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Get the answer of: Is Nuclear Family the Product of Industrialism?
1. In the first place, there is the widely held view that in pre-industrial society of Europe the joint or extended family was in vogue. Such a family fulfilled the various needs of its members—economic, educational, recreational, ensuring social security, etc.
But with the advent of industrialisation, the modern family was stripped of these functions and “reduced to a pale shadow of its former ample self”. Modern family is viewed, in its ideal form,” as a nuclear-family group living in its own house independency of other kin and subsisting upon the wages or salary of the husband-father”.
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It is further pointed out that “falling birth rates, an increase in the incidence of divorce, a decline in home food-processing, clothes making, and so on” signify “a decline in family living and a shift toward increasing individualism and material values”.
2. Secondly, Talcott Parsons and others have argued that the family system of the urban U.S. is not a denuded form of a more ‘normal” or ‘natural’ family system but is itself a highly specialised form that fits in more satisfactorily with a highly differentiated economic and political system and with institutionalised values that stress achievement rather than ascription.
Parsons views the emergence of the isolated nuclear family in terms of his theory of social evolution. The. evolution of society involves a process of ‘structural differentation’. This means that during the process of evolution social institutions evolve which specialise in fewer functions. It is, therefore, nothing surprising that the family and kinship groups no longer perform a wide rage of functions.
Instead specialist institutions, such as schools, hospitals, business firms, factories, etc. take over many of the functions of the family. Parsons further argues that there is a functional relationship between the isolated nuclear family and the economic system in industrial society. The isolated nuclear family is required to make suitable adaptations in response to the requirements of industrial society.
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It is argued that the smallness and relative isolation of the family from other kinship ties is an adaptation that makes possible the spatial and status mobility of its members which is required by the modern industrial system.
Individuals with specialised skills are required to move to places where those skills are in demand. Parsons gives another instance to establish his thesis. In an industrial society, status is achieved rather than ascribed.
That-is, individuals are judged in terms of the status they achieve. Such judgments are based on what Parsons calls ‘universalistic values”, i.e. values that are universally applicable to all members of society. Within the family, however, status is ascribed. Such ascription is based on what Parsons calls ‘particularistic values’, i.e. values that are applicable to particular individuals only.
Parsons argues that in an extended family these two kinds of values may be a source of conflict within the family. Thus, if the father is a factory mechanic and the son a doctor or an engineer, the particularistic values of family life would give the father a higher status and a more dominant position in the family.
The universalistic values, on the other hand, would give the son a higher social status which might tend to undermine the authority of the father. Conflict may thus arise and threaten the solidarity of the family. The isolated nuclear family largely prevents such conflicts of values from arising. In other words, the nuclear family is an adaptation to the requirements of industrial society.
3. Thirdly, the functional interpretation of the importance of nuclear family, as given by Parsons, is considerably weakened by the work of Peter Laslett, the Cambridge historian. The work of Laslett indicates that the pre-industrial family system in England did not have large extended families occupying single dwellings.
On the contrary, the nuclear-family household seems to have been the normal type of dwelling group. Laslett found that from 1564 to 1821 only about 10 p.c. of households contained kin beyond the nuclear family. The percentage is the same for England in 1966.
One explanation for this surprisingly low figure is that people in pre- industrial England married rather late in life and that life expectancy was short, with the result that within a few years of the marriage of a couple, their parents died.
Whatever be the explanation, Laslett found no evidence that extended family was widespread in pre- industrial England that gave way to the small nuclear household of modern industrial society.
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It is, therefore, suggested that it was not industrialisation that produced the nuclear family. On the contrary, the nuclear family may have been one of the factors encouraging the development of the industrial revolution in England.
That is, if the nuclear family has been the major form of European family structure for many centuries, pre-dating the industrial revolution, and if this family form was the product of social values rather than of demographic or other constraints, then the modern family forms may be simply the continuation of culturally preferred form.