Family Types in the UK

9 Key excerpts on "Family Types in the UK"

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  The Family

  • Liz Steel, Warren Kidd, Anne Brown(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The only section of the population where the three-generational family remains is the Bangladeshi community, which is the largest ethnic group in Swansea. It is worth noting here that arguments about family diversity may simply boil down, in the final analysis, to competing definitions of what we actually mean by ‘the family’. As Gittins (1993: 155) states: There is no clear, unambiguous definition of what a family is – indeed, it has been argued that the family is little more than an ideology that influences and informs the ways in which people interact and co-reside with one another. For example, sociologists have used a great range of terms to classify different types of family living. Below are 14 family types, although the list is by no means complete. local extended family dispersed extended family attenuated extended family nuclear family neo-conventional family reconstituted/blended family (see Chapter 2) lone/single-parent family 142 The Family ‘cornflake packet family’ (as in the ‘family ideology’) symmetrical family (as suggested by Young and Willmott) dual-worker family (where both partners contribute an income) cohabitation family mother households same-sex families singleton households These problems of classifying ‘the family’ add weight to the argument put forward by post-modernists and feminists that it is a contested category and that we should see the family in broad terms, using the plural term ‘families’ to describe the wide range of domestic arrangements in existence. Also, in the past sociologists did not take much account of the subjective views of family members about their living arrangements and tended to adopt a ‘from the outside looking in’ approach to research into families. Researchers have also adopted an unquestioning heteronormative stance in their attempts to understand and explain family life. Exercise 8.3 Look at the list of terms used by sociologists to describe different types of family K U I A structure.

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  An Introduction to Sociology

  • Ken Browne(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  Shared households and ‘families of choice’ For those who have finally left their family home, shared households are becoming much more common, particularly among young people. There may often be a greater loyalty among young people to their friends than to their family. Such shared households, where people choose to live and form relationships with a group of people with whom they have closer relations than with their families of birth, have therefore sometimes been called ‘families of choice’. Such households may involve shared domestic life (cooking, eating and socializing together), and shared leisure, sporting activities and holidays.

  These households and families are on the increase because of the high costs of buying or renting houses, the growing numbers of young people entering higher education, and the desire of young people to explore alternative living arrangements rather than simply settling down into a conventional couple household.

  Conclusion on family diversity

  This section has suggested that it is very misleading to assume that the cereal-packet image of the conventional family represents the reality of family life in Britain. Only a small minority of families are of this type. It is much more realistic to recognize that families and households are constantly changing. There is a wide diversity, or variety, of family types and household relationships in contemporary Britain. Trends suggest there will be growing numbers of extended, dual-earner, reconstituted, cohabiting, gay and lesbian, and lone-parent families, and more single-person households.

  Figure 3.6 summarizes the various forms of family and household types you might consider as making up the patterns of family diversity in contemporary Britain, some of which will be explored later in the chapter.

  SOCIAL CHANGE AND FAMILY TYPES, STRUCTURES AND RELATIONSHIPS

  Many of the forms of family diversity considered above have arisen from a series of social changes which have led to shifts in family structure and organization. Social changes have also affected relationships between family members. These changes will now be examined.

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  The Social Context of Ageing

  A Textbook of Gerontology

  • Christina Victor(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As with many such deceptively simple and uncomplex terms, defining precisely what does, and does not, constitute a family is a question which taxes policy makers, politicians and social commentators. Determining what type of living arrangements merit description and classification as a family is remarkably problematic. Are gay couples a family? Are children required to be present before the term 'family' can be applied to a living group? Clearly the way the 'family unit' is defined is, at least to some degree, an ideological construct. One way of defining what constitutes a family is by the characteristics of the individuals living within it. Some would argue that the term 'family' could be applied only to a heterosexual married couple with children —the stereotypical 'nuclear' family. Others would include single parents, cohabiting or gay couples within the term 'family'. Another way to define 'family' is by the number of generations included within it. A 'typical' nuclear family would constitute of two generations: parent(s) and children. The linking together of several nuclear groups by an extension of parent-child relationships, such as a married couple, their married offspring and grandchildren living together, produces the second major family type, the extended family. This is sometimes also known as a three-generational family, although examples of up to five generations living together have been enumerated. Whatever the definition used, we need to be aware of both the ideological underpinning of such definitions and their variability over time and across cultures. Like community care the term 'family' is one which remains constant but the precise meaning of which is fluid and is constantly subject to reinterpretation and definition.

