Write short note: Changing structure of family. (2007)
The structure of a family is the patterned arrangement of its positions and relationships: its size and generational depth, composition, residence, authority, roles and links to wider kin. William J. Goode (World Revolution and Family Patterns, 1963) found every one of these moving, across societies, towards a conjugal pattern, though at different speeds and with important exceptions.
Dimensions of structural change
1. Size and generational depth Families are getting smaller but “taller”. Low fertility and longer lives produce what Julia Brannen calls the beanpole family: several living generations with few members in each, so ties between siblings and cousins weaken while ties between grandparents and grandchildren grow. India’s total fertility rate stood at 2.0 in NFHS-6 (2023–24), below replacement level, so Indian children will have fewer siblings and more living grandparents.
2. Composition The joint and extended family is giving way to nuclear, single-person, lone-parent and reconstituted households. Reconstituted families add new positions, such as step-parent and half-sibling. Talcott Parsons linked the isolated nuclear family to industrial mobility. Peter Laslett’s finding that only about a tenth of English households held wider kin between 1564 and 1821 warns against treating this as a simple sequence.
3. Residence and kin network Patrilocal residence is yielding to neolocal residence. Kin ties now stretch across separate homes rather than a shared courtyard: Eugene Litwak’s modified extended family and Peter Willmott’s dispersed extended family (1988).
4. Authority structure Authority based on age and gender is moving towards consultative, conjugal decision-making. In India, property law has shifted its legal base. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 made daughters coparceners, and Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) held that this right arises by birth, whether or not the father was alive in 2005. The male-only coparcenary that underpinned patriarchal joint-family authority has lost its legal foundation.
5. Role structure Elizabeth Bott (Family and Social Network, 1957) related segregated conjugal roles to close-knit networks and joint roles to loose-knit ones. Michael Young and Peter Willmott saw the symmetrical family emerging with rising living standards, smaller families and wives’ paid work. Feminists such as Ann Oakley found the symmetry largely rhetorical, since women still did most domestic work.
6. Axis of relationships In the traditional Indian joint family, M. S. Gore noted, filial and fraternal bonds outranked the husband–wife bond. The conjugal bond now tends to be the family’s central axis, especially in urban households.
The Indian qualification
- I. P. Desai (Mahuva, 1964) found families structurally nuclear but functionally joint, bound by shared property, rituals and obligations.
- A. M. Shah showed that households pass through simple and complex phases over their developmental cycle, so a snapshot count of nuclear households overstates breakdown.
Conclusion
Family structure is shrinking, flattening in authority and moving toward the conjugal axis. The shift, though, is towards a plurality of structures, and in India co-residence changes faster than the kinship obligations that give the family its shape.