Uneven distribution of wealth gives rise to new family and personal relationships - Essay Example

Uneven Distribution of Wealth Gives Rise to New Family And Personal Relationships Introduction The cereal packetimage of the family has mom, dad and the children breakfasting together. People who don't follow the pattern of this nuclear family used to be considered deviants. This picture perfect image of a family is gone. The family linked by biological ties has been supplanted by a setup characterized less and less by biological relationships and more and more by elements of diversity (Saggers, S. & Sims, M., 2005). The concept of the new family includes the extended family, the same-sex family, and the childless or single-person household. There is also the blended family, in which members are often migrants forced to share dwelling by circumstance. The extended family is getting to be the rule in some cultures, such as China and the Philippines, where as many as three generations live together. This is usually exacerbated by economic difficulties, which drive up the costs of property and housing. In Australia, it is also becoming commonplace among the indigenous people who are forced to share a roof by poverty, housing scarcity and racism. If they don't share a house, the Australian minorities move regularly between houses of kin in the country and the city. The new family is influenced by the growing diversities in five distinct aspects (Rapoport, R. & Rapoport, R.N., 1982). These diversities involve organization, culture, life cycle, family life course and social class. Culture is the underlying factor behind the extended families, which usually consist of migrant households, while organization is behind the families that take shape out of divorce and remarriage. Life cycle diversity, on the other hand, reflects in families separated by generation gaps such as the baby boomers and people of the new generation. As for family life course, it is seen in the divergent priorities held by its members at the different stages of their lives. For the purpose of this essay, we fix our attention on the influences of social class in creating families with attributes and characteristics different in many ways from the kind we used to go home to. Social class also invokes economic factors, which could be the biggest obstacles to the making of a happy, fulfilling and ideal family. The New Family Torrant, J. (2006) places the new family into four categories: Divorce-extended families - these include spouses, ex-spouses, new spouses and all these spouses' children. Transnational families - these consist of couples from different cultures who have contracted an inter-racial marriage. Families are given the same tag if their members live in different countries. Cohabiting couples - members of families formed out of cohabitation are often stigmatized and looked down by society. Same-sex couples - these consist of gays or lesbians, who if not childless bring up children developed through in-vitrio fertilization. Obviously, Torrant, J. (2006) does not give much significance on single-person households, but this type of families is as much a cause for concern to those who cherish the ideal family values. In UK, for example, single-person households are expected to be the predominant type in 2010, accounting for 40 percent of all households (Simpson, R. (2003). The same kinds of households are expected to grow in Australia from 1.6 million in 1996 to 3.4 million in 2010. These expected number and rate of increase are definitely bigger than those on same-sex couples. In Australia alone, the 2001 census placed same-sex couples at 19,594, which was twice the number listed in 1996 but the figure is just a fraction of the total number of households in that country (Saggers, S. & Sims, M., 2005). In a study of family relationships in Australia, Poole, M. detected new patterns of partnerships arising from a decline in fertility, changing roles for fathers, children acting as consumers, ageing population, intimacy and power. Dissatisfaction was noted in many Australian families in terms of balancing work with family needs. The expectations of high levels of personal fulfillment also impact on family relationships and on all aspects of life. One concept that enjoys wide economic academic support is the idea that family change is caused mostly by an increase in people's individualism. They pursue ideas like independence, diversity and variety in family life because of the changing demands of market economies, which force men and women to build lives of their own unfettered by the perceived burdens of the traditional family (Beck-Gernsheim, E.). These new attitudes toward family result from new demands in the labor market that makes people less fitter for closer and more dependable long-term relationships (Stacey, J., 1996). Post-Modern influences In the US, the "American family revolution" is caused by a shift from the modern to the post-modern era, which is characterized by the narrowing of economic opportunities (Stacey, J., 1996). In this theory, modernism and post-modernism are terms that are interchangeable with industrialism and post-industrialism. The post-modern changes in "work, family and sexual opportunities for men and women opened the prospect of greater democracy, equality and choice into our most intimate relationships, especially for women and members of sexual minorities." This brought about a change in cultural values, which inevitably reflects in the economic configuration of the family. Torrant, J. (2006) posits that cultural values determine the shape of the family, such that the moralistic rhetoric in the name of family has fueled politics that harm rather than help actual families and impair the social fabric upon which all families depend. Within the post-modernist or post-industrial regime, Torrant, J. (2006) says, the middle class has been shrinking and the Americans have been polarized between the high-wage and low-wage workers because of economic stresses that deepen the gap between rich and poor. At the root of this polarization of wealth is the capitalist system of production and exploitation that enshrines the profit motive. One of the most easily discernible changes in the family that occurs in the post-industrialist society is the significant socialization of young people, especially women, into more flexible gender identities. This enables them to assume different roles in the socialization process for production. Such socialization process no longer gears women on a lifetime of dependency on men but hones for the role of smart