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Factors that Influence the Changing Family Patterns!
Changes in family patterns are being produced by many factors. The important among these are science and technology (industrialization), expansion of towns and cities (urbanization) and employment of men and women both within organizations outside family influence.
The material condition of industrial-capitalist society is the main cause of change in the family. Greater affluence, geographical and occupational mobility and economic independence of (some) women are the main contributing factors for the change in patterns of residence and family life.
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The global factor (technology and industrial change) is nearly encompassing everything. Since it is everything, naturally it causes everything. Industrial change or industrialization includes not merely machines, but the science and engineering that produced them, the secular attitudes of the modern era, anti-traditionalism, job placement on the basis of competence, an open-class system, high geographical mobility and urbanization.
Industrialization in this enveloping sense does ’cause’ the modern social and family patterns. These changes are tending to produce a worldwide movement towards nuclear family systems, eroding extended (joint) family forms and other types of kinship group. It is opined that there is a ‘fit’ between industrialization and the conjugal (nuclear) family.
There is also some sort of natural harmony between the modern complex of industrialization and the conjugal system. The industrial system has increased the demand of emotional satisfaction which is provided by conjugal bond only. Thus, this family system is attuned to serve the needs of industrialization.
The extended family system is unfit to the demands of industrialization. Decreasing emphasis on land ownership also increases the ease in mobility. The conjugal family is neo-local and its kinship network is not strong, thus it puts fewer barriers in geographical mobility.
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W.F. Ogburn (1922) saw a wide range of new elements as sources of family change, from ideology to airplane. He argued that the development of formal agencies like schools, hospitals, hotels, etc., for handling major functions of the family have greatly affected the institution of family.
Labour-saving devices have reduced the number of hours of the housewife. This has offered more freedom and has relieved them from many household tasks. The young ones need not now rely on family elders for job instructions, since the schools and the factory teach them new skills.
The growth of romanticism, the high premium on individual attachment along with individualistic and liberal values of industrial-capitalist society encourages people to change their partners as they want. In this connection, Giddens (1997) observed, ‘for many in the West commitment is “for now,” not necessarily “forever”.
Relationships depend on feelings, not externally imposed moral frameworks. These values have led in the rise of divorce rates and as a consequence single-parent households, reconstituted family or living with step families are increasing. Cohabitation (where a couple lives together in sexual relationship without marriage) has become increasingly common in many developing and developed countries.
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The situation in India and other traditional societies is bit different where the institutions of marriage and family are still rooted in religion (in India, marriage is regarded as a samaskar, a religious sacrament). Baring a few metropolitan cities, people still do not resort to divorce as a common remedy for the ills of marriage.
