mad con

Aim: Using information from Items A,B and C and elsewhere, assess the view that the Nuclear Family functions to benefit all it’s members and society as a whole. (24 marks).

This essay is asking me to weigh up that the ‘Nuclear Family’ is beneficial to it’s family ‘members’ and ‘society’ or if the ‘Nuclear Family’ is not beneficial to it’s members and society. This will involve me to examine the Functionalist, Marxist, Feminist and Radical-Feminist perspectives.

From the functionalist perspective on the role of the nuclear family, this is thought to benefit society and its members according to functionalists such as Talcott Parsons and Ronald Fletcher that such families help to keep society together by teaching the new generation its values like its language and history. The two researchers identify that in caring nuclear families the children are brought up according to parental expectation.
Fletcher states that the nuclear family benefits society by fulfilling ‘essential’ functions through provision of health care, child benefit, council housing, etc. Whereas, Parsons views the family as a positive and beneficial place for all it’s members where the home is a place in which people can be their natural selves using phrases such as ‘home sweet home’ and ‘haven in a heartless world’. In contrast, there is considerable opinion to support the disapprovals of these above perspectives with evidence of child abuse, domestic violence and divorce. Therefore this clearly shows that these ‘dysfunctional relationships’, are not an asset to its members and contemporary society and is a major problem which is supported by the daily reporting of domestic abuse in whatever form this occurs.

Another functionalist, Murdock strongly believes that the main role of a family is to have sex in an approved manner which is based on religious doctrine as so therefore excludes deviations such as homosexuality, incest and sodomy. Sex within this family structure is the moral platform from which the next generation are conceived and raised. The family then acts as the role model as to how their offspring interact with the society and at the same time providing food and shelter. Murdock goes on to suggest that the above functions are carried out in nuclear families because they are necessary for stability. Parsons, another functionalist of the 1950s, argued that the international community of families performed to important roles. The first of these was the primary socialisation of children which ensures that the accepted norms are transferred from one generation to the next analogous to a production line in a factory where the end product is consistently the same. The second of his premises is the stabilisation of human personalities. Here, the role of the family is to help stabilise the personality changes that can result from the external pressures of survival by sexual division with a clear demarcation in gender roles. Both these sociologists present the family in a utopian perspective which underplays the other immoral side as mentioned in the previous paragraph. The family can come to represent hell on earth where children are psychologically damaged by inter-parental conflict.

From the Marxist perspective on the role of the nuclear family, Marxists do not observe the nuclear family as a functionally essential institution. Marxists say that the nuclear family is troubled with teaching its members to accept to the capitalist class and emphasize the ways the family reproduces unequal relationships and social conflict. According to the Marxist Althusser had argued similarly stating that, in order for capitalism to survive, the working class must accept agree to the ruling class/bourgeoisie. He suggested that the family is one of the main means of passing on the ideology (ideas and beliefs) of the ruling class. Through this process, the ruling class tries to sustain false class consciousness by engaging the heart and minds of the working class. The criticisms of the Marxist views on the family are evident from suggestions made from Anthropologists that the nuclear family didn’t actually submit to the ruling class and with the emergence of capitalism. The Marxist views above shows to ignore family diversity as it sees the nuclear family as being simply single-minded by the economy and that the family is a unit of consumption provided by capitalism.

The Feminist perspectives are often a more critical expansion of Marxist views on the family as this focuses more upon the cruelty to women from the roles of the family that take place in the household. Feminists have been critical of the effects of family life on women such as the housework and its contribution to the economy, domestic violence, the negative effects of family life on women’s careers in paid employment and the continuing inequality between men and women in the family. Through these circumstances, the family with its use of women serves the needs and continues capitalism. Marxist feminists, Ansley says that emotional support in family stabilises male workers, making them less likely to take their frustrations out on the system. Feeley says that the family values and teaches respect as then children learn to accept hierarchy and their position within it. However, the criticisms of this view show that the Marxist Feminists such as Ansley and Feeley tend to ignore the diversity of modern family life assuming that everyone lives in heterosexual nuclear families.
Marxist Feminists tend to explain a very negative picture of family life, possibly exaggerated.
Finally to conclude these perspectives assume that women are portrayed as passive victims in the family through exploitation. This is not true as some women choose to do full-time housewives/mothers because they enjoy it and find it fulfilling and rewarding and make it their own decision to do it and not forced by others. Although, many do choose to take paid employment and combine it with the responsibilities of housework/childcare.

Radical feminism sees gender mistreatment as the most important social division in society. More important than class, ethnicity etc. Many radical feminist writers see patriarchy the main obstacle to women’s freedom as Patriarchy is all persistent and extremely harmful from the system of male dominance. Anthropologists such as Edmund Leach and radical psychiatrists R.D. Laing and David Cooper say that life in the nuclear family might be far from pleasant. The Edmund Leach claims that the decline of the extended family has isolated the nuclear family and placed emotional demands upon it which are intolerable. The inevitable result is conflict both within the nuclear family and within societies as a whole as the nuclear family creates barriers between it and the wider society gaining fear and social conflict. R.D. Laing had made similar arguments, claiming that the nuclear family critically controls the process of self-development. David Cooper concludes that the family controls the development of the self and conditions its members not to accept the shared norms and values of a pleasant society, but to agree to a capitalist one. The studies of Leach, Laing and Cooper have been criticised for many reasons which means that the conclusions of these studies should not be assumed to dishonour the functionalist theories totally. Therefore critics have argued that none of these theorists have accomplished detailed work in industrial societies and Laing’s and Cooper’s research is based only on families where one member has been defined as schizophrenic. They do not attempt to relate the family to other aspects of the social structure such that for example there is no consideration of the relationship between class and family life. Also Laing may have under-estimated the amount to which tolerant attitudes also come forward in the family and intolerant attitudes are received from causes other than the family.
Arguments to say that the Nuclear Family does function to benefit all its members and society show from the family socializing children into the shared norms and values leading to social harmony and stability. Also the sexual labour in the family where the men perform the instrumental roles and women performing expressive roles, which as a result stabilizes adult personalities to maintain a stable society. Arguments to say that the Nuclear Family does not function to benefit its members and society show from the family meeting the needs of capitalism by socializing children into ruling class ideology, leading to the passive and obedient workforce, with false consciousness, and stability for capitalism. This does not benefit society as a whole as it only benefits the capitalist society. My judgement to this question is that I agree with the functionalist view that the nuclear family helps to benefit both members and society because the main functions for the family in my view is to provide stability for the rearing of children, to teach the norms and values in which builds value consensus to maintain a stable society and to provide food and shelter for its family members. From my experiences, the functionalist view is the most common view as my family also share these functions because the family is there to support its members in order for both the society and members, to survive. To conclude on my essay, Functionalism is the most related to the question, then Marxism, then Marxism Feminism and then finally Radical Feminism as the least in my outlook.