Why is it important to think in terms of the family’s ‘structure’ having changed, and how is this
different from the way we usually think about changes to family life?
You’re probably familiar with the basic elements of the narrative about how family life has
changed over the centuries.We’ve supposedly moved from a ‘traditional’ family structure, with lots of children and large households including
grandparents, siblings and cousins, to a ‘nuclear’ family of only two parents and 2.5 children.
I say ‘supposedly’, because there is some argument about whether this was actually what
happened in countries like England, but I’ll have to leave that for another lecture!
This shift is often seen as having been driven by a number of factors, such as urbanisation, the
requirement of capitalism for a mobile labour force, and the rise of individualism accompanied
by a reluctance to settle down and raise children.
Since the 1960s, furthermore, the nuclear model of a mum, dad, and two biologically related
children has also weakened, as single parent families, step-families, childless couples, and
same-sex couples become more common and socially accepted,
couples more frequently have and raise their children without being married, and women
spend an increasing proportion of their lives in the paid workforce, with a significant impact on the form taken by family life.
The growing acceptance of same-sex relationships, same-sex parenting and same-sex
marriage in many countries is one of the more contemporary examples of a change in how the
concept of ‘the family’ has come to be altered significantly.
One influential family sociologist, Judith Stacey, goes so far as to say...
Although these changes are often
understood as changes in attitudes and norms, they need to be understood as bound up with
particular processes of economic change, with scientific and technological changes, such as the
introduction of oral contraception and the development of artificial insemination techniques,
and to legal reforms, such as the abolition of the concept of ‘fault’ in divorce proceedings.
In more general terms they are connected to a variety of broader social, cultural, economic and
political changes which constantly exert pressures on the family.
In many respects being a worker under capitalism is actually fundamentally in tension with being a
committed family member, which is why as early as 1937, the American sociologist of the family
Kingsley Davis wrote that....
Let’s look, then, at a selection of the more important of those shifts underpinning the structural changes in family life.
First, the economic position of the family has been transformed dramatically, and continues to change.
In pre-industrial society, with life organized around farming and only a little manufacturing,
most economic activity took place within the family, including the activities of children.
With the rise of industrial capitalism and ever- expanding urbanisation, the worlds of work and
family became increasingly separated, with economic activity shifting to the factory and the office.
Part of this transformation has included an increasing requirement that both parents in a family take on paid work.
For the majority of families, the cost of housing and everyday living simply cannot be covered by only one income.
For much of the 20th century – in Australia since the 1907 Harvester Judgement – the accepted
understanding of a ‘living wage’ was that it was also a ‘family wage’, sufficient to support not only
a single male worker, but also their wife and children.
This had the related effect of keeping women’s wages lower than men’s, since the assumption in
the concept of the family wage was that men, not women, were the “breadwinners”.
However, since the 1970s, wages overall have declined, housing, living and consumption costs
have gradually increasing, as have the costs of raising children, and it has become increasingly
an economic necessity that both parents be active in the paid labour force.
The nature of the work has also changed, shifting from manufacturing to service sectors of
the economy, removing the advantages that men used to be able to claim in their ability to perform
the required tasks in, say, a factory or an industrial plant, and creating new employment
sectors where women could perform as well if not better than men.
Another element of the transition from traditional to modern society has been the movement from
larger to smaller household size, and to declining fertility.
As John Caldwell, the famous Australian demographer, put it:
One, possibly over-simplified, explanation of long- term fertility decline from the late nineteenth
century onwards, then, is that as children move from being contributors to the family economy, to
spending an increasing proportion of their childhood at school and so becoming increasingly
expensive to raise, people are compelled by pure economic necessity to restrict the number of children they have.
Second, the cultural norms surrounding how males and females relate to each other have
changed, and this has been an important driver of the transformation of family life.
These shifts included a rejection of the idea that only men should pursue education and a career,
with an increasing emphasis on women being independent, capable and talented individuals in
their own right, rather than merely decorative appendages to their “breadwinner” husbands.
This has also played a role in the fertility decline, since it had an effect on the age at which women have children.
If a woman has following a particular educational trajectory and has a fulfilling career, this is a
strong incentive to delay child-bearing until the time is right, as well as to delay having
subsequent children, and this has a significant impact on the broader fertility rate.
Generally higher levels of educational qualifications and socioeconomic position are
associated with lower fertility rates, which explains why fertility rates began to drop as more
people began to attend university and women’s workforce participation increased.
It’s become less accepted that housework and childcare is entirely ‘women’s work’, even though
the balance still remains tilted in that direction.
Men’s relationship to their children is understood differently, with a greater expectation that they
form close relationships with them and strike a different balance between the time they spend at work and the time they are at home.
It’s possible to overestimate the extent of this shift, because women still spend far more time on
childcare than men do, but the changes have not been insignificant either.
Third, how people experience their emotions and how they understand the meaning of intimacy has shifted.
This includes changing attitudes to variety in sexual expression, and in particular greater acceptance of homosexual partnership.
In many respects the expectation of an intimate partnership have become more demanding,
requiring greater emotional intelligence and communicative skills from both partners, but
especially from men in their relationships with both their partners and their children.
A kind of societal learning process has also taken place in relation to marriage, in the sense that
over time it’s become apparent that marriage vows in themselves are no guarantee of
emotional commitment or a loving and caring relationship.
People have correspondingly become increasingly inclined to look for other indicators that their partnership is worthwhile, cohabiting
before marriage, which in turn makes marriage less essential for a fulfilling and meaningful intimate relationship.
Most sociologists will agree with Andrew J Cherlin that...
Legal recognition of de facto relationships has also made it a more attractive option these days, as partners in de facto relationships have the
same rights and obligations to those in a marriage with regards to property settlement, custody of children and financial responsibilities.
An important element of this broader change has been that the acceptance of aggression and violence, in particular in the domestic and intimate
sphere, has declined, and this has contributed to frequency with which couples separate and divorce.
In this sense, like many others, lower rates of marriage and higher rates of divorce can be
interpreted as the result, not of a devaluing of the family, but precisely of having higher
expectations of what family life should be like, with people less willing to tolerate violence and abusive family relationships.
The removal of the requirement to show which partner was at fault in divorce proceedings is
often presented as having had an important causal influence in the increase in the divorce rate since the 1970s.
Although it true that the introduction of no-fault divorce made separation much easier and was
indeed accompanied by a significant increase in the divorce rate, it’s not really correct to see this legal change as an independent factor.
In reality, it was part of a package of changes, and there were already a variety of factors
creating the conditions for increased rates of separation and divorce, which the no-fault legal
regime facilitating rather than causing the larger numbers of couples divorcing.
These are only some of the more general social, cultural and economic changes that have been
connected with the structural transformation of family life.
What’s important to keep in mind is that when we are considering changes to the family, often what
we are really observing are the flow-on effects from other types of changes that we have come
to accept as unavoidable features of modern society, and it’s important to keep an eye on the
relationships between these different but connected processes of social change.