Analyse the contemporary trends in family with examples. (2013)
A trend is a sustained, directional change, not a passing fashion. Contemporary family change can be broken into five components: size and composition, internal relations, functions, stability and the range of recognised forms. Taken together, and in how they interact, they show that the family is diversifying rather than declining.
1. Size and composition
- Households are shrinking and becoming nuclear or single-person. In the United States, family households fell from 79% of all households in 1974 to 64% in 2024.
- In India, Pauline Kolenda’s review of 26 studies found nuclear households in the majority, with marked regional and caste variation. A. M. Shah showed that many “nuclear” households are simply a phase in the developmental cycle of a joint family, which divides after the father’s death.
2. Internal relations: authority and roles
- Authority is moving from patriarchal seniority towards conjugal partnership, and children’s autonomy is growing. Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s symmetrical family captures the direction of change.
- Example: an urban dual-earner couple sharing decisions on children’s schooling, yet relying on a grandmother or a paid domestic worker for care.
- Change is incomplete. Spousal violence against ever-married women fell from 37% (NFHS-3, 2005–06) to 22.3% (NFHS-6, 2023–24): a real decline, but patriarchal control persists.
3. Functions
- William F. Ogburn and Talcott Parsons describe functions moving to specialised agencies such as schools, crèches, hospitals and pension systems. The family keeps socialisation and emotional support.
- Ronald Fletcher (The Family and Marriage in Britain, 1966) countered that these remaining functions have grown in detail and importance. Example: parents now manage coaching, health and screen time far more intensively than earlier generations did.
4. Stability
- Divorce, separation and remarriage are rising, producing reconstituted and lone-parent families.
- Example: Census 2011 counted about 13.6 lakh divorced Indians (0.24% of the married population), with nearly three times as many separated. Sreeparna Chattopadhyay and Suraj Jacob (2016) found dissolution higher in the south and north-east, where women’s autonomy is greater. Marital breakdown in India is often informal, not recorded as divorce.
5. Diversity of forms
- Cohabitation, living apart together, same-sex families and voluntary childlessness are spreading. Judith Stacey calls this the postmodern family, in which no single form sets the norm.
- Example: live-in couples in Indian metros, and grandparent-headed households in migrant-sending villages.
How the components interact
Fewer children and women’s employment → more egalitarian roles → higher emotional expectations of partnership (Anthony Giddens’ pure relationship) → greater instability → wider diversity of forms. Change in one component therefore drives change in the others.
Counter-trends
- Eugene Litwak’s modified extended family and I. P. Desai’s “functional jointness” show kin support surviving separate residence.
- Young adults are returning home because housing is expensive. In the US, 57% of 18–24-year-olds live with their parents (2024).
Conclusion
The trends point from a single, prescribed family to a plural, negotiated one, but unevenly across class, region and culture. For India the key finding is that residence and structure are changing faster than obligation. The family is being reorganised, not dissolved.