  A further distinction may be made between the term 'family' and the wider notion of the kinship group. De facto the term 'family' has become virtually synonymous with the concept of the nuclear family. Consequently Finch (1989a) suggests that the term 'kinship group' should be used when considering the web of wider blood relationships which extends beyond the immediate household (but which also includes them) while the term 'family' is restricted to groups of co-resident or immediate blood relatives. Again such definitions may be expanded to include the relationships resulting from the 'blending' of groups via (re)marriage, divorce and cohabitation. Regardless of how the concept is defined, families and kinship groups have been seen as being especially important for older people. Shanas (1979) proposed the primacy of the family for older people as the focus of their social world and as the primary and favoured source of support, both emotional and instrumental. Proponents of disengagement theory proposed that family relationships were more important for older people because of their loss (or disengagement) from other social spheres such as employment. More recently, notions such as 'successful' ageing continue to propose the centrality of social relationships and participation in maintaining, and potentially enhancing, quality of life in old age. Furthermore early gerontological research accepted at face value the highly gendered nature of family relationships and posited that women experienced ageing less problematically than men because of their more central location within family relationships and because of the enduring nature of these relationships. Throughout their adult lifecourse women are often defined by their 'caring' relationships such as mother, wife and grandmother rather than by occupational status. Such simplistic notions have been replaced but they have enduring implications because assumptions such as these influenced the type of research questions that have been asked about families and family relationships. Much of our knowledge of the family life and social relationships of older people is derived from studies concerned with 'caring' and the provision of care within families. Thane (1998) also notes that early gerontological studies were highly uncritical of the data they collected about intergenerational relationships and missed many of the potentially existing tensions. Despite this, Thane (1998) concludes that the family remains central to the experience of old age and later life and indeed other phases of the lifecycle and that this represents a continuation of the broad pattern established across a long historical perspective (see also Botelho and Thane, 2001).

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  Supporting Families

  • Terence O'Sullivan(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  With the exception of some politicians and religious leaders, those inside and outside sociology have largely discredited and abandoned the idea of ‘the family’. Sociologists think the term the family evokes an ‘ideological stereo-type of a heterosexual, two-parent nuclear family with a breadwinning hus-band and father, and a home-making wife and mother’ (Edwards and Gillies, 2012 : 64). They fear the concept is in danger of setting a fixed and static normative standard as something for people to live up to and be judged by. Family sociologists have endeavoured to resolve these issues surround-ing the subject matter of their discipline in a number of ways. One UNDERSTANDING FAMILIES 27 relatively straightforward way is instead of ‘the family’, it is now common to refer to ‘families’, which is thought to better reflect the different and changing ways of being a family. Now the word family is used much less on its own but rather as an adjective as in ‘family relationships’, ‘family activities’, ‘family outing’, ‘family conflict’ or ‘family violence’. Another way sociologists have tried to get away from fixed notions of what families are is to focus on ‘family practices’, and the different ways of ‘doing fam-ily’ and ‘displaying family’. The term family practices is a relatively new term that focuses on what family members actually do in their family roles both within the family home and outside (Saltiel, 2013 ). Morgan ( 1996 ) was one of the first to use the term, among other things, to resolve some of the issues around the rigid notion of ‘the family’. The term allows differences in the ways ‘family’ is done and different ways of doing ‘family’. Families are what families ‘do’, rather than relying on institutional or membership defini-tions of family. Family practices are those practices that families construct as being in some way about ‘family’.

