Industrialisation + Family (Sociology)

Industrialisation is where the country begins to expand in producing secondary goods and services using factories and transport. This allowed extended families to become wage earner that meant they were able to work for someone else other than their selves and their families. This was important as extended families consisted of the children and their parents but also grandparents or aunts and uncles. So having a large family meant everyone had to contribute financially, also with educating the younger generation and be able to look after each other and be seen as doctors for one another. Extended families were very common in Pre- Industrial England because all family members were able to support each other through difficult time and their work would be more physically demanding than Industrial England, but this work would be to support the family as it would be farming on their own land. When Industrialisation took over England the extended family were no longer needed as all the functions that they would perform for the family were lost as they were now the States responsibility so this no longer gave a purpose for extended families to stick together. Also as family had to work for others this meant that the economy demanded a more geographically mobile workforce. This then allowed families to become the nuclear family as they had to move around in order to gain a job and moving around with a large family would become very costly or simply the older generations within the family may have got ill very easily so becoming the nuclear family was the best option for families as this meant they were able to survive as they would have not if they did not move around looking for jobs.

Parsons agreed that Industrialisation did lead to the decline of extended families and the rise of nuclear families. He suggested that before Industrialisation families were large and extended and that Industrialisation created the isolated nuclear family. He believed that geographical