Module 4: Chapter 11: Families and Society

Common-Law Marriage

A type of relationship in which partners live as if married but without marriage's formal legal framework.

Consider the economic and labor market impact of globalization on U.S. families. On the one hand, globalization has contributed to an increase in many employers' demands for men and women with high degrees of skill and formal training, particularly in technical fields. On the other hand, low-skilled U.S. workers have been priced out of many sectors of the global job market by the fact that lower-wage labor is readily available elsewhere around the globe. Globalization can produce national economic gains even as it diminishes the prospects of some categories of workers.

About 70% of the individuals who make up the U.S. labor force do not hold 4-year college degrees. As we see elsewhere in this text, these are the workers who have been hit hardest by global economic change. Writing about domestic manufacturing industries, journalist Louis Uchitelle (2007) observes, As customers defected, sales plummeted and failed to bounce back. Nowhere was that more apparent than in the auto industry's struggle with [lower-cost] Japanese imports. But nearly every manufacturer was hit, and the steep recession in 1981 and 1982 compounded the damage. The old world has never returned.

How many adults live alone today?

About a quarter.

SUMMARY 2

Marriage, found in some form in all societies, can take several different forms, from the most common— monogamy—to many variations of polygamy, in which a person has multiple spouses simultaneously.

Elder Abuse

The victimization of elderly persons by family members or other caregivers

A substantial number of children in the United States also...

live in extended families.

In Northern and Western Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia, most children...

live in nuclear families.

Solid and low-conflict marriages are...

healthy, and unstable, high-conflict marriages are not.

The relationships among class, poverty, and family patterns are complex, but Wilson and Edin and Kefalas offer sociological lenses for understanding some of the structural and cultural roots of low marriage rates and high nonmarital birthrates in many poor U.S. communities. As William Julius Wilson (2010) notes in his book More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City,...

"How families are formed among America's poorest citizens is an area that cries out for further research."

Interestingly, Friedman points out that parents of upper-middle-class girls are more likely to enroll their girls in soccer or chess than in dance, pursuing an...

"aggressive femininity" that they perceive to offer their daughters a future labor market advantage.

Ho suggests in her profiles of these female global citizens—most of whom work in lower-wage sectors of the economy, including clerical work and childcare—that such global-family arrangements enable Caribbean immigrants to avoid becoming fully Americanized: International families and child minding provide a strong sense of continuity with their Caribbean homeland culture. Ho predicts that Caribbean immigrants will retain their native culture by regularly receiving what she characterizes as...

"bicultural booster shots" through the shuttling of family members between the United States and the Caribbean. At the same time, Ho notes, this process contributes to the Americanization of the Caribbean region, which may eventually give rise to an ever more global culture.

Antimiscegenation Laws

Laws prohibiting interracial sexual relations and marriage.

Endogamous

Limited to partners who are members of same social group or caste.

Cohabitation

Living together as a couple without being legally married.

Almost 10 years later, Wilson (1996) argued that falling rates of marriage and rising numbers of nonmarital births were, at least in part, rooted in the declining numbers of...

"marriageable men" in inner-city neighborhoods. He posited that the ratio of unmarried Black women to single and "marriageable" Black men of similar age was skewed by male joblessness, high rates of incarceration, and high death rates for young Black men. The loss of jobs in the inner city had a powerfully negative effect on male employment opportunities. The consequences were felt not only in the economic fortunes of communities but also—and no less importantly—in families, where women were choosing motherhood but options for marriage were diminished by the uneven ratio of single women to marriageable men. Although rates of nonmarital births had previously been high in Black communities, where extended families have traditionally been available to support mothers and children (Gerstel & Gallagher, 1994), Wilson saw new urban circumstances as central to the rise of nonmarital births among Black Americans from one quarter in 1965 (when Moynihan published his report) to about 70% by the middle 1990s, where it remains today (Table 11.1). By then, about half of Black American families were headed by a woman (Wilson, 2010).

Women, reared by mothers who nurture close and critical bonds, are rendered...

"relational" through this process, seeking close bonds and defining themselves through relationships (Anna's mom, Joe's wife, and so on).

Families and the Work of Raising Children in different times and places:

-The Baganda tribe of Central Africa, in which the biological father's brother was traditionally responsible for raising the children. -The Nayars of southern India offer another variation, assigning responsibility to the mother's eldest brother. -In Trinidad and other Caribbean communities, extended family members have often assumed the care of children whose parents have migrated north to seek work (in the United States, in most instances).

In a National Center on Elder Abuse study,...

10% of elderly U.S. adults (those 65 or older) surveyed reported experiencing either emotional, physical, or sexual abuse or potential neglect. Similar to child abuse, elder abuse is likely underreported because victims are often in a subordinate position in the family and unable to access help outside the home. Elder abuse also shares with child abuse some of its forms, including neglect—the failure of caregivers to provide for basic needs such as nutritious food and hygienic conditions—and physical abuse. Some aspects of elder abuse differ from abuse of other kinds of victims, however. For example, elder abuse may take the form of financial exploitation or outright theft of property. Those who care for elderly relatives may feel entitled to the resources the seniors possess—or they may simply take advantage of the older persons' vulnerabilities.

Notably, the second leading reason that parents give for spending too little time with children differs by sex, with mothers saying the reason is because they have other family or household obligations and fathers responding that it is because their children do not live with them. Of all fathers,...

17% live apart from all of their children, a percentage that varies based on education and race. Only 8% of fathers with a bachelor's degree or more live apart from their children, while 28% of those without a bachelor's degree say the same. As for race, more Black fathers report living apart from some or all of their children (47%), while 26% of Hispanic and 17% of white fathers say the same.

Nonmarital Birthrate by Race/Ethnicity in the United States, 2020: WHITE:

28.2%

Child abuse—sexual and/or physical assaults on childtren by adult members of their families—is also common in our society. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, approximately...

3.5 million children were the subject of a child abuse investigation in 2018. On any given day, an estimated five children die as the result of abuse, although the main form of abuse is neglect. Boys and girls are equally likely to be physically abused, but girls are more likely to be sexually abused as well. According to Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline, an organization dedicated to the prevention of child abuse, the cycle of abuse is difficult to break; one study suggests that about 30% of abused and neglected children will later abuse their own children.

Nonmarital Birthrate by Race/Ethnicity in the United States, 2020: HISPANIC:

51.8%

Nonmarital Birthrate by Race/Ethnicity in the United States, 2020: BLACK:

69.9%

Marriage

A culturally normative relationship, usually between two individuals, that provides a framework for economic cooperation, emotional intimacy, and sexual relations.

OBERGEFELL V. HODGES

A dramatic shift took place in June of 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court held in Obergefell v. Hodges that states must allow same-sex couples to marry and that they must recognize same-sex marriages from other states. The 5-4 decision indicated that a fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. According to a Gallup poll reported in the Washington Post prior to the Obergefell decision, about 390,000 married same-sex couples resided in the United States. Another 1.2 million adults were living in same-sex domestic partnerships (Schwarz, 2015). Whether the newly gained right to marry will have any significant effect on the falling rate of marriage in the United States remains to be seen, but recent data show that 2 years after the Obergefell decision, just over 10% of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual (LGBT) adults are now married to a same-sex partner (Jones, 2017).

Polygyny

A form of marriage in which a man may have multiple wives.

Polygamy

A form of marriage in which a person may have more than one spouse at a time.

Monogamy

A form of marriage in which a person may have only one spouse at a time.

Polyandry

A form of marriage in which a woman may have multiple husbands.