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  Sociology

  The Essentials

  • Margaret L. Andersen; Howard F. Taylor, Margaret Andersen, Howard Taylor(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Census Bureau. 2013. The 2012 Statistical Abstract . Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce. www.census.gov Family diversity is the norm in American society, with no one type of family shaping people’s experience. BananaStock/Jupiter Images/Alamy LWA/Dann Tardif/Blend Images/Getty Images Many view the changes taking place in fami-lies as positive. Women have new options and greater independence. Fathers are discovering that there can be great pleasure in domestic and child-care responsibilities. Change, however, also brings difficulties: balancing the demands of family and employment, coping with the interpersonal conflicts caused by changing expectations, and striving to make ends meet in families without sufficient financial resources. These changes bring new questions to the sociological study of families. Family affairs are believed to be private, but as an institution, the family is very much part of the public agenda. Many people believe that “fam-ily breakdown” causes society’s greatest prob-lems—thus the intense national discussion around so-called family values. Public policies shape family life directly and indirectly, and family life is now being openly negotiated in political arenas, corpo-rate boardrooms, and courtrooms, as well as in the bedrooms, kitchens, and “family” rooms of indi-vidual households. 308 CHAPTER 13 Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. FAMILIES AND RELIGION 309 Defining the Family The family is a social institution , that is, an established social system that emerges, changes, and persists over time.

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  Inter-generational Financial Giving and Inequality

  Give and Take in 21st Century Families

  • Karen Rowlingson, Ricky Joseph, Louise Overton(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  These changes in family forms are certainly linked to a reduction in the ‘traditional nuclear family’ where the couple are married and live only with their own biological children rather than any step-children. If this is what is meant by the ‘decline of the family’, then there is cer- tainly evidence for this. But this kind of family is very particular to the mid-twentieth century, and so its decline does not necessarily indicate a decline in ‘the family’ more generally. What we have seen, instead, is greater diversity and complexity in family structures. But is this focus on family structure enough to understand the nature of ‘the family’? What about relationships between family members? Family structures are, of course, likely to affect relationships, and we might assume that non-resident parents and step-parents have rather different (and perhaps weaker) relationships with their (step-)children compared with ‘intact’ nuclear families. Research has suggested, however, that step-families face many similar issues to other families even if they do also confront distinct dilemmas (Allan et al. 2013). This research has also pointed to the diversity of step-families and the way that relation- ships change over time. Much of the research has focused on step-families with dependent children rather than step-families with adult children where parents may be making decisions about how they support bio- logical (adult) children compared with step-children, and similarly, how step-children make decisions about supporting biological parents com- pared with step-parents. How families manage and negotiate such issues warrants further attention. When discussing ‘the family’, people often have in their mind the tra- ditional nuclear family, but the ‘extended’ family is also an important component of family life, and analysis of demographic data also shows that the structure of extended families is changing.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Sociology

  • Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan S Turner, Craig Calhoun, Chris Rojek, Bryan S Turner(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  INTRODUCTION: ISSUES IN THE CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY OF THE FAMILY The family, which is employed in this chapter as an umbrella term to cover the more general discussion of familial institutions, kinship relations, household structures, intimate cou-ples and friendship networks, is a fundamental institution of all human societies. For reasons that are to be explored, the family is difficult to define. In the twentieth century, there have been profound changes in marriage, family structures, divorce, love and intimacy. It is dif-ficult to use the word ‘family’ to cover such a diverse collection of social relationships and institutions. There is the further complication that, through much of the previous century, the sociology of the family and marriage was not a dominant or influential topic of socio-logical inquiry. In American sociology, the family was, of course, a major aspect of the sociological research of Talcott Parsons, W.E. DuBois, Robert F. Bales, Kingsley Davis and William J. Goode (Turner, 1998). In particular, Goode’s World Revolutions and Family Patterns (1970) was an outstanding contribution to sociology as a science of institutions, but few other publications on the family achieved a similar status. In British sociology, there were also a number of classical contributions: Peter Willmott and Michael Young (1957) Family and Kinship in East London , Elizabeth Bott (1957) Family and Social Network and Peter Laslett (1972) Household and Family Life in Past Time. In his City Life in Japan , Ron Dore (1958) made an important contribution to the comparative sociology of the family. Despite this legacy of research and analysis, it is not clear that the sociology of the family can sur-vive as a specific area of inquiry in sociology. There are four reasons for this analytical cri-sis in the study of the family.

