Family

Basic Concepts:

• Family - unites people into cooperative groups to bear and raise children

• Kinship - a social bond based on common ancestry, marriage, or adoption

• Marriage - a legal relationship, usually involving economic cooperation, sexual activity, and childbearing responsibilities

• Families of affinity - people who think of themselves as a family and wish others to see them that way, regardless of biological factors

Key idea: There are two types of ways of thinking about family dynamics: biological perspectives, which emphasize genetic connections, and sociological perspectives, which focus on the relationships formed through social contracts and emotional bonds.

Families: Global Variations

• Extended family: a family consisting of parents and children as well as other kinds (also called “consanguine families”)

• Nuclear family: a family unit composed of one or two parents and their children living together (also called “conjugal family”)

• Marriage Patterns:

  • Arranged Marriages

  • Romantic Love

  • Endogamy: marriage between people of the same social category

  • Exogamy: marriage between people of different social categories

  • Monogamy: a marriage that unites two partners

  • Polygamy: a marriage that unites a person with two or more spouses

    • Polygyny: a marriage that unites one man with two or more women

    • Polyandry: a marriage that unites one woman with two or more men

      Mobility is much easier in industrial and post industrial societies, so it makes more sense that it is easier for nuclear families to move

  Industrialization has brought a pretty significant shift in marriage because you are expected to get married and have kids

  We are still endogamous when it comes to marriage, but it has loosened up over the years with a growing acceptance of diverse family structures

  2003, same-sex marriage had been legalized in Massachusetts

  In modern post industrial society procreation is not as important as it used to be, so the conditions in under we marry have changed so the idea of same-sex marriage has changed

• Residential Patterns:

  • Patrilocality: with or near the husband’s family

  • Matrilocality: with or near the wife’s family

  • Neolocality: setting up house apart from both families

• Descent:

  • The system by which members of a society trace kinship over generations

  Three Types:

  • Patrilineal descent: through men

  • Matrilineal descent: through women

  • Bilatereal descent: through both men and women

We are delaying marriage because their are an extended time for future careers when it comes to education.

Know: Overall trend that dipped post war: the average number for age was 20s and now it is 30s. The gap between men and women is usually 2 years.

Divorce Patterns:

• Divorce is more prominent in the northern hemisphere than it is in the northern hemisphere

• If something is a social obligation, there will be more social pressure and expectations to stay together, even through the difficult times

No Fault Divorce: In the 1960s, women were stuck in relationships because they had to show CAUSE to be able to divorce their husband.