Harvard Men's Health Watch Newsletter report:

A major survey of 127,545 American adults found that married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood. Men who have marital partners also live longer than men without spouses; men who marry after age 25 get more protection than those who tie the knot at a younger age, and the longer a man stays married, the greater his survival advantage over his unmarried peers. In terms of mental health, married men also have a lower risk of depression and a higher likelihood of satisfaction with life in retirement than in their unmarried peers.

Accomplishment of Natural Growth

A parenting style associated with working-class and poor families.

Personality Stabilization

A phenomenon named to support adult family members emotionally.

Foster Care

A situation in which a child is cared for by people who are not his or her parents for either a brief or extended period of time.

Concerted Cultivation

A style of parenting associated most fully with the middle class and characterized by an emphasis on negotiation, discussion, questioning of authority, and cultivation of talents and skills through, among other things, participation in organized activities.

What was Daniel Patrick Moynihan's publication "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action" (the Moynihan Report) about?

An argument about lower-class Black family life was often dysfunctional, as reflected in high rates of family dissolution, single parenting, and the dominance of female-headed families.

For one thing, parenting in poverty is expensive.

As a blog post in the Washington Post noted, for parenting families in the middle quintile of the household income spectrum, diapers consume just under 3% of their income; for those in the upper two quintiles, the figure is closer to 1% to 2%. By contrast, nearly 14% of the household income of the poorest quintile goes to diapers (Badger & Eilperin, 2016). What explains this dramatic difference? Consider the fact that today many middle- or upper-income families buy their disposable diapers in bulk from shopping clubs such as Sam's Club or through the mail from Amazon, which offers free shipping for subscribed members. This can considerably reduce the cost and increase the convenience of buying a good that has become a basic necessity of modern life.

So why do women mother?

Because men in heterosexual relationships are not socially or psychologically well prepared for close relational bonding, women choose to mother to reproduce this intimate connection with a child.

For low-income families, these avenues are often foreclosed. Poor parents may not be able to afford a costly membership to a shopper's club—or even a car to travel to a distant warehouse shop where these items could be bought. They may not have space at home to store bulk purchases of diapers or other household goods. Those with little money may not be able to purchase the larger bags of diapers that offer a better value; instead, they are forced by economic circumstances to buy in small quantities. As the authors of the blog write,

Cheap diapers are hard to come by for the families that have the least to spend on them. Mora, 27, scans coupons and travels for bargains. She tells her children "no" at the grocery store, when she has to choose between the kiwis they want and the diapers 2-year-old Nathan needs. Then, sometimes, when she finds a good deal, it comes in the wrong sizes. "Sometimes you have to decide between 'Okay, this box has 120 diapers, and this is the size that he doesn't use. But if I get the size that he's using, it's just 70 diapers, and I have 50 diapers more. So what should I do?'" she says, knowing that a too-small size might chafe her son's skin. "You just have to make things happen."

FACTS ON HOUSEHOLDS WITH MEN AND WOMEN:

Consider the fact that for men, the median age at first marriage was 22.8 in 1960, 26.1 in 1980, and 26.8 in 2000; for women, it was 20.3 in 1960, 23.9 in 1980, and 25.1 in 2000. The steep rise in the median age at first marriage suggests that many people are not marrying until their 30s—or even later. Most U.S. adults indicate a desire to marry, and most will at some point in their lives; more than 2.1 million married in 2018, and the U.S. marriage rate of 6.5 per 1,000 population exceeds that of many other economically advanced countries, including the states of Western and Northern Europe.

What, then, explains the decline of marriage in the millennial generation? #3

Economic circumstances, including the rising burden of student debt, are having an influence on decisions about family formation. Research shows some correlation between debt and the ability or willingness of young adults to start families (Smock et al., 2005). Students graduating from higher education in the past decade are the first U.S. generation to finance so much of their education with interest-bearing loans. A 2002 survey from Nellie Mae (a nonprofit corporation and, until recently, the largest private source of student loans) offers some early insights into the relationship between debt and delayed family formation: In the survey, 14% of borrowers indicated that "loans delayed marriage," a rise from 9% in 1987, when the debt burden was smaller. More than one fifth responded that they had "delayed having children because of student loan debt," an increase from 12% in 1987. More recently, an IHS Global Insight report highlighted the fact that even though other types of debt have declined, student loan debt continues to rise—and it correlates with a discernible trend among young adults of delaying marriage and childbearing (Dwoskin, 2012). In fact, financial concerns more generally appear to have an effect on young adults' decisions about marriage: In a Pew Research Center (2014a) survey, a third of young adults indicated that economic reasons were a key obstacle to getting married (Figure 11.7).

Nuclear Families

Families characterized by one or two parents living with their biological, dependent children in a household with no other kin.

International Families

Families that result from globalization.

SUMMARY 4

Feminist perspectives on the family are more conflict oriented, highlighting the sexual division of labor in society and its stratifying effects. Feminist perspectives also examine the different experiences of men and women in marriage and the way social expectations and roles affect those experiences. The psychodynamic feminist perspective takes a sociopsychological approach, emphasizing the impact of early mothering on the later assumption of gender roles.

What, then, explains the decline of marriage in the millennial generation? #4

Fourth, the marriage market has shifted. If it is the case that nearly a third of young adults indicate that they have not yet met someone they would like to marry, some of that can be explained with the application of the sociological imagination. That is, rather than looking at this on an individual level, we may want to ask what sociological factors may underpin difficulty in meeting a suitable partner. For instance, even though there are more unmarried young adult men than unmarried young adult women (implying a robust pool of partners), a closer look at the marital pool shows that the unemployment rate for unmarried men is higher than for unmarried women (see Figure 11.8). To the degree that being employed is a variable that makes a man "marriageable," the data suggest that the marriage market may be weaker than it appears.

Bernard identifies her marriage experiences:

Her marriage is one in which she may seek to define herself as fulfilled through her achievement of marriage (following societal norms that indicate this is what she should be experiencing) while, at the same time, experiencing associated female dependence and subjugation.

Bernard identifies his marriage experiences:

His marriage is one in which he may define himself as burdened and constrained (following societal norms that indicate this is what he should be experiencing) while, at the same time, experiencing authority, independence, and a right to the sexual, domestic, and emotional services of his wife.

Why is the U.S. divorce rate, while declining, persistently high?

Historian Stephanie Coontz (2005) argues that divorce is, in part, driven by our powerful attachment to the belief that marriage is the outcome of romantic love. Although historically, many societies accepted marriage primarily as part of an economic or social contract—and some still do—modern U.S. adults are smitten with love. Yet the powerful early feelings and passion that characterize many relationships are destined to wane over time. In a social context that elevates romantic love and passion in films, music, and books, we may have less tolerance for the more measured emotions inherent in most long-term marriages.

FAMILY LIVING STATS

In 2019, about 70% of children lived with two parents, and just over 20% lived with only their mothers, while just over 4% resided with only their father and 2% lived with grandparents or a grandparent. Figures show that changes in the past half century have been steady but slow.

SUMMARY 5

In U.S. society today, the composition of families and the roles within families are shifting. The age at first marriage has risen across the board, and rates of marriage have declined, particularly among the less educated. Same-sex marriage was recognized as legal in the entire United States in 2015. Young adults are less likely than prior generations to marry, although most still value parenthood. Nonmarital births account for more than 40% of all births. Divorce rates have leveled off but remain at a high level.

SUMMARY 7

In the United States, the effects of globalization include changes in household income and employment opportunities. Women from developing countries often leave their homes and children to work for families in the developing world.