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  Early Years Policy and Practice

  A Critical Alliance

  • Pat Tomlinson, Chelle Davison, Susan Waltham, Chelle Davison, Susan Waltham(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Critical Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Family structures, status and public policy • 43 Today’s families are more complex than the tables suggest. For example, two-parent house- holds may be the result of two families coming together after divorce or separation and its members may be step-parents and children. Two- or one-parent families may have fostered or adopted children as well as contain birth children. Many more families with children do not undertake marriage and the number of children living in cohabiting households doubled in the 16 years between 1996 and 2012. Family is fluid in the twenty-first century. It can change many times over its lifetime, and not just in the ways routinely experienced, such as from non-dependent to dependent children and back again. Couples separate and divorce, Table 2.1 Number of families with dependent children, UK, 1996 and 2012 Thousands Family type 1996 2012 With dependent children Without dependent children 1 Total families With dependent children Without dependent children 1 Total families Married couple family 5,223 7,418 12,641 4,610 7,575 12,185 Civil partner couple family 2 N/A N/A N/A 6 60 66 Opposite sex cohabiting couple family 539 920 1,459 1,131 1,761 2,893 Same-sex cohabiting couple family .. 15 16 6 64 69 Lone parent family 1,631 814 2,445 1,986 989 2,975 All families 7,393 9,167 16,560 7,739 10,449 18,188 1 Families without dependent children have only non-dependent children or no children in the household. 2 Civil partnerships were introduced in the UK in December 2005. .. indicates that estimates are not sufficiently reliable to be published. Totals may not sum due to rounding. Source: Labour Force Survey, Office for National Statistics. 44 • Early Years Policy and Practice moving from joint to single parenthood and step families. Gay and lesbian couples create families with dependent children through surrogacy and adoption and looked-after children become members of more than one family for short or long periods of their lives.

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  Working and Caring over the Twentieth Century

  Change and Continuity in Four-Generation Families

  • J. Brannen, P. Moss, A. Mooney(Authors)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Some sociologists have argued that families have become less solidaristic (Parsons, 1943), yet many empirical studies have shown the extended family to be alive and well, albeit in a modified 178 Working and Caring over the Twentieth Century form (see Morgan, 1975). In recent years, the debate has taken a new turn. Attention has changed to the conditions under which family members decide to provide support to one another. This has arisen out of a reconceptualisation of family responsibilities as subject to processes of negotiation rather than prescribed obligations (Finch, 1989) (see Chapter 4). Just as generalisations about how ‘the nuclear family’ operates failed to enlighten and have led to a more differentiated approach which takes account of gender, generation and other perspectives, so too we need to exercise restraint in studying multi-generation families and apply the process of differentiation to them. It has been suggested that multi-generation families will constitute a valuable new resource for the support of individuals in the 21st century, particularly in the context of the weakening of household ties following divorce (Bengtson, 2001). However, while multi-generational families may offer personnel resources, namely several generations of kin, these may not be readily available. Moreover the ways in which family relations work vary: for family relations, including multi-generation families, are shaped by material and cultural resources, by beliefs and practices, by commitment to family obligation and by wealth, assets and life chances. Resources are utilised in different ways, at different times; they are required in differing amounts and for different needs and by and for different family members. Within families, there is a creative tension between change and con- tinuity, and between processes of reproduction and innovation.

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