7.3 Theoretical Perspectives on Marriage and the Family

Functionalism

When considering the role of family in society, functionalists uphold the notion that families continue to be an important social institution that plays a key role in stabilizing society. They also note that family members take on roles within a marriage or family, which are determined by the functions required to keep families operational and viable. The family and its members are functional components in a social system whose performance facilitates the continuity, prosperity and development of society.

One of the socialization functions of the family is to teach children gender roles. The functionalist Talcott Parsons (1943) emphasized that in each family, there is a division of labour that consists of instrumental and expressive roles. In the past, men tended to assume the instrumental or breadwinning roles in the family, which typically involve work outside of the family that provides financial support and establishes family status. Women tended to assume the expressive or nurturing roles, which typically involve work inside the family, including providing emotional support and physical care for children (Crano and Aronoff, 1978). The differentiation of the roles was seen as performing a specific role and function that helped maintain the functioning of the family as a whole. Defined roles was also seen to reduce internal competition for status within the family, and ambiguity about the status of the family in the external community.

Today, how have these roles evolved? And what function do they serve for the family and society as a whole?  What challenges exist with this evolution? For example, stay-at-home dads are becoming more common today but their non-traditional role may produces ambiguity and uncertainty in their claim to status in the community (e.g., being seen as not ‘really’ working). Working women, on the other hand, may also find themselves pulled in different directions between expectations from work and expectations that they continue their homemaker roles within the family. Canadian sociologist Andrea Doucet (2024) tackles some of these questions through interviews with fathers and mothers. How do parents navigate and negotiate ‘caring’ and ‘breadwinning’ responsibilities?

Conflict Theory

This perspective adopts a historical lens to examine the economic structures and power relationships that influence family forms and processes (Comacchio, 2000). Sociologists working in the Marxist tradition emphasize the ways in which family relationships are entwined with the changing structures of work.  Firstly, until the 20th century families were the main site of economic production and consumption. As economic activity separated from the home, families became dependent on the fluctuations of wage labour while still remaining a main unit of consumption and economic collaboration.

Secondly, families continued to play a key role in the reproduction of labour power — feeding, clothing, replenishing, raising, and socializing. The ability of family members to do work depends on the family. Dorothy Smith therefore described home and family as “integral parts of, and moments in, a mode of production” (Smith, 1985). For sociologists like Smith, the dynamics of home and family cannot be analyzed independently of the capitalist economic and political structures that organize them and give them their particular forms.

For example, one development is the transition from the feudal family unit, as the basis of production and consumption, to the capitalist family, where economic life moves outside of the home, was the redefinition of public and private spheres. North American families came to be defined as private entities, the consequence of which (historically) has been to see family matters as issues concerning only those within the family. Serious issues including domestic violence and child abuse, inequality between the sexes, the right to dispose of family property equally, and so on, have been historically treated as being outside of state, legal, or police jurisdiction. The feminist slogan of the 1960s and 1970s — “the personal is the political” — indicates how feminists began to draw attention to the broad social or public implications of matters long considered private or inconsequential.

Symbolic Interactionism

Interactionists view the world in terms of symbols and the meanings assigned to them (LaRossa and Reitzes, 1993). The family itself is a symbol. To some, it is a father, mother, and children; to others, it is any union that involves respect and compassion. Interactionists stress that family is not an objective, concrete reality. Like other social phenomena, it is a social construct that is subject to the ebb and flow of social norms and ever-changing meanings.

Consider the meaning of other elements of family: “parent” was a symbol of a biological and emotional connection to a child. With more parent-child relationships developing through adoption, remarriage, or change in guardianship, the word “parent” today is less likely to be associated with a biological connection than with whoever is socially recognized as having the responsibility for a child’s upbringing. Similarly, the terms “mother” and “father” are no longer rigidly associated with the meanings of caregiver and breadwinner. These meanings are more free-flowing through changing family roles.

Interactionists also recognize how the family status roles of each member are socially constructed, which plays an important part in how people perceive and interpret social behaviour. Interactionists view the family as a group of role players or “actors” that come together to act out their parts in an effort to construct a family. These roles are up for interpretation. In the late 19th and early 20th century, a “good father,” for example, was one who worked hard to provide financial security for his children. Today, a “good father” is one who takes the time outside of work to promote his children’s emotional well-being, social skills, and intellectual growth — in some ways, a much more daunting task.

Symbolic interactionism therefore draws our attention to how the norms that define what a “normal” family is, and how it should operate, come into existence. The rules and expectations that coordinate the behaviour of family members are products of social processes and joint agreement, even if the agreements are tacit or implicit. In this perspective, norms and social conventions are not regarded as permanently fixed by functional requirements or unequal power relationships. Rather, new norms and social conventions continually emerge from ongoing social interactions to make family structures intelligible in new situations, and to enable them to operate and sustain themselves