Family Dynamics From the Functionalist Conflict and Symbolic Interactionist Perspectives

15.two Sociological Perspectives on the Family unit

Learning Objective

1. Summarize understandings of the family every bit presented by functional, conflict, and social interactionist theories.

Sociological views on today's families more often than not fall into the functional, conflict, and social interactionist approaches introduced before in this book. Let'south review these views, which are summarized in Table fifteen.one "Theory Snapshot".

Table 15.1 Theory Snapshot

Theoretical perspective	Major assumptions
Functionalism	The family performs several essential functions for club. It socializes children, it provides emotional and practical support for its members, it helps regulate sex and sexual reproduction, and it provides its members with a social identity. In addition, sudden or far-reaching changes in the family's structure or processes threaten its stability and weaken gild.
Conflict	The family contributes to social inequality by reinforcing economic inequality and past reinforcing patriarchy. The family tin can also be a source of disharmonize, including physical violence and emotional cruelty, for its own members.
Symbolic interactionism	The interaction of family members and intimate couples involves shared understandings of their situations. Wives and husbands have different styles of communication, and social class affects the expectations that spouses accept of their marriages and of each other. Romantic dearest is the common basis for American marriages and dating relationships, only it is much less common in several other gimmicky nations.

Social Functions of the Family unit

Recall that the functional perspective emphasizes that social institutions perform several important functions to help preserve social stability and otherwise keep a gild working. A functional understanding of the family thus stresses the ways in which the family unit as a social establishment helps make order possible. Every bit such, the family unit performs several of import functions.

First, the family is the primary unit for socializing children. As previous capacity indicated, no society is possible without adequate socialization of its young. In most societies, the family is the major unit in which socialization happens. Parents, siblings, and, if the family is extended rather than nuclear, other relatives all help socialize children from the time they are born.

One of the most important functions of the family is the socialization of children. In most societies the family unit is the major unit through which socialization occurs.

2nd, the family is ideally a major source of practical and emotional back up for its members. Information technology provides them nutrient, clothing, shelter, and other essentials, and it also provides them beloved, comfort, help in times of emotional distress, and other types of intangible support that nosotros all need.

3rd, the family helps regulate sexual activity and sexual reproduction. All societies have norms governing with whom and how ofttimes a person should have sex activity. The family unit is the major unit for teaching these norms and the major unit through which sexual reproduction occurs. One reason for this is to ensure that infants have acceptable emotional and practical care when they are born. The incest taboo that well-nigh societies accept, which prohibits sex between certain relatives, helps minimize conflict inside the family if sex occurred among its members and to establish social ties among different families and thus among society as a whole.

Quaternary, the family provides its members with a social identity. Children are born into their parents' social course, race and ethnicity, organized religion, and then forth. As we have seen in earlier chapters, social identity is important for our life chances. Some children have advantages throughout life because of the social identity they learn from their parents, while others face up many obstacles because the social class or race/ethnicity into which they are born is at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Beyond discussing the family'south functions, the functional perspective on the family maintains that sudden or far-reaching changes in conventional family structure and processes threaten the family'due south stability and thus that of society. For example, well-nigh sociology and spousal relationship-and-family textbooks during the 1950s maintained that the male person breadwinner–female person homemaker nuclear family was the best system for children, as it provided for a family's economic and kid-rearing needs. Any shift in this arrangement, they warned, would impairment children and by extension the family unit as a social establishment and fifty-fifty society itself. Textbooks no longer comprise this alarm, but many conservative observers continue to worry about the bear on on children of working mothers and i-parent families. We render to their concerns shortly.

The Family and Conflict

Conflict theorists concord that the family serves the important functions but listed, but they likewise point to bug within the family that the functional perspective minimizes or overlooks altogether.

First, the family as a social establishment contributes to social inequality in several means. The social identity information technology gives to its children does bear on their life chances, but information technology as well reinforces a society's system of stratification. Considering families laissez passer forth their wealth to their children, and because families differ greatly in the amount of wealth they take, the family unit helps reinforce existing inequality. Equally it adult through the centuries, and especially during industrialization, the family also became more and more than of a patriarchal unit of measurement (run into before discussion), helping to ensure men's status at the top of the social hierarchy.

Second, the family can also be a source of conflict for its own members. Although the functional perspective assumes the family provides its members emotional condolement and back up, many families practise just the opposite and are far from the harmonious, happy groups depicted in the 1950s telly shows. Instead, and as the news story that began this chapter tragically illustrated, they argue, shout, and apply emotional cruelty and physical violence. We return to family violence later in this affiliate.

Families and Social Interaction

Social interactionist perspectives on the family unit examine how family members and intimate couples interact on a daily basis and arrive at shared understandings of their situations. Studies grounded in social interactionism give united states of america a neat understanding of how and why families operate the way they do.

Some studies, for example, focus on how husbands and wives communicate and the caste to which they communicate successfully (Tannen, 2001). A classic report past Mirra Komarovsky (1964) found that wives in blue-collar marriages liked to talk with their husbands about issues they were having, while husbands tended to exist quiet when problems occurred. Such gender differences seem less common in eye-course families, where men are improve educated and more emotionally expressive than their working-class counterparts. Another archetype study past Lillian Rubin (1976) found that wives in heart-class families say that ideal husbands are ones who communicate well and share their feelings, while wives in working-form families are more apt to say that platonic husbands are ones who practice non potable too much and who get to work every day.

Other studies explore the role played by romantic honey in courtship and marriage. Romantic love, the feeling of deep emotional and sexual passion for someone, is the basis for many American marriages and dating relationships, but it is actually uncommon in many parts of the contemporary earth today and in many of the societies anthropologists and historians take studied. In these societies, marriages are arranged by parents and other kin for economical reasons or to build alliances, and young people are but expected to marry whoever is chosen for them. This is the situation today in parts of India, Islamic republic of pakistan, and other developing nations and was the norm for much of the Western world until the late 18th and early on 19th centuries (Lystra, 1989).

Central Takeaways

• The family ideally serves several functions for society. It socializes children, provides practical and emotional support for its members, regulates sexual reproduction, and provides its members with a social identity.
• Reflecting disharmonize theory'due south emphases, the family unit may too produce several problems. In detail, information technology may contribute for several reasons to social inequality, and it may subject its members to violence, arguments, and other forms of conflict.
• Social interactionist understandings of the family emphasize how family unit members interact on a daily ground. In this regard, several studies detect that husbands and wives communicate differently in certain means that sometimes impede effective advice.

For Your Review

1. As yous recall how best to understand the family, do you lot favor the views and assumptions of functional theory, conflict theory, or social interactionist theory? Explain your respond.
2. Practice yous think the family continues to serve the function of regulating sexual behavior and sexual reproduction? Why or why non?

References

Komarovsky, M. (1964). Blue-collar marriage. New York, NY: Random House.

Lystra, K. (1989). Searching the heart: Women, men, and romantic love in nineteenth-century America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Rubin, 50. B. (1976). Worlds of hurting: Life in the working-form family. New York, NY: Bones Books.

Tannen, D. (2001). Yous just don't understand: Women and men in chat. New York, NY: Quill.

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Source: https://open.lib.umn.edu/sociology/chapter/15-2-sociological-perspectives-on-the-family/

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