HETEROSEXUAL ADULTS STATS

Interestingly, as younger generations of heterosexual adults have drifted away from marriage as a normative part of the life course, many of their gay and lesbian peers have been fighting for the opportunity to marry. Just a few years ago—2014—33 states prohibited same-sex marriage while only 17 states and the District of Columbia permitted it (Ahuja et al., 2014). States that rejected same-sex marriage tended to cite the same language as the federal law prohibiting same-sex marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA): "The word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife." DOMA was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. It also included the provision that states were not obligated to recognize same-sex marriages conducted in states or cities that permit them.

When Wilson revisited this issue in 2010, he found that research on the relationship between male employment and rates of marriage and single parenthood offered mixed findings:

Joblessness among black men is a significant factor in their delayed entry into marriage and in the decreasing rates of marriage after a child has been born, and this relationship has been exacerbated by sharp increases in incarceration that in turn lead to continued joblessness. Nevertheless, much of the decline in marriages in the inner city, including marriages that occur after a child has been born, remains unexplained when only structural factors are examined.

In 1987, sociologist William Julius Wilson published The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy, in which he revisited the issues...

Moynihan had raised in the 1965 report. In the two intervening decades, much had changed—and much had stayed the same. The family patterns that Moynihan had identified as problematic, including nonmarital births and high levels of family dissolution, had become more pronounced among poor and working-class Black Americans. At the same time, social problems such as joblessness in the inner city had grown more acute, as deindustrialization and the movement of jobs to the suburbs dramatically reduced the number of positions available for less educated and low-skilled workers. These changes, Wilson noted, had important consequences for family formation.

Domestic (or family) Violence

Physical or sexual abuse committed by one family member against another.

What, then, explains the decline of marriage in the millennial generation? #2

Second, there are more viable and normatively acceptable alternatives to marriage available (Figure 11.6). Cohabitation and common-law marriage, are options that have gained popularity in recent decades. Some 12% of never-married young adults (25-34) live with a partner, compared to 8% of Gen Xers (Pew Research Center, 2020). The decision to forgo marriage in favor of short- or long-term cohabitation is not one limited to today's young adults: More older adults are choosing to build households without traditional marriage as well.

According to sociologist Nancy Chodorow, "Why do women mother?"

She suggests that to explain women's choice to mother, a verb that describes a commitment to the care and nurturing of children, and men's choice to not mother (that is, to assume a more distant role from child-rearing), we must look at personality development and relational psychology.

Extended Families

Social groups consisting of one or more parents, children, and other kin, often spanning several generations, living in the same household.

SUMMARY 6

Socioeconomic class status affects child-rearing practices and family formation patterns. Lower rates of marriage and high rates of nonmarital births are present in the working class and among the poor. Middle-class family life is often structured around the needs of children.

COHABITATION & COMMON-LAW MARRIAGE STATS:

Some 12% of never-married young adults (25-34) live with a partner, compared to 8% of Gen Xers. The decision to forgo marriage in favor of short- or long-term cohabitation is not one limited to today's young adults: More older adults are choosing to build households without traditional marriage as well.

Why do people say they want to strike a better balance between work and the rest of their lives and yet do nothing about it when they have the opportunity?

Some reasons are practical; several employees in Hochschild's study feared that taking advantage of liberal work policies would count against them in their careers, while others simply needed the money—they couldn't afford to work less. Yet Hochschild identified a more surprising reason many people worked long hours: They liked being at work better than being at home. Previous research had shown that many men regard work as a haven, and Hochschild found that a notable number of working women now feel the same way. Despite the stress of long hours and guilt about being away from their families, they are reluctant to cut back on their commitment to paid work.

The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence STATS:

The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, an ongoing survey developed and administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found in 2019 that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 10 men surveyed had been victims of IPV in their lifetimes. As defined by the CDC, IPV includes physical violence, rape, and stalking by a former or current partner or spouse. About 1 in 5 women and 1 in 7 men surveyed had experienced severe physical violence at the hands of their partners. Although these data are for experiences over the life course, even the data from a single year reveal a serious epidemic of IPV. According to the survey, more than 42 million people experienced IPV in 2015 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2018).

.As sociologists examining a problem that is both a private trouble and a public issue, we need to ask, "Why does domestic violence exist and persist in family life?"...

The acceptance of a husband's "right" to subject his wife to physical discipline has roots in Anglo American culture. British common law permitted a man to strike his wife and children with a stick as a form of punishment, provided the stick was no thicker than his thumb; the phrase rule of thumb originates in this practice. Through the end of the 19th century in the United States, men could legally beat their wives. Research has found that domestic violence is most likely to be prevalent in societies in which family relationships are characterized by high emotional intensity and attachment, there is a pattern of male dominance and sexual inequality, a high value is placed on the privacy of family life, and violence is common in other institutional spheres, such as entertainment or popular culture.

What are the effects of these differing styles of child-rearing?

The accomplishment of natural-growth style not only tends to cultivate early independence but also leads young people toward jobs that require respect for authority and obedience to directives, such as those associated with the working class. In contrast, the concerted-cultivation approach to child raising tended to lead young people both to hold a sense of entitlement and to pursue careers that require a broad vocabulary and ease in negotiating with people in authority. Following up with the families she studied, Lareau found that all the middle-class children had completed high school and that most were attending college. Many of the children of low-income families had left high school, and few were in college. "In sum," she writes, "differences in family life lie not only in the advantages parents obtain for their children, but also in the skills they transmit to children for negotiating their own life paths."

SUMMARY 3

The functionalist perspective highlights the family's functionality in terms of social stability and order, emphasizing such activities as sex role allocation and child socialization.

Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2002) argue that Western global power, previously manifested in the extraction of natural resources and agricultural goods, has evolved to embrace an extraction of women's labor and love, which is transferred to the well-off at a cost to poorer countries, communities, and—most acutely, perhaps—families:

The lifestyles of the First World are made possible by a global transfer of the services associated with a wife's traditional role—child care, homemaking, and sex—from poor countries to rich ones. To generalize and perhaps oversimplify: in an earlier phase of imperialism, northern countries extracted natural resources and agricultural products ... from lands they conquered and colonized. Today, while still relying on Third World countries for agricultural and industrial labor, the wealthy countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look very much like love.

SUMMARY 1

The meaning of family is socially constructed within a particular culture. In the United States, as in other modern societies, the meaning and practices of family life have been changing.

Sexual Division of Labor

The phenomenon of dividing production functions by gender and designating different spheres of activity: the "private" to women and the "public" to men. Men produce, women reproduce.

Serial Monogamy

The practice of having more than one wife or husband - but only on at a time.

The challenges do not end at the doorstep of an individual household. Parenting in poverty often means raising children in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, which present a further set of challenges. A recent Pew Research Center report titled "Parenting in America" indicates that "higher-income parents are nearly twice as likely as lower-income parents to rate their neighborhood as an 'excellent' or 'very good' place to raise kids (78% to 42%)" (p. 3). Fully 38% of families with incomes under $30,000 described their neighborhood as only a "fair or poor" place to raise children. Among families with incomes over $75,000, the figure was only 7%. The differences do not stop there: Nearly half of the poorest families expressed a fear that their child could get shot, and over half worried that their child could get beat up or attacked. Although these concerns were also expressed by better-off families, 22% of whom worried about shooting and 38% of whom were concerned about other physical violence, the figures suggest a lower perceived degree of threat.

