Family in The Modern Society
Family has inarguably been a solid basement for the personal development of each individual, who attains his primary experiences and knowledge from his nearest and dearest. Family stands for one of the most important social institutions and is responsible for holding society together as well as for safeguarding values. Family is an essential social unit, which makes a considerable contribution to normal functioning of society in general. Family, although generally known to be an idealized unit, has been exposed to significant alterations in its concept in the recent decades. There has been a radical change witnessed in family values from the Golden Age period until the present days. Currently, the family concept has adopted less traditional, but rather more “irregular” features. This paper intends to cover the issues, which reflect the most principal changes in family life and concept during the recent decades as well as to discuss family from the perspective of two social disciplines such as sociology and psychology, and define the most notable types of family. It is essential to acknowledge how and why the ways of conducting a family have been exposed to such considerable changes in order to estimate the potential development of family values in future.
When it comes to changes in family and its values, Golden Age should be referred to. During this period families were considered to be more solid while marriages were considered more long-lasting and reliable. Divorce, so wide-spread and popular now, was rather costly and rarely took its place during the Golden Age. Children were brought up in safe environments, where both parents participated in their education. However, should one delve deeper, the families were just as irregular as they are today (Swarbrick 2013). Even during the Golden Age, single parenthood, divorces, co-habiting, and step parenthood existed. Swarbrick (2013) is convinced that “Golden-Age marriages” are a myth and they actually were loveless and unhappy in the majority of cases.
Traditional nuclear family consists of a mother, a father, and their young children still living at home (Sarkisian & Gerstel, 2012). In other words, nuclear family is another concept of a family, which suggests only a married couple with children, excluding other relatives such as aunts, uncles, grandparents, or cousins. Meanwhile, the concept of the intact family consists of children with exclusively biological parents. No step-parenthood or another “irregularity” is accepted when it comes to intact family. Intact family defines its core value as the authenticity of the parents (Sarkisian & Gerstel, 2012).
Post-nuclear family is an absolutely controversial replacement of the nuclear family, which traditionally values biological parenthood and the participation of both parents in a child’s upbringing. Post-nuclear family represents single parenthood, step parenthood, committed non-married couples, two mothers or two fathers (Hoerl & Kelly, 2010), and other untraditional phenomena, which were not acceptable during the Golden Age.
In sociological perspective, family has experienced significant changes mostly because of change in beliefs, the alterations in gender roles as well as …
