1997).

Moreover, not all people who prefer to work are able to find full-time, secure
employment, and part-time jobs offer little in the way of job security, decent wages, or
benefits.

A second criticism of generous family support policies focuses on child care. Some critics
say that non-family child care is bad for children under the age of three. In their view, only
parents can provide the love, interaction, and intellectual stimulation that infants and
toddlers need for proper social, cognitive, and moral development. However, when studies
compare family care with daycare involving a strong curriculum, a stimulating
environment, plenty of caregiver warmth, low turnover of well-trained staff, and a low ratio
of caregivers to children, they find that daycare has no negative consequences and many
positive consequences for children over the age of one or two (Cleveland, 2016).

Research also shows that daycare has some benefits, notably enhancing a child’s ability to
make friends and improve cognitive performance. The benefits of high-quality daycare are
especially evident in low-income families