There are, to be sure, commonalities that many parents share, regardless of income. Comparable numbers of parents expressed fears of a son or daughter struggling with anxiety or depression or having problems with drugs or alcohol (Pew Research Center, 2015a). At the same time, families with greater economic means are likely to have fuller access to resources to address these problems, again highlighting some of the challenges to poor parents seeking, like their better-off peers, to make a good life for their children.

ASL STATS:

There has been a movement within the deaf community to redefine the meaning of deafness to denote not a form of disability but a positive culture. Some people who are deaf see themselves as similar to an ethnic group: sharing a common language (American Sign Language, or ASL), possessing a strong sense of cultural identity, and taking pride in their heritage. Identifying as an ethnic group rather than as a disability group, some people who are deaf believe that cochlear implant surgery, a procedure through which some deaf people can become hearing, is problematic, especially when it is performed on children who cannot consent. Often, deaf people who undergo this surgery are still unable to attain mastery of any oral language (Lane, 2005). The National Association of the Deaf (2000) takes a cautionary stance on cochlear implants, advising hearing parents of deaf children to conduct thorough research, create a support system, and, most important, communicate with their children before undertaking the transition. Julie Mitchiner takes pride in being deaf.

What, then, explains the decline of marriage in the millennial generation? #1

There is a relationship between attitudes and practices. Data appear to show a declining sense that marriage is a necessary part of the adult life course. Consider data from a Pew Research Center study that shows a shift that has taken place across merely one generation: In 1997, 42% of 18- to 29-year-olds (Generation X) indicated that being a good parent was "one of the most important things" in their lives, and 35% said that having a successful marriage was "one of the most important things in their lives." In 2010, young adults in the same age group (Millennials) were more likely to value parenthood but less likely to value marriage: Although 52% said that being a good parent was important to them, only 30% said the same about having a successful marriage. Even though most Millennials said that they would like to get married, this traditional milestone is no longer the vital component of adulthood that it once was (Wang & Taylor, 2011): Recall that we learned that only 44% of Millennials today are married, while 61% of baby boomers were married at the same phase of their lives.

Parents are often caught in a dilemma:

They must instill some degree of conformity in their children as they attempt to socialize them into the norms and values that will be socially appropriate for adult behavior, but at the same time, they must foster a degree of independence—after all, children must eventually leave the nest and survive in the adult world. Given the tension between protecting children and instilling independence, it should not be surprising that in most families, neither is fully achieved. Parents may understand that they need to help build their children's independence yet still be unwilling to trust their children's judgment, especially during adolescence. They may hang on to their children, prolonging dependence past the point in which children are ready to make decisions on their own. Growing up includes some degree of conflict no matter what approach parents use.

Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2002) have turned their attention to what they call the "global woman." Like Ho, they examine the female migrant leaving home and family to seek work in the wealthy "first world." Unlike Ho, however, they take a pointedly critical view of this phenomenon, suggesting that these female workers, many of them employed as nannies or housekeepers (or even prostitutes), are filling a "care deficit" in the wealthier countries, where many female professionals have pursued opportunities outside the home. In doing so, the migrants create a new deficit at home, leaving their own children and communities behind:

Third World migrant women achieve their success only by assuming the cast-off domestic roles of middle- and high-income women in the First World—roles that have been previously rejected, of course, by men. And their "commute" entails a cost we have yet to fully comprehend.

Family

Two or more individuals who identify themselves as being related to one another, usually by blood, marriage, or adoption, who share intimate relationships and dependency.

Intimate Partner Violence (IPV)

Violence that involves current or former spouses or nonmarried partners.

William Julius Wilson (2010) also cited cultural factors in the fragmentation of the poor Black family. Although sociologists have been reluctant to use culture as an explanation, not least due to fear of the backlash generated by the Moynihan Report, Wilson writes that structure and culture interact to create normative contexts for behavior. He points out, for instance, that...

[B]oth inner-city black males and females believe that since most marriages will eventually break up and no longer represent meaningful relationships, it is better to avoid the entanglements of wedlock altogether. ... Single mothers who perceive the fathers of their children as unreliable or as having limited financial means will often—rationally—choose single parenthood.

People have become more aware of child and spousal abuse and its spectrum of consequences in recent years, largely because of efforts by the women's movement to bring them into the open. Shelters for battered women and children enable victims to be protected from violence. Although still limited in number, such refuges have enabled women to get counseling while terminating abusive relationships in relative safety. Family violence is clearly...

a dysfunctional social phenomenon. It is both a personal trouble and a public issue. A fuller understanding of its roots and consequences can contribute to both a better-informed national conversation about the problem and more robust efforts to address it.

Some states defined miscegenation as...

a felony, prohibiting residents from marrying outside their racial groups.

Furthermore, it is not clear that all was well in the prosperous suburbs, either. As we noted, some sociological observers detected...

a streak of discontent that ran through the idealized nuclear family.

The feminist perspective and other conflict-oriented perspectives offer...

a valuable addition to functionalist theorizing.

At the same time, rates of marriage in the United States have declined, and far fewer adults today are married than in generations past. Consider that of the roughly 73 million men and women who compose the millennial generation, about 44% are married. By comparison,...

about 61% of the baby boomer generation was married at the same point in their lives.

In a capitalist system, power tends to...

accrue to those who hold economic resources.

Possible explanations for the correlation include the...

advent of no-fault divorce laws, decline in the normative stigma related to divorce, and women's greater economic independence, which has enabled them to leave unhappy marriages that might earlier have been sustained by their dependence on spouses' wages.

The role of parent or primary caregiver in the United States and much of Europe has traditionally been assumed by...

biological parents (and occasionally stepparents), but this is one of many possible family formations in which adults have raised children in different times and places.

Although mothering is rooted in biology, Chodorow argues that...

biology cannot fully explain mothering because fathers or other kin can perform key mothering functions as well.

Global women have been increasingly in demand in high‐income countries to provide health and social care for children, elderly people, and the disabled. As of 2014, there are approximately 53 million domestic workers worldwide, the majority of whom are female temporary migrant workers (International Labour Organization, 2014). The demand for live‐in caregivers and domestic workers is driven by...

aging populations, the aforementioned feminization of international migration, diminishing state provision of care services, and the incorporation of women into the labor force without policies in place to reconcile the demands of family life (such as childcare) and paid employment.

These studies strongly suggest that family life—and practices of child-rearing, in particular—contribute to the reproduction of class status. Although structural factors, including obstacles related to educational and economic resources, are an important part of the picture, Lareau suggests that the orientations and skills developed in childhood, which become part of a young adult's human capital as he or she negotiates the path through school and toward a job, are...

also relevant to understanding socioeconomic outcomes and the reproduction of class status.

At the same time, most young adults do not reject marriage as...

an institution.

In Bernard's analysis of marriage as a cultural system comprising beliefs and ideals,

an institutional arrangement of norms and roles, and a complicated individual-level interactional and intimate experience,.

Globalization means greater mobility for families and more fluid ways of organizing work and life. The benefits of globalization enjoyed by some U.S. families, however,...

are accompanied by the losses suffered by others.

Moynihan saw the breakdown of Black families, together with continued racial inequality,...

as leading to a new crisis in race relations. He identified the legacy of slavery, which intentionally broke up Black families, as one of the roots of the problem. He also argued that many rural Blacks had failed to adapt adequately to urban environments. Moynihan concluded that these patterns in family life were, at least in part, responsible for the failure of many low-income Black Americans to make it into the economic mainstream in the United States. He saw Black poverty and inner-city violence, which exploded in the urban riots of the 1960s, as partly the result of Black family breakdown.

Foster care may be used when a parent is determined by...

authorities to no longer be capable of safely caring for the child.

