Gender Roles In Family Sociology

A family is “a group of people who are related to each other” (Merriam-Webster). Sociologist would not agree with this definition considering there are many families and in these families, not everyone is related. Sociologists define a family as “two or more individuals who maintain an intimate relationship that they expect to last indefinably-or in the case of parent and child, until the child reaches adulthood-who usually live under the same roof and pool their incomes and household labor.” (Cherlin 2010:14) This is a more modern day definition considering it includes homosexuals and heterosexuals who are both apart of the foundation of society. There are many types of families in today’s society, such as, blended families, one parent families, traditional families, homosexual families, adoptive parent families and even grandparent reared families. This paper will be analyzing these families and explaining how my family doesn’t exactly fit into any of these categories. It will describe how functionalist perspective, conflict perspective and interactionism theory …. My family consists of my step dad, mom, brother, sister, step sister, my good friends and all …show more content…
Gender roles are those commonly assigned tasks or expected behaviors linked to an individual’s sex-determined status. But today gender roles sometimes change and it has nothing to do with the family members sex. Men could be providers, financially speaking, but the woman could be the protector and vise versa. In some cases, families that are in poverty need to have their child-14 years old-get a job because the parent’s income is not enough. My mom makes more income than my step dad and she is the only one that could purchase cars, or our house because she had excellent credit. While my step dad was not good with budgeting his money and his credit score went down because of it. The only way set gender roles would work is in an ideal traditional