Diversity Of Family

The term ‘family’ is believed to be easily defined by most people, and almost always involves the image of a two parents and their children. Despite this, sociologists have been debating the true meaning of family for years, and although multiple definitions have come up, none provide an explanation broad enough to cover its spectrum. For example, Oxford Dictionaries has a lot of definitions for this term. One of them is that family is “A group consisting of two parents and their children living together as a unit”, while another one says that it is “A group of people related by blood or marriage.” (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.). Although the first definition has a more traditional approach, the second one applies to modern standards better, …show more content…
The first one is social status. Middle class families tend to function within a nuclear family more commonly than working class families, due to the constant moving for career advancement, The second one is ethnicity and cultural beliefs. For example, in cultures that discourage single parent families, they are less common than other countries, while bigger, extended families tend to be more frequent in these cultures. These cultures also tend to have stronger religious values. The third factor is sexual orientation, due to the amount of same sex couples that choose to adopt children (Moore, 2001). Other factors that influence family makeup can include age, with younger couples more likely to divorce later in life, therefore creating a single parent family, and background, which is mostly associated with psychological factors due to its nature. For example, children whose parents divorced are more likely to have a divorce in their marriage, unlike children whose parents stayed together (Giddens, …show more content…
These concepts are strongly reinforced within families, and feminism supports this by comparing gender roles from multiple countries, and how they differ intraculturally and interculturally. Feminism is also highly critical of nuclear families and their traditional family components, by explaining that young girls are socialised to accept submissive roles, and young women are socialized to accept the “housewife” role as the only acceptable role for women (Thompson, 2014). Despite this, the clear changes in traditional family archetypes have affected the way feminism explains these changes. For example, the abrupt rise in adoptive families, according to feminism, is solely due to the same-sex couples who have recently been given the right to wed. Nuclear families, on the other hand, were strongly affected after the two World Wars, due to the high number of deaths, and the newfound independence that women experienced after having to support the war by working (Atwood, 2011). All in all, this perspective is focused on the feminine factors that affected family types, and denies the existence of biological gender