Family Changes For The Past 60 Years

This has complicated the consensus about family structure and components because many families have unique traits which cannot be associated with certain traditional norms, beliefs, and standards. Given that there is no consenus about the ideal definition and componets of the current family structure, this paper evaluates the ways families have changed for the past 60 years with a keen interest to the reasons as to why family is an important agent of socialization, the courses and causes of family changes, and the influences of race, gender, class, and personal choice in marriage and family. Also, the paper will evaluate the impacts of this trend on the society and the way the women’s rights would have been affected if the trend changed toward traditional family structures.

Family An Important Agent Of Socialization Majority of the sociologists such as the functionalists believe that family is the most important agent of primary socialization. The reasoning behind this argument is that family is the primary institution of socialization which performs the essential functions of socializing the young and satisfies the emotional need of its members. The remaining families include single-parent families, families whose parents live together but not married while others live with families where both parents are of the same gender. Typically, these changes can be grouped into two categories including changes in the household structures and work and family lives. Changes In The Household Structure The current family has experienced changed in the household structures as compared to the structures during the 1960s.

These changes in the family structures have influenced a decrease in the fertility rate and aging populations which are associated with the growing share of the childless children in the United States and several countries in the world (Livingston, 2014). Additionally, the changing trends of the marriage rates and divorce rates have contributed profoundly to the increase of single-family structures. This is because current mothers take shorter breaks from the paid works just before and after they give birth (Cowan, 2018). After this period, children are left in daycares and other babysitting institutions which in turn shift the essential parental roles to other individuals and guardians. Family Versus Class, Race, Gender, And Personal Choice Despite these changes, the family lives and marriages have maintained their correlations with class, race, gender, and personal preference.

In the context of class, lower class families experience numerous challenges to sustain themselves since they lack economic opportunities which in turn reduce the likelihood of marriages in these households (Collins, 2016). Meanwhile, the middle-class families are ideal because they have admittance to security lifestyles opportunities such as medical treatments. Therefore, changing the family trend into the traditional family will change the women’s rights. Impacts Of Family Changes In my view, the changing trend to diverse families is favorable to the societies. To exemplify, the traditional families which included married coupled and children made it problematic for the families to adopt parentless children or orphans. However, the changes in these family structures have enabled different families to adopt children since some alternative arrangements of families such as same-sex marriage depend on adoption as the only course of having children in the family.

Also, these changes have helped the current society to embrace equality in economic, social, political and academic fields as women are playing different roles in the current family structures as compared to the past family structures. The “industrial revolution” in the home: household technology and social change in the twentieth century. In The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender (pp. Routledge. Drucker, P.  The age of discontinuity: Guidelines to our changing society.  Race, ethnicity, gender, and class: The sociology of group conflict and change. Sage Publications. Livingston, G. Less than half of US kids today live in a ‘traditional’family.  Pew Research Center. Adolescents' prosocial behavior toward family, friends, and strangers: A person‐centered approach.  Journal of Research on Adolescence, 25(1), 135-150.