and independent women earning their own keep (Torrant, J., 2006). This practice contributes in no small measure to the shaping of the new family, in that the increased participation of women in the labor force increased the incidence of divorce and separation (Cherlin, A., 1992). Unequal Sharing of Wealth In the view of Stacey, J. (1996), the new families consist of the haves and the have-nots. Only the haves can afford to realize the "tantalizing potentials of post-modern options." The underlying social division between capital and labor shapes the new family, since it determines a family's access to the resources available in society. Those with more access to such resources live in luxurious dwellings and send their children to elite schools, while those with less make do with substandard housing and schools. The kind of work people do determines the amount of time and energy they can devote to meeting the emotional and other non-financial needs of the different family members. This is where the family becomes an articulation of the social division of labor. The basic division of labor is between owners or those who own the means of production and have control over labor and workers, and those who own no means of production and must sell their labor to earn wages. This is capitalism in action, and the wider the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the greater distortion it will create on the family (Torrant, J., 2006). The reason families try to give their children the best education is because they don't own the means of production and thus need to enhance their labor power that would be saleable and fetch a higher value at the labor market. It is for this very same reason that young women in the family are also socially developed into filling flexible gender roles. Some families achieve these goals and manage to place their children on the capitalist side of production, but the bigger majority of the families do not. In the US, Mishel, L., et al. (2003) reveal that workers belonging to middle-class families put in additional 660 hours of labor between 1979 and 2000, for an increase of over 16 weeks of full-time work. However, there was hardly a commensurate increase in wages except for those in the higher wage brackets. Torrant, J. (2006) says the lives of the working class families continue to be buffeted by financial crises, such that they remain overworked but underpaid and lack decent housing, proper healthcare, etc. To preserve the dignity of the family from the ill effects of socio-economic inequality, Stacey, J. (1996) proposes a collective effort to provide families with the best forms of social and cultural supports to cushion the impact of the "inevitable disruptions and disappointments, the hardships and heartaches, that all families and humans have to confront." Conclusion It has been shown that same-sex relationships, extended and blended families, childless and single-person households - the new configurations of a family - are the products of social and economic changes that tend to concentrate the fruits of production in the favored sectors of society. This is one of the ugly facets of capitalism, which sometimes defeats the democratic ideal of equitably distributing a nation's wealth among its people. As the gap between rich and poor widens, people are forced to live together to become extended families. The same reason drives the working class to set up house alone, or couples to avoid children, in the belief that they can't afford a large family. As for same-sex relationships, no direct connection has been established between the increase in this type of households and economic disparity but it is possible that people are more tolerant of such deviancy because their attention is focused on their economic difficulties (Weeks, J., et al., 1999). There is some perception that the nuclear family is going the way of the dodo. This is not entirely true, many sociological studies show. Children leave home when they grow up to marry and start a family of their own, thus giving the impression that the family they left is broken for good. But because of the rising incidence of separation and divorce, these children come back to recreate the family they left (Saggers, S. & Sims, M., 2005). More and more people are shunning marriage and even if they do marry, they often as not end up divorcing, thus coming back to "recreate" their families. Declining rates of marriage and fertility, rising divorce rates and other social trends mean that fewer people are living under the ideal family norm. For the family to revert back to its old norms, Torrant, J. (2006) exhorts workers to change their moral attitudes and values so that even a fraction of the wealth exploited from worker by capital may be redistributed back to them. References: Barrett, M. (1986). "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State." London: Penguin, 1986: 7-30. Beck-Gernsheim, E. "On the Way to a Post-familial Family: From a Community Need to Elective Families." Theory, Culture and Society, 15: 3-4: 53-70. Cherlin, A. (1992). "Marriage, Divorce, Remarriage." Revised and Enlarged Edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1992. Coelho, R. et al. (2005). "A Family Network Model for Wealth Distribution in Societies." Physics Department, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia: 353 (2005); 515-528. Mishel, L. et al. (2003). "The State of Working America 2002-2003." An Economic Policy book. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, Cornell University, 2003. Poole, M. "Changing Families, Changing Times." http://www.ebooks.com Rapoport, R. & Rapoport, R.N. (1982). "British Families in Transition." In Families in Britain, Rapoport, R., Rapoport, M. & Fogarty, R. (eds). Routledge & Kegan, London. Saggers, S. & Sim, M. (2005). "Diversity: Beyond the Nuclear Family." Chapter 4 in Changing Families, Changing Times. Poole, M. (ed), Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Simpson, R. (2003). "Contemporary Spinsters in the New Millennium: Changing Notions of Family and Kinship." London School of Economics, Gender Institute, ISSN 1470-8515, July 2003. Stacey, J. (1996). "In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Post-Modern Age." Boston: Beacon press, 1996. Torrant, J. (2006). "Why is the New Family so Familiar" The Red Critique. http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/whyisthye newfamilysofamiliar.htm. Weeks, J. et al. (1999). "Everyday Experiments: Narratives of Non-Heterosexual Relationships." In The New Family, Silva, E. & Smart, C. (eds). Sage: London. Read More