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Chapter 11. Families and Intimate Relationships. Questions for you. What have been some of the most significant changes in marriages and families within the United States during your lifetime? What social events can account for these changes?
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Chapter 11 Families and Intimate Relationships
Questions for you • What have been some of the most significant changes in marriages and families within the United States during your lifetime? • What social events can account for these changes? • What are some current trends that are affecting marriage and family relationships today? • How might families of the future be organized?
Chapter Outline • Families in Global Perspective • Theoretical Perspectives on Families • Developing Intimate Relationships and Establishing Families • Child-Related Family Issues and Parenting • Transition and Problems in Families • Family Issues in the Future
Traditional Definition of Family • A group of people who are related by blood, marriage, or adoption, live together, are an economic unit, and bear and raise children. • How might the definition of family be changing today to reflect current social norms and realities?
New Definition of Family • Relationships in which people live together with commitment, form an economic unit and care for any young, and consider their identity to be significantly attached to the group.
How Much Do You Know About Contemporary Trends in U.S. Family Life? • True or False? • Most U.S. family households are composed of a married couple with one or more children under age 18.
How Much Do You Know About Trends in U.S. Family Life? • False. • Less than 25 percent of all family households are composed of married couples with one or more children under age 18.
How Much Do You Know About Trends in U.S. Family Life • True or False? • Recent studies have found that adult children of divorced parents are more likely to dissolve their own marriages than they were two decades ago.
How Much Do You Know About Trends in U.S. Family Life? • False. • Adult children of divorced parents are less likely to dissolve their own marriages than they were two decades ago.
Family Structure and Characteristics • Kinship refers to a social network of people based on common ancestry, marriage, or adoption. • Family of orientation is the family into which a person is born and in which early socialization usually takes place. • Family of procreation is the family a person forms by having or adopting children.
Family Structure and Characteristics • An extended family is composed of relatives in addition to parents and children who live in the same household. • A nuclear family is composed of one or two parents and their dependent children, all of whom live apart from other relatives.
Polling Question • The strength of the American family is declining. • Strongly agree • Agree somewhat • Unsure • Disagree somewhat • Strongly disagree
Marriage • Legally recognized arrangement between two or more individuals that carries certain rights and obligations. • Monogamy is the only form of marriage sanctioned by law in the United States. • Establishes a system of descent so kinship can be determined.
Monogamy • A marriage between two partners, usually a woman and a man. • Through a pattern of marriage, divorce, and remarriage, some people practice serial monogamy—a succession of marriages in which a person has several spouses over a lifetime but is legally married to only one person at a time.
Polygamy • The concurrent marriage of a person of one sex with two or more members of the opposite sex. • The most prevalent form of polygamy is polygyny—the concurrent marriage of one man with two or more women. • Polyandry is the concurrent marriage of one woman with two or more men.
Patterns of Unilineal Descent • Patrilineal descent traces descent through the father’s side of the family. • Matrilineal descent is a system of tracing descent through the mother’s side of the family.
Bilineal Descent • Tracing kinship through both parents. • The most common form is bilateral descent. • A system of tracing descent through both the mother’s and father’s sides of the family.
Power and Authority in Families • A patriarchal family is a family structure in which authority is held by the eldest male. • A matriarchal family is a family structure in which authority is held by the eldest female. • An egalitarian family is a family structure in which both partners share power and authority equally.
Residential Patterns • Patrilocal residence refers to a married couple living in the same household as the husband’s family. • Matrilocal residence refers to a married couple living in the same household as the wife’s parents. • Neolocal residence refers to a married couple living in their own residence apart from the husband’s and the wife’s parents.
Endogamy and Exogamy • Endogamy is the practice of marrying within one’s own group. • In the United States, most people marry people who come from the same social class, racial–ethnic group, religious affiliation, and other categories considered important within their own social group. • Exogamy is the practice of marrying outside one’s own social group or category.
Functionalist Perspective: Four Functions of Families • Sexual regulation • Socialization • Economic and psychological support for members. • Provision of social status and reputation.
Conflict Perspective • Families in capitalist economies are similar to workers in a factory. • Women are dominated at home the same way workers are dominated in factories. • Reproduction of children and care for family members reinforce subordination of women through unpaid labor.