Men, by contrast, define themselves more...

autonomously and have a harder time forming close bonds.

From the 1970s, a period following intense activity in the women's movement and a rise in the number of women taking jobs outside the home, feminist perspectives...

became central to sociological debates on the family.

Significantly, she argues, this devaluation of the feminine is institutionalized in society: That is,...

because men still largely dominate key institutions in society, traits associated with masculinity are more highly valued in areas like politics, business, and the law.

Although these processes play out primarily on the micro level of the family and relationships, Chodorow also recognizes macrolevel effects. She suggests that...

because of a lack of available male role models at home, the masculine personality develops, in part, as a negation of the feminine personality.

Although marriage has historically united partners of different sexes, same-sex marriages have...

become increasingly common in the United States and other countries, although their legal recognition is still incomplete.

The never married are...

better off than those in high-conflict marriages.

Today, a rising number of new marriages are...

between spouses of different races or ethnicities: In 1967, intermarriages constituted only 3% of new marriages; today, the figure is 17%. Interestingly, the rate of intermarriage is dramatically different across U.S. racial and ethnic groups: Asian Americans and Hispanics are far more likely to marry outside of the group than are white or Black Americans.

With mothers and fathers of young children in the labor force, childcare has progressed further into paid means. Data from the Center for American Progress show that 55% of children age 5 and younger whose mothers work for pay are...

cared for in childcare centers or preschools.

Correlation is, of course, not...

causation.

Parsons worried that disruption of the roles he observed in families could...

cause dysfunctions for the family and society.

You can probably anticipate that in looking at the family, the...

conflict perspective will ask how it might produce and reproduce inequality.

According to Pew, "only 4% of never-married adults ages 25 to 34 say they don't want to get married. A majority of them either want to marry (61%) or are not sure (34%)," although the collective attitude toward marriage is far less traditional than that of older generations: Only about a third of those in the 18 to 29 age group agreed that it was "very important" that a...

couple marries if they plan to spend their lives together, while about half of those 50 to 64 agreed, and fully 65% of those 65 and over agreed.

Authorities in areas ravaged by the opioid crisis are struggling to find enough foster homes to care for children removed from threatening situations. Widespread opioid addiction, born of prescription drugs such as OxyContin and Vicodin, given by health care providers for pain, has birthed a...

crisis of heroin and fentanyl use and abuse that has devastated families in many communities not only through death and injury but also through the dissolution of families.

In this social context, the stigma of unmarried parenthood is minimal, and behaviors rooted in structure become...

culturally normative.

The period of early industrialization shifted these patterns somewhat, not least because it was accompanied by urbanization, which brought workers and their families to cities for work. The family's economic function...

declined; some children worked in factories, but the passage of child labor laws and the rise of mass public schooling made this increasingly uncommon (although, according to one source, at the end of the 19th century, a quarter of textile workers in the American South were children, whose cheap labor was a boon to employers).

Many working-class families have found themselves confronting flat or declining incomes as a result of competition with a global workforce. Household incomes at the bottom of the economic spectrum have declined most dramatically since the 1970s, when globalization began to transform the domestic economy. This decline has had a multitude of effects on U.S. families. Recall our discussion in this chapter of the diminished pool of "marriageable" males. Here, we see some of the effects of...

declining job opportunities and wages in manufacturing, which used to offer gainful employment to less educated men.

Distinct sex roles also clarified the social status of the family, which was...

derived from the male's social position.

Indeed, both of these macrolevel approaches may have...

difficulty capturing the complexities of any family's lived experiences, particularly as they evolve and change over the years.

As life spans increased,...

divorce also became more common, replacing death as the factor most likely to end a marriage.

Arguably, the shift from an agricultural to industrial to postindustrial economy in the United States has made the family's economic purpose less central than its reproductive and socializing functions, although microlevel consumption decisions made by families continue to...

drive a national economy that is deeply dependent on consumer activity.

Middle- and upper-class jobs often require individual initiative and innovation, while working-class jobs tend to...

emphasize conformity.

Jessie Bernard confronts the issue of...

equality in marriage, positing that a husband and wife experience different marriages.

In industrial societies, in which the nuclear family unit was often disconnected from the...

extended kin networks that characterized earlier eras, this stabilization function was particularly vital.

Family patterns among Native Americans are highly diverse. There are nearly 500 different nations, although more than half of American Indians identify as coming from six of these. American Indians often live in...

extended-family households that include uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents.

Domestic violence is a persistent source of family crisis in society. A more recent phenomenon is the dramatic rise in opioid addiction in some U.S. regions and the effect this is...

having on families. According to recent data, on any given day in 2016, about 437,500 children were in foster care, and in the same year, over 273,000 entered foster care for the first time.

Interestingly, reflecting the influence of home cultures on migrants, first-generation migrants often have birthrates above those of the native-born U.S. population. One study found that immigrant women in the United States were slightly more likely to have given birth in the last 12 months (6%) than U.S.-born women in the same age group (5%). In the second generation, however, the rate typically declines to the average U.S. rate—that is, approximately 2.1 children per woman. Nevertheless, some studies have found that the trend toward decreasing fertility in first- and second-generation immigrant women may actually be reversed in the third generation for some groups. Historically, fertility rates have decreased for immigrant families the longer they reside in the United States. It is important, however, to note that...

factors such as country of origin, education, religion, and cultural attitudes add to the complexity of understanding these trends.

Nonetheless, the perspectives offer a useful way of thinking about...

families and family members, their place in the larger social world, and the way they influence and are influenced by societal institutions and cultures.

Functionalists also neglect...

family dysfunctions, including ways in which the nuclear family—central to modern society yet, in many respects, isolated from support systems such as kin networks—may perpetuate gender inequality and even violence.

The perspectives focus on the divisive and unequal aspects of...

family forms and norms may overlook the valuable functions of caring, socializing, and organizing that families have long performed and continue to perform in society.

Many families are...

formed through marriage.

What did Parsons suggest about the nuclear family of his time...

functioned to support adult family members emotionally.

Many theorists, including Parsons saw the sexual division of labor as...

fundamentally functions.

Some controversies over family life taking place within Native American communities mirror those taking place in U.S. society more generally. For instance, beginning in 2008, some tribes began to permit same-sex marriage; in that year, the Coquille tribe of Oregon was the first to pass a law defining marriage or domestic partnership as a "formal and express civil contract entered into by two persons, regardless of their sex." The sovereign Navajo Nation, together with tribes such as the Kickapoo and Chicksaw, has resisted this step, even after the legalization of same-sex marriage by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015: According to the Navajo Nation's marriage law, "Marriage between persons of the same sex is void and prohibited." These sovereign tribes' laws are not affected by the Supreme Court ruling because the tribes were never parties to the U.S. Constitution. Interestingly, some research shows that...

gay partnerships were historically accepted in many tribal cultures, where the term two spirits was used to categorize LGBT members.

Focusing on mothers who emigrate from the Caribbean to the United States, Ho documents how they often rely on child minding, an arrangement in which extended family members and even friends cooperate in raising the women's children while they pursue work elsewhere, often thousands of miles away. This practice adds a...

global dimension to cooperative child-rearing practices that are a long-standing feature of Caribbean culture.

An extended family may include...

grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other close relatives.

Class status is linked with changing patterns of family life in another important way. Some sociologists believe that macrolevel economic changes, in particular the rise of a postindustrial economy and associated labor market, have...

had a powerful effect on microlevel practices of family formation.

