The Privatization Of Nuclear Family

Nuclear family is a basic unit which consists of a heterosexual couples with one or more children dependant on their parents and is hence considered to be the ‘cereal packet family’.
The family is regarded as the cornerstone of the society and family life has become a topic of political debate. Different sociologists have different perspectives of how the nuclear families serve the interests of the state.
Functionalists argued that each institution has a set of crucial interlocked roles to perform to ensure the health of that society. They compared society to a human body and its internal organs wherein the job performed by the heart which is pumping blood was similar to the work of schools which is role allocation. Moreover, just as a heart …show more content…
Marxists are similar to functionalism in that they evaluate the way in which various institutions are designed to serve the needs of the society. However, whereas functionalists are generally positive in that they believe everyone benefits from them, Marxists are more pessimistic. They believe that state institutions serve the needs of the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production and oppress and exploit the proletariat, the workers. Marxists argue that the role of the privatized nuclear family is to quell rebellious feelings and prevent male workers from questioning the status quo whereas socialist feminism focuses on how the roles played by women help to preserve capitalism. They argue that if the capitalist system was replaced by a communist one, that the negative aspects of family life would disappear. Examples of Marxists are Louis Althusser. He argued that there were two types of state institutions that served the interests of the ruling class, repressive state apparatuses that used force to control the masses and ideological state apparatuses that subtly cajoled the proletariat. The family’s job fitted into the latter of these; specifically it taught the proletariat the ruling class ideology that is children learn to accept and not to challenge the values or the authority of their parents. They also see hierarchical structures as being the natural way to organize a group of people e.g. man as head of household. The result of this is that their future bosses will inherit a passive, unquestioning workforce. It could be argued that the concept of ruling class ideology is a darker, more mocking version of Parsons optimistic theory of the value