Symbolic Interactionist Perspective • How family problems are perceived and defined depends on: • Patterns of communication. • The meanings people give to roles and events. • Individual interpretations of family interactions.
Postmodern Perspective • Families are diverse and fragmented. • Boundaries between workplace and home are blurred. • Family problems are related to cyberspace and consumerism in an age characterized by high-tech “haves and have-nots.”
Cohabitation • Refers to two people who live together, and think of themselves as a couple, without being legally married. • A recent study of 11,000 women found that there was a 70% marriage rate for women who remained in a cohabiting relationship for at least 5 years. • Of the women in that study who married their partner, 40% became divorced within a 10-year period.
Domestic Partnerships • Household partnerships in which an unmarried couple lives together in a committed, sexually intimate relationship and is granted the same rights and benefits as those accorded to married heterosexual couples.
Why People Get Married • Being "in love." • Desiring companionship and sex. • Wanting to have children. • Social pressure. • Attempting to escape from their parents' home. • Believing they will have greater resources.
Homogamy • The pattern of individuals marrying those who have similar characteristics, such as race/ethnicity, religious background, age, education, or social class.
Housework and Child-Care Responsibilities • Today, more than 50% of all marriages in the United States are dual-earner marriages—marriages in which both spouses are in the labor force. • In 2004, more than 74% of employed mothers with children under age 6 worked full time • Many married women work a full day then go home to perform hours of housework and child care. • Sociologist Arlie Hochschild refers to this as the second shift.
Deciding to Have Children • Sociologists suggest fertility is linked not only to reproductive technologies but also to women’s beliefs about whether they have opportunities that are viable alternatives to childbearing. • The desire not to have children often comes in conflict with our society’s pronatalist bias, which assumes having children is the norm.
Infertility • Defined as an inability to conceive after a year of unprotected sexual relations. • Infertility affects nearly five million U.S. couples, or one in twelve couples in which the wife is between the ages of fifteen and forty four.
Adoption • A legal process through which the rights and duties of parenting are transferred from a child’s biological and/or legal parents to a new legal parent or parents. • This gives the adopted child all the rights of a biological child.
Teen Pregnancy • The United States has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the Western industrialized world. • In 2003 the total number of live births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 19 was 59.9.
Primary Reasons for Teen Pregnancy: Microlevel • Many sexually active teens don’t use contraceptives. • Teenagers may receive little accurate information about the use of contraception. • Some teenage males believe females should be responsible for contraception. • Some teenagers view pregnancy as a way to gain adult status.
Myths of Teenage Fathers • They engage in sex early and often. • They sexually exploit unsuspecting females. • They have a need to prove their masculinity. • They have few emotional feelings for the women they impregnate. • They are rarely involved in caring for their children.
Single Parenting • 42% of white children and 86% of African American children spend part of their childhood in a single parent household. • Lesbian and gay parents are often counted as single parents, however many share parenting with partner.
Two-Parent Households • Parenthood in the United States is idealized, especially for women. • Children in two-parent families are not guaranteed a happy childhood simply because both parents reside in the same household.
Polling Question • It is better for everyone if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family. • Strongly agree • Agree somewhat • Unsure • Disagree somewhat • Strongly disagree
Two Important Facts About Families • Families are central to our existence. • The reality of family life is far more complicated than the idealized image of families found in the media and in many political discussions.
Characteristics of Those Likely to Get Divorced • Marriage at an early age. • A short acquaintanceship before marriage. • Disapproval of the marriage by relatives and friends. • Limited economic resources.
Characteristics of Those Likely to Get Divorced • Having a high-school education or less. • Parents who are divorced or have unhappy marriages. • The presence of children at the beginning of the marriage.
Divorce • The legal process of dissolving a marriage that allows former spouses to remarry if they so choose. • Recent studies have shown that 43 % of first marriages end in separation or divorce within 15 years.
Blended Families • Some people become part of blended families, which consist of a husband and wife, children from previous marriages, and children (if any) from the new marriage.
1. A social network of people based on common ancestry, marriage, or adoption is: • family of orientation • Kinship • family • ethnic group