On the other hand, some in the deaf community argue that the deaf children of hearing parents can never fully belong to the hearing world. Many in the deaf community believe...

hearing parents should send their deaf children to residential schools for the deaf, where they will be fully accepted, learn deaf culture, and be with people who share their experience of deafness.

Historian Stephanie Coontz points out that the...

highly venerated traditional nuclear family model is, in fact, a fairly recent development.

Through such early socialization, daughters come to...

identify more fully with their mothers than with their fathers.

The United States has more foreign-born residents than any other country in the world. Given its low fertility rate, a substantial proportion of the country's population growth is the result of immigration. With the proportion of foreign-born residents at about 13%, it is not surprising that...

immigrants and the cultures they carry with them have important effects on family patterns in the United States.

Social class has an...

impact on family life, in particular on the styles of child-rearing in which parents engage.

The traditional nuclear family with the man as breadwinner and the woman as caregiver is still in existence, although it has changed in many respects over recent decades—...

in 1970 it was about 40%, but by 2012 it had fallen to just 20% of U.S. households.

Examining the phenomenon of low marriage rates and high nonmarital births in some communities, sociologists Edin and Kefalas looked at data on low-income white, Black, and Puerto Rican single mothers in Camden, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Black communities have historically had higher nonmarital birthrates and lower rates of marriage than white and Latinx communities, but...

in low-income white and Latinx communities, comparable trends have taken root.

Marriage is only one way in which young people create families today. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, 12% of never-married young adults (25-34) are living with a partner (2020). Parenthood also has become...

increasingly separated from marriage, and a contemporary family may well consist of a never-married mother (or, less commonly, a father) raising a child or children. Today, 33% of millennial mothers have never been married; by contrast, that figure in 1960 was 23%.

Most societies have clear and widely accepted norms regarding the...

institution and practice of marriage that have varied across time and space.

Although families and their structures vary, the family as an...

institution is an organized system of social relationships that both reflects societal norms and expectations and meets important societal needs.

Parsons posited that men were prepared for...

instrumental roles in the public sphere, working and earning money to support the family.

The post-World War II era witnessed a range of...

interconnected social phenomena, including suburbanization supported by federal government initiatives to build a network of highways and encourage home ownership; a boom in economic growth and wages that brought greater consumption power, along with technologies that made the home more comfortable and convenient; and a "baby boom," as a wave of pregnancies delayed by the years of war came to term.

The most common form of domestic violence...

is intimate partner violence.

Although the number of stay-at-home fathers is rising, 63% of fathers say that they do not spend enough time with their children. By contrast, about 35% of mothers say the same. While education is a factor in determining how fathers self-report their time spent with their children,...

it is not a factor for mothers: 69% of fathers who do not have a bachelor's degree say they spend too little time with their children, while 50% of fathers with a bachelor's degree say the same. Employment is a better determining factor for mothers: Only 28% who are unemployed or work part time say they spend too little time with their children, while 43% of full-time working mothers say the same. Parents of both sexes share the sentiment that time spent at work is the biggest obstacle to spending time with children. This is particularly salient in a time when a growing share of women are primary or co-breadwinners in the family.

The family is a...

key social institution.

Coontz points out that tranquilizers, one of many medical innovations of the era, were...

largely consumed by women—and in considerable quantities, at least 1.15 million pounds in 1959 alone.

Middle-class family life is often characterized by a strong commitment to constructive and active child-rearing and to the parents' pursuit of careers. These competing commitments often...

leave parents without the time to do everything or to do it well and feeling rushed and stressed instead of satisfied.

Marriages may be legitimated by...

legal or religious authorities or, in some instances, by the norms of the prevailing culture.

More recent studies have shown that Native American family ties extend across generations. Native American grandparents have shown high levels of involvement in the care of their grandchildren. Native Americans also report high levels of caregiving to their elderly relatives. Indeed, Native American culture and families traditionally emphasize sensitivity toward kin, tribe, and land and value the collective over the individual, in contrast to the mainstream U.S. emphasis on individual fulfillment and achievement. Research on Native Americans of the Southwest suggests that...

many members of these groups see their children as belonging to the entire American Indian nation: to the land, the sky, the tribe, and its history, customs, and traditions.

Many of the health benefits connected with marriage are more pronounced for...

married men than for married women.

Although Bernard's analysis, which is nearly four decades old, cannot fully capture the reality of today's marriages, her recognition that men and women...

may experience marriage in different ways remains an important insight.

The situations of deaf parents raising a hearing child and hearing parents raising a deaf child raise interesting and fundamental questions about what happens when family members are also...

members of different cultures and how the obstacles of difference within a microunit such as the family are negotiated.

The basic nuclear family model, with a mother working in the private sphere of the home while focused on child-rearing and a father working in the public sphere for pay, evolved among...

middle-class families in the late 19th century. It was far less common among the working class at this time; working-class women, in fact, often toiled in the homes of the new middle class as housekeepers and nursemaids.

Bernard's analysis pointed to data showing that married women, ostensibly fulfilled by marriage and family life, and unmarried men, ostensibly privileged by freedom, scored highest on stress indicators, while their unmarried female and married male counterparts scored lowest. Although this was true when Bernard was writing several decades ago, recent social indicators show a...

mix of patterns. Some are similar to those she identified.

Other studies paint a different picture. For instance, an examination of a spectrum of marriage studies determined that married women were less likely to experience depression than their unmarried counterparts. Researchers controlled for such factors as the possibility that less depressed people were...

more likely to get married (which would confound results) and found that self-selection was not an issue. That is, marriage did seem to have positive health effects for women.

Coontz points out that, as the popular imagination suggests, the mother-as-homemaker and father-as-breadwinner model of the nuclear family is...

most characteristic of the widely idealized era of the 1950s.

Chodorow argues that an infant of either sex form his or her initial bond with the...

mother, who satisfies all of the infant's basic needs.

Chodorow suggests that masculinity in boys may thus develop, in part, as a...

negation and marginalization of qualities associated with femininity, which is rejected for both social and psychological reasons.

The functionalist perspective—and Parsons's application of it—has been criticized for...

neglecting power differentials inherent in a relationship where one party (the wife) is economically dependent on the other (the husband).

For close and extended family members to function as caregivers is...

neither new nor unusual.

The traditional nuclear family often appears in popular media and political debates as a...

nostalgic embodiment of values and practices to which U.S. families should return.

Bernard's work gives us an opportunity to look at marriage as a gendered institution—that is,...

one in which gender fundamentally affects the experience of marriage.

Because divorce and remarriage are so common in postindustrial countries such as the United States,...

our marriage pattern might be label serial monogamy.

A growing number of children in the United States live with one or a...

pair of grandparents, although the proportion who live with neither parent is still only 4%.

Families typically confer their own cultural status on their children, but this may not be true for 9 of 10 deaf children born to hearing parents. On the one hand, hearing parents want the same sorts of things for their deaf children as any parents want for their children: happiness, fulfillment, and successful lives as adults. Family dynamics between hearing parents and deaf children are also influenced by the way the parents perceive the condition of the child, namely, whether deafness is seen as a physiological (hearing) and medical problem to be rectified and "normalized," or as an integral part of the child that relates to a sense of identity and belonging. These children often face challenges, such as...

parental disconnectedness, emotional distance, difficulties in developing an identity as a person who is Deaf/Hard of Hearing, and a lack of exposure to deaf culture. Many hearing parents of deaf children would like their children to mainstream into the hearing world as well as possible, in spite of the challenges.

Directives rather than negotiation and explanation, a focus on obedience, and an inclination to care for children's basic needs characterize this style, in which...

parents leave children to play and grow in a largely unstructured environment.

