Sociology of the family
This includes childcare, children, child support, families and households, fertility, grandparents and grandchildren, marriage and divorce, and same-sex couples.
More historically, American Families by Stephanie Coontz treats the difficulties these couples went through during the time before Loving v. Virginia, when interracial marriage bans were declared unconstitutional.
"[9] Turner argues that attempts to regulate female sexuality through religious discourse have, in the case of Western Europe, to be understood in the context of concerns about managing private property and ensuring its continuity.
Judeo-Christian belief system marriage is modeled after the Genesis story of Adam and Eve and its framework of a lifetime commitment between man and woman.
[12] This transition has blurred the division of labor within the breadwinner–homemaker model, such that maintenance of the household and childcare, called the "second shift", are now topics for debate between marital partners.
Hochschild illustrates the ways in which an unequal division of the second shift undermines family welfare by reducing marital equality and spousal satisfaction.
[14] Consequently, this forces women into disadvantaged career opportunities that are structured around the primary obligation to be a homemaker and reasserts the gender labor market inequality.
[20][citation needed] Social class interacts with gender to impact the male-female dynamic in marriage, particularly with respect to "temporal flexibility at work and home".
[21]: 397 Research shows that class-advantaged men and women use their class privilege and the flexibility it provides them in ways that support conventional gender roles.
Conversely, men and women who do not have access to such flexibility and control of their time are pressured to weaken conventional gender expectations regarding marriage, family, and jobs.
Women in particular need flexible work hours in order to meet the inflexible demands that marriage and a family place upon them, as traditional gender expectations stipulate that the woman be the primary caregiver.
[21]: 405 The results of this study demonstrate that class, intersecting with gender, influences the ability of men and women to obtain and utilize flexibility with their time.
Additionally, women who take time out of the workforce to raise their young children will lose out on wages, benefits, and social security contributions.
Keene and Quadagno found a greater likelihood of perceived imbalance when work duties caused men or women to miss a family event or make it difficult to maintain their home (2004).
Gender differences exist in the division of household labor and chores, with men working more hours and women spending more time on domestic and child-care responsibilities.
Couples must overcome barriers such as religious beliefs, social stigma, and financial dependence or law restrictions before they successfully dissolve their marriage.
"Ancestral conditions that favored the dissolution of a mateship constituted a recurrent adaptive problem over human evolutionary history and thus imposed selection pressures for the evolution of strategic solutions."
[citation needed] Wallerstein, however, has a disputed an "extreme version" of her theory where she claims that the difference between the children with divorced and continuously married parents is dramatic and pervasive.
What she found was an increased level in confidence from the fathers and the opposite effect in mothers; fathers felt more confident after viewing other parents on social media, while mothers were worried after viewing posts depicting ideal or perfect family photos or concerned with the comments they would receive on their posts from others criticizing their parenting.
[41] The study shows that the difference in age of child birth is related to education, since the longer a woman has been in school, the older she will be when she enters the workforce.
For men, it is difficult to separate occupational success from fatherhood because financially providing for one's family has been central to the identity of being a father in the United States.
The high percentage of mothers becoming the sole parent is sometimes due to the result of a divorce, unplanned pregnancy or the inability to find a befitting partner.
[54] Since the 2000s, a new subfield, sociology of childhood, has gained increasing attention and triggered numerous empirical studies as well as intensive theoretical disputes, starting in the Scandinavian and the English-speaking countries.
Focusing on everyday life and the ways children orient themselves in society, it engages with the cultural performances and the social worlds they construct and take part in.
[64] In this work, Prout examines how childhoods are not merely constructed socially – via discourses, laws or institutions – but materially, through toys, food and medicines.
Scholars such as Peter Kraftl, John Horton and Affrica Taylor have been particularly influential in examining how childhoods are produced and experienced through complex intersections of emotion, affect, embodiment and materiality.
[71][editorializing] There has been much research and discussion about the effects of society on the assumption of gender roles in childhood, and how societal norms perpetuate gender-differentiated interactions with children.
Psychologists and sociologists suggest that self-gender identity is a result of social learning from peers, role-modeling within the family unit, and genetic predisposition.
Meanwhile, widespread anthropological assumptions concerning a universal human nature, based on a view of individual and society as opposed to each other, should be omitted from the conceptual repertoire of sociological childhood research.
They are the legacy of the older socialization approach and they legitimate some forms of childhood and education practices as indispensable and even as a "natural" requirement of society, while devaluing others.
