest that it is better to use a broader definition of ‘thefamily’, which includes a very broad range of family types – one suggested definition of the family is ‘a group of people who are related by either blood or marriage/ similar form of committed relationship’.
The Personal Life Perspective‘s definition of the family is inspired by postmodernism, arguing that we should accept the unique definition of the family as each individual sees it which may mean we have different definitions of what the family is even within the same family household.
For example a step-father may view his family as the current family he is living with and his ex-wife’s family, but his step-daughter who is living with him may not regard his ‘other family’ as part of her family, and she may regard her pony as part of her family, but her dad may not.
From the Personal Life Perspective we will end up including friends, pets and dead relatives as part of some people’s families.
The strength of the above is that we get a full picture of the complexity of people’s understandings of the family, but it doesn’t leave us much possibility of doing anything other than describe this complexity.
Case study: the Rainbow Family of Light
Have a look at the case study below, do you think this group of people is a ‘family’?
The Rainbow Family was created out of the Vortex gathering in Oregon from August 28 to September 3, 1970. Inspired in large part by the first Woodstock Festival.
Those who attend Rainbow Gatherings usually share an interest in intentional communities, ecology and new age spirituality. Attendees refer to one another as “brother”, “sister”, or the gender neutral term, “sibling.” Attendance is open to all interested parties and decisions are reached through group meetings leading to some form of group consensus.
The organisation is a loose, international affiliation of individuals who have a stated goal of trying to achieve peace and love on earth. There are no official leaders or structure, no official spokespersons, and no formalised membership. Strictly speaking, the only goals are set by each individual, as no individual can claim to represent all Rainbows in word or deed.
Rainbow Family video
Apparently all is not well with the Rainbow family at the moment:
Question: is the family rainbow of light a family?
Think carefully about this – if you do then it means that practically any group of friends with close emotional ties should be called a family, but is this really what me mean when we use the term ‘family’? Or should sociologists limit themselves to studying families in the more traditional sense of the word?
If you want to explain why you voted in more depth, drop in a comment at the end!
Defining the family… why it matters…
You can only really get your head around perspectives on the family if you understand how different perspectives define the family differently!
Ultimately, how you define the family will determine how you conclude any essay within the families and households module!