Marriage functioned, from this perspective, to allocate social roles and expectations—but not to women's advantage. In a good example of the sociological imagination, Bernard saw a connection between the...

personal experiences of individual men and women and the norms, roles, and expectations that create the context in which their relationship is lived.

Parsons suggested that the complementary roles were...

positively functional, as they ensured cooperation rather than competition for status or position.

Consider that in the preindustrial era, when the U.S. economy was...

primarily agricultural, families were key social and economic units. Households often included multiple generations and sometimes boarders or farmworkers. Families were typically large, and children were valued for their contributions to a family's economic viability, participating along with the other members in productive activities. Marriages tended to endure; divorce was neither normative nor especially easy to secure. At the same time, average life expectancy was about 45 years.

Parsons believed that the family served the function of...

primary socialization - that is, the process of learning and internalizing social roles and norms (such as those relating to gender).

It may be perpetrated by adults against their children, by one spouse against another, by one sibling against another, or by adult children against their elderly parents. As little as three to four decades ago, domestic violence was rarely studied. Many people regarded violence in the home as a private matter, an attitude that was reflected in lawmaking as well, which...

provided few sanctions for violence that did not reach the level of severe injury or death. Today, domestic violence is understood to be a serious public issue, as researchers have come to realize that it is sadly commonplace.

At the same time, in the slow growth of another trend, more fathers are assuming the primary childcare role in the home. According to one study, about 17% of stay-at-home parents are fathers, up from 10% in 1989. Interestingly, this trend appears to be driven by labor market and health issues more than by changes in social or cultural norms that support more active fathering. Data show that even though 78% of stay-at-home mothers are motivated by a desire to care for the family, only 24% of men offer the same explanation: 40% of stay-at-home fathers indicate that they are at home because they are either ill or disabled. Notably,...

public attitudes about men as primary caregivers are, in spite of myriad changes in family life, still only nominally supportive. Livingston (2014) reports on a Pew Research Center poll in which about 76% of respondents said that they believed children are "just as well off" if their father works, but only 34% said that children are "just as well off" if their mother works, and 51% said that children are "better off" if the mother stays home; only 8% responded that the children are "better off" with the father at home.

Additionally, marriage as an institution does not appear to confer health benefits; rather, it is the...

quality of marriage that matters. Indeed, when studies measure it, marital satisfaction is a much stronger predictor of happiness than just being married, and being in a toxic relationship is decidedly bad for happiness.

The Moynihan Report was widely criticized as...

racist and sexist, and Moynihan was accused of blaming the victims of racism and poverty (primarily Black female heads of household) for their disadvantages. Many critics ignored Moynihan's attention to structural as well as cultural factors in his analysis, however. Although he wrote that "at the center of the tangle of pathology is the weakness of the family structure," he also implicated social phenomena such as unemployment, poverty, and racial segregation in the decline of families and the rise of dysfunctions. Still, critics focused largely on his cultural analysis, and Moynihan's findings were disregarded while sociologists avoided examining the connections among race, family characteristics, and poverty for at least two decades.

Parents across the economic spectrum seek to raise healthy and happy children and to meet the many challenges of shepherding boys and girls from infancy to adulthood. But parenting in poverty presents a...

range of obstacles and fears that well-off families are far less likely to face.

Sexual or marital partnerships outside the endogamous group may be cause for a...

range of sanctions, from family disapproval to social ostracism to legal consequences.

According to one study, people in happy marriages...

rate their health better as they age.

Feminist theories about the family have...

reflected a conflict orientation in its efforts to understand the family as a potential site of both positive support and unequal power.

Critics see Parsons's work as...

reinforcing and legitimating traditional roles.

Accurate data on family violence are difficult to obtain for a variety of reasons. Abused partners or children are...

reluctant to call attention to the fact that they are abused. Police do not want to mediate or make arrests in family conflicts, and even today, the courts are hesitant to intervene in what are often perceived as family matters. Some good estimates of the prevalence of this crime are available, however. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2003 and 2013, domestic violence made up about a fifth of all violent crime in the United States.

Family plays a role in society as a site for the...

reproduction of community and citizenry, socialization and transmission of culture, and the care of the young and old.

Today, parents in the U.S. middle class, particularly its upper fraction, devote an unprecedented amount of resources to child-rearing. Although some of the rising financial outlays are for basic needs and childcare, parents are also committing time and money to enrichment activities intended to give their offspring advantages in competition, education, and the future labor market. More economically advantaged parents are actively engaged in building what Hilary Levey Friedman (2013) calls "competitive kid capital." Friedman's study of 95 families with elementary school-age children who were involved in competitive after-school activities, such as chess, dance, and soccer, found that many parents...

saw their kids' participation in competitive afterschool activities as a way to develop certain values and skills: the importance of winning; the ability to bounce back from a loss to win in the future; to succeed in stressful situations; and to perform under the gaze of others.

Predictably, more recent immigration correlates with a group's stronger ties to its homeland culture. Many scholars are now focusing on the transnational nature of immigrant families. Embodying transnationalism may mean living, working, worshipping, and being politically active in one nation while still maintaining strong political, social, religious, and/or cultural ties to other nations. Family members may...

send money to relatives in their countries of origin, keep in nearly constant contact with those they left behind through modern communication technologies, and travel back and forth between countries frequently to maintain close emotional ties.

Families come in a spectrum of forms, but they...

share important qualities.

Later, the mother pushes a son away emotionally, whereas...

she maintains the bond with a daughter.

In a reversal of a longtime (nearly four-decade) trend in the United States, increasing numbers of mothers are staying home to care for children: In 2016, 27% of mothers reported that they did not work outside the home. About two thirds of today's stay-at-home mothers are part of "traditional" families; that is, they care for children in the home while their husbands work for pay. The rest include...

single and cohabiting women, as well as women whose husbands are unemployed. The shift toward fewer mothers working outside the home is driven by a variety of social, cultural, and economic factors. Mothers remain far more likely than fathers to remain home to care for the family. Other factors include the growing percentage of immigrant women who are mothers, and stagnating wages that have led some women to conclude that the costs of outside childcare outweigh the benefits of working for pay.

At the same time, even though commentators often lament the "decline of the family," most children in the United States still live in two-parent households. More children are living with...

single parents than in the past, but more adults are also living in nonfamily households, consisting of either a single householder or unrelated individuals.

Families as MICRO units in the social order, also serve as...

sites for the allocation of social roles, such as breadwinner and caregiver, and contribute to the economy as consumers.

Over time, children became more of an economic cost than a wage-earning benefit; in a related development, families became...

smaller and began to evolve toward the nuclear family model.

The roots of this difficulty are...

social (society defines men as autonomous and independent) and psychological (the pain of an early break in the mother-son bond results in fear or avoidance of these deep bonds).

The impact of globalization on families depends, to a substantial degree, on...

social class and country or region of residence...

Feminist challenged a social order that gave males privileged access to the sphere offering capitalism's most prized rewards, including...

social status, opportunities for advancement, and economic independence.

Boys develop masculine personalities, but those draw from...

societal models of masculinity (or, sometimes, hypermasculinity) rather than predominantly from their fathers, who take a far less prominent role in child-rearing than do mothers.

The need for a family to have two incomes to make ends meet is one of the reasons for the dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home. The movement of women into the paid workforce has, in turn, provided some women with a degree of economic independence and an opportunity to rethink the meaning of marriage. As women join the paid workforce,...

some postpone marriage until they are older. Couples choose cohabiting as an alternative to marriage, and when they do decide to have children, their families are likely to be smaller. Some may never marry; as we learned earlier, marriage is continuing to decline among young adults.

There is a tension between obedience and trust in this style, suggesting it is characterized by...

something close to distrustful consent born of frustration with authority and dominant institutions but a sense of powerlessness in their presence.

With the decline of marriage, the United States has also experienced a decline in divorce. After rising through the 1960s and 1970s, the rate of divorce has leveled off. There is a relationship between these two phenomena, since a smaller number of marriages reduces the pool of people who can divorce. The rate overall is...

still high, however, and the United States has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, with the rate for second and later marriages exceeding that for first marriages.

Hochschild found that both men and women often derive...

support, companionship, security, pride, and a sense of being valued when they are working. In the absence of family time and kin and community support at home, some parents sought and found—and sometimes preferred—a sense of competence and achievement in the workplace. In about a fifth of the families Hochschild studied, work (rather than home) was the site at which the parents derived the most satisfaction.

A foster parent may be a relative but may also be a nonrelative who has been vetted by authorities. While not all children enter foster care because of a parent's drug addiction, the opioid crisis has been a catalyst in the rise of children needing foster homes. A judge in Indiana (which, together with other parts of the Midwest, has been hard-hit by the opioid crisis) recently noted...

that the intake of children into foster care has more than doubled in the past 2 years in his area.

Bernard understood these gender-differentiated experiences as rooted in...

the cultural and institutional foundations of marriage in the era she studied.

Although prosperity and technology brought new opportunities to many, mass suburbanization largely left behind minorities, including Black Americans, who were not given full access to the government's subsidized mortgages (including mortgages subsidized through the G.I. Bill, which was theoretically available to all returning veterans of World War II) and were often left behind in segregated, devalued neighborhoods. As the jobs followed white workers to the suburbs,...

the economic condition of many Black families and their neighborhoods deteriorated.

The functionalist theory has highlighted...

the economic, social, and cultural functions of the family.

Parsons posited that women were socially prepared for...

the expressive role of mothers and wives.

Many people who are deaf succeed in the hearing world, but they may confront daunting problems. Often, they are not able to speak in a way that hearing people fully understand, and most hearing people do not know ASL. It is not surprising that an estimated 85% of people who are deaf choose to marry others who share their own language and culture or that many deaf parents are wary when their deaf children form relationships with hearing people. When a deaf couple has a hearing child,...

the family must make difficult choices as they negotiate not only the ordinary challenges of child-rearing but also the raising of a child who may be "functionally hearing" but "culturally deaf."

"Factory of personalities"

the family—socialization produces males and females prepared to pursue and fulfill different roles in the family and society.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem of domestic violence. Physicians at a large hospital in Boston saw a near-doubling of the proportion of domestic abuse cases that resulted in physical injury in 2020 in comparison with previous years. The injuries were also more severe, prompting concerns that victims had delayed seeking care even as the violence against them escalated. Additionally,...

the proportion of men and women whose abuse was physical—rather than verbal or emotional—was 80% higher in 2020 than in the previous 3 years put together. With victims isolated for extended periods of time with their abusers and few other social contacts, more opportunities for abuse have presented themselves. Stressors due to the pandemic may have also contributed to an increase in abuse, including the high unemployment rate, loss of savings, and uncertainty of the future.

One reason for the growth of single-person households is...

the rising median age at first marriage, which in 2019 was 30 for men and 28 for women.

Feminists endeavored to critique...

the sexual division of labor.

Although the women from the developing world are, for the most part, agents in their own choice to migrate to countries of the developed world in search of work (unless they are trafficked or tricked into migration), Ehrenreich and Hochschild point to powerful social forces that figure into this choice. On the one hand, many women encounter the push factor of poverty: the choice of facing destitution at home or leaving families behind to earn what are, for them, substantial wages abroad. On the other hand, there is the pull factor of opportunities abroad: their services are welcomed and needed, and they may gain human as well as economic capital. Even though these women make choices,...

their decisions may be driven by strong economic pressures and carry substantial noneconomic costs.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild (2001b) has come to some interesting and perhaps surprising conclusions about this modern dilemma. Hochschild conducted a series of interviews with employees at a well-known Fortune 500 firm that had gone to some lengths to be family friendly, offering flextime, the option of part-time work, parental leave, job sharing, and even a course titled "Work-Life Balance for Two-Career Couples." But she noticed that the family-friendly measures didn't make much of a difference. Most employees said they put "family first," but...

they also felt strained to the limit, and almost none cut back on work time. Few took advantage of parental leave or the option of part-time employment.

While extended families are more common in Eastern and Southern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central and Latin America, in the United States, extended-family form is most common among...

those with lower incomes, in rural areas, and among recent migrants and minorities.

In children, the toll of domestic violence—and its undercount—could be even worse due to the pandemic. Most cases of physical abuse against children are...

typically identified by teachers and school administrators; however, due to school closures and remote learning replacements, teachers lack the ability to easily identify such abuse. Thus, most cases of physical injury at the hands of a caregiver are more unlikely to be identified unless they are serious enough to prompt a visit to a doctor.

Census Bureau data show that about one fifth of the U.S. population has some kind of disability. How does disability affect family life? In this subsection, we examine the case of people who are deaf and the choices and challenges that family life brings for them. According to Gallaudet University (2012) figures, in 2012, approximately 13% of the U.S. population had hearing problems that may range from being fully deaf to being hard of hearing. Fewer than 1 in 1,000 were deaf before the age of 18; more than half became deaf at some point after childhood. Family life poses...

unique challenges for many people who are deaf, and as a consequence, some prefer to practice endogamy, marrying others who are deaf and therefore share a common experience.

Chodorow's work on sex roles and socialization in the family offers a...

unique marriage of Freud and feminism that is both challenging and compelling, asking us to consider the effects that psychological processes in early childhood have on social institutions.

An example of family involvement in child-rearing outside the immediate parents is found in Sioux families. This involvement begins early in a child's life, when a second set of parents are selected for the newborn. Therefore, the total family involved in child-rearing and support includes...

unrelated members of the Indian community. This community support and protection can be viewed as responsibility for others' actions.

The polygynist practice of a man taking multiple wives is...

unusual (and not legally recognized) in the United States, but according to researchers at Brigham Young University, an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 U.S. residents practice polygamy.

Working-class parents have been observed by some researchers to...

value respect for authority, obedience, and a higher degree of conformity and to rely on punishment when these norms are violated.

Middle- and upper-class families tend to...

value self-direction and individual initiative in their children.

Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique highlighted "the problem that has no name," a broad discontent born of women's exclusion from or marginalization in the workplace and the disconnect between their low status and opportunities and society's expectation that marriage and children...

were the ultimate feminine fulfillment.

Macrolevel processes of globalization affect U.S. families in a variety of ways. In this section, we examine the dual phenomena of international families and the global woman to emphasize some of the microlevel effects of globalization on women, particularly...

women from the developing world.

There is some correlation between...

women's assumption of autonomous roles outside the home and the rise of divorce.

Although early theorizing about the family highlighted its structure and roles as well as its evolution from the agricultural to the industrial era, feminist theorizing in the late 20th century turned its attention to...

women's experience of domestic life and their status in the family and social world.

Choosing who will care for a young child is a highly personal decision for a family, but there are some discernible patterns in childcare arrangements by socioeconomic status. For example, poorer fathers are more likely to be stay-at-home parents than are their better-off male peers. As well,...

working mothers who hold college degrees are most likely to use center-based childcare, which is often costly.