Functionalist Theory and Families

According to functionalist theory, all social institutions are organized to provide for the needs of society. Functionalism also emphasizes that institutions are based on shared values among members of the society. Functionalist theorists interpret the family as filling particular social needs, including socializing the young, regulating sexual activity and procreation, providing physical care for members of the family, assigning identity to people and giving psychological support and emotional security to individuals. According to functionalism, families exist to meet these needs. Marriage is conceptualized as a mutually beneficial exchange wherein women receive protection, economic support and status in return for emotional and sexual support, household maintenance and the production of offspring (Glenn 1987). At the same time, in traditional marriages, men get the services that women provide – housework, nurturing, food service and sexual partnership. Functionalists also see families as providing care for children, who are taught the values that society and the family purport to have.

When societies experience disruption and change, according to functionalist theory, institutions such as the family become disorganized, weakening the social consensus around which they have formed. Currently, some functionalists interpret the family as “breaking down” under societal strains, suggesting this breakdown is the result of the disorganizing forces that rapid social change fosters.

Functionalists also note that, over time, other institutions have begun to take on some functions originally performed solely by the family. For example, as children now attend school earlier in life and stay in school for longer periods of the day, schools (and other caregivers) have taken on some functions of physical care and socialization originally reserved for the family. The family’s share of these functions has been dwindling, while other institutions have taken on more of the original functions of the family. Functionalists would say that the decline of the family’s functions produces further social disorganization because the family no longer carefully integrates its members into society. To functionalists, the family is shaped by the template of society, and things such as the high rate of divorce and the rising numbers of female-headed and single-parent households are the result of social disorganization.

Conflict Theory and Families

Conflict theory examines family as a system of power relations that reinforces and reflects the inequalities in society. Conflict theorists are especially interested in how families are affected by class, race and gender inequality. This perspective sees families as the units through which the privileges and disprivileges of race, class and gender are acquired. Families are essential to maintaining inequality in society because they are the vehicles through which property and social status are acquired (Eitzen and Zinn 2004).

The conflict perspective also emphasizes that families undergo transition with changes in the modes of production because the family produces agents that each mode of production requires, say the family produces workers that capitalism requires. Accordingly, within families, personalities are shaped by adapting to the needs of a capitalist system. Thus, families socialize children to become obedient, subordinate to authority and good consumers. Those who learn these traits become the workers and consumers that capitalism wants. Families also serve capitalism in myriad ways – for example, giving a child an allowance teaches the child capitalist habits for earning money.