Discuss the contemporary trends in family as a response to social change in modern society. (2016)
The family is both shaped by social change and a mediator of it. William F. Ogburn saw it losing functions as technology moved production, education and protection elsewhere. Functionalists read present-day family trends as adaptation to a changing environment, while Marxists and feminists read them as responses shaped by capitalism and patriarchy. Each major process of change has produced a distinct family trend.
Social change and the family’s response
1. Industrial economy and occupational mobility → the conjugal family Talcott Parsons argued that a mobile, achievement-based labour market favours a structurally isolated nuclear family. It sheds production and education to firms and schools, and keeps primary socialisation and the stabilisation of adult personalities. William J. Goode (World Revolution and Family Patterns, 1963) traced a worldwide drift toward this conjugal pattern.
2. Urbanisation and migration → dispersed and transnational kin Distance reorganises kinship rather than ending it. Eugene Litwak’s modified extended family keeps up help and contact across separate households. The Kerala Migration Survey 2023 counted about 2.2 million emigrants, and student emigration had doubled since 2018 to roughly 2.5 lakh. Many households now run on remittances, video calls and parents left behind.
3. Women’s education and paid work → dual-earner and more symmetrical families Michael Young and Peter Willmott predicted a symmetrical family with shared conjugal roles. Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift (1989) showed that employed women still carry most domestic work. In India, female labour force participation (15+, usual status) rose from 23.3% in 2017–18 to 41.7% in PLFS 2023–24, much of it rural self-employment. Women’s earnings are renegotiating authority at home faster than they redistribute housework.
4. Demographic transition → smaller, ageing, “beanpole” families Falling fertility and longer lives produce families with few siblings and several living generations (Julia Brannen). Care of the elderly becomes a central family question.
5. Individualisation and rights → divorce, cohabitation and diverse unions Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim describe life as a self-authored project, and Anthony Giddens (1992) the pure relationship. Higher divorce, cohabitation and same-sex partnerships follow. In India, Navtej Singh Johar v. Union of India (2018) decriminalised same-sex relations and made queer families publicly visible, though not legally married.
Is the response mechanical?
- Historical evidence. Peter Laslett found that only about 10% of English households between 1564 and 1821 contained kin beyond the nuclear family. The nuclear form came before industrialisation, so the fit thesis overstates causation.
- The family as agent. I. P. Desai’s Mahuva study (1964) found families “structurally nuclear but functionally joint”. Indian households filter change through caste, property and obligation instead of simply absorbing it.
- Conflict readings. Eli Zaretsky (Capitalism, the Family and Personal Life, 1976) argues that capitalism separated home from work and made the family an illusory refuge from alienation. Feminists add that every “adaptation” redistributes burdens unequally between women and men.
Conclusion
Contemporary family trends are responses to industrial, demographic and cultural change, but not passive ones. Culture, gender power and the state shape the response, and the family in turn shapes how change is lived. In India the result is adaptive jointness rather than Western-style individualisation. The family survives by changing its form while keeping its core obligations.