Families and Households Mind Map (A Level Sociology)

Murdock: the family has four functions, sexual, reproductive, economic and educational. Parsons: the nuclear family fits industrial society and has two irreducible functions, primary socialisation and stabilising adult personalities.

The family serves capitalism: passing on private property, reproducing an ideology of acceptance, and acting as a unit of consumption. Zaretsky saw it as a refuge from capitalism that cannot really meet people's needs.

Liberal feminists see gradual progress towards equality; Marxist feminists link women's oppression to capitalism; radical feminists see the family as patriarchal at its core.

Smart and others focus on the relationships that matter to people, including friends and fictive kin, rather than only blood or marriage ties.

Rose after the Divorce Reform Act 1969, which came into effect in 1971. Explanations include easier laws, declining stigma, secularisation, women's financial independence and rising expectations of marriage.

Fewer people marry, and later. Cohabitation has become common, often as a step before or instead of marriage.

Civil partnerships were introduced by the Civil Partnership Act 2004, and same-sex marriage began in England and Wales in 2014.

More lone-parent, reconstituted and single-person households. Rapoport identified five types of family diversity: organisational, cultural, class, life-stage and generational.

Young and Willmott (1973) argued roles were becoming more equal, with couples sharing tasks and leisure.

Oakley (1974) found little evidence of symmetry: men's help with housework was limited. Women in paid work may carry a dual burden of paid and domestic work.

Duncombe and Marsden argued women also carry the emotional work of the family, a triple shift.

Pahl studied how couples control money. Dobash and Dobash studied domestic violence as an outcome of patriarchal power.

Ariès argued that in the Middle Ages childhood as a separate stage barely existed; children were treated as mini-adults.

The view that children today are better cared for, healthier and more protected than ever.

Critics argue children remain controlled and unequal, and that childhood differs by class, gender and ethnicity.

Postman argued television blurs the line between childhood and adulthood. Palmer's idea of toxic childhood points to technology and consumer culture.

Linked to women's changing position, contraception, lower infant mortality, and children becoming an economic cost rather than an asset.

Falling death rates and rising life expectancy mean more older people, raising the dependency ratio and creating beanpole families (Brannen).

Immigration has increased cultural diversity in family types and affected the age structure of the population.

Functionalists see policy helping families perform their functions. The New Right argues some policies, such as generous benefits, undermine the traditional nuclear family.

Feminists argue many policies assume and reinforce a male breadwinner and female carer.

Saw policy as a way of policing families, with professionals such as social workers controlling poorer families in particular.

The Divorce Reform Act 1969, the Civil Partnership Act 2004 and the introduction of same-sex marriage, changes to maternity and paternity leave, and child benefit rules.