personal life perspective of the family

carol smart

Key thinker in the Personal Life Perspective

• Smart criticises traditional views that treat families as simply legal or biological structures.

• Argues that people actively construct their family life based on meaningful personal relationships.

• She says we should study family from the perspective of the people involved, not through fixed categories like "nuclear" or "extended".

• Emotional connections matter more than blood or marriage.

• E.g. a friend, carer, or even a pet can be seen as "family" if that’s how someone experiences it.

• focuses on how people feel about thier relationships - how dies it feel to be married - focuses on the titeractions , roles and meanings and negotiations.

Stacey

• accepting of family diversity - the divorce extended family focuses on the meanings to the individual - “ fictive kin” - refers to them as family but aren’t related to you via blood or marriage

• Argues that there is no single dominant family type anymore.

• In postmodern society, people create families that suit their own needs and lifestyles.

• Especially in the USA, she found diverse family types, such as:

  • Divorce-extended families (e.g., ex-in-laws still helping raise children).

  • Single-mother families led by choice, often among working-class women.

She says women are the main agents of change in the family, and many are rejecting traditional roles (e.g., housewife/mother) to shape their own family life.

Nordqvist and Smart-Doner conceived families

• They studied families with donor-conceived children, looking at how people define “real” family when there’s no genetic link.

• For many parents, what mattered was social relationships and emotional bonds, not biology.

• Some struggled with what it means to be a "real" parent if they didn’t share genes with their child.

• Donor siblings and anonymous donors also created complex feelings about family identity.

• Their research supports the idea that family is what people make it, not just what they’re born into.

Criticism for this view of family

• The Personal Life Perspective focuses heavily on individual meanings, which can vary widely.

• Critics argue it's too difficult to generalise from personal stories or definitions of family.

• This makes it harder to study patterns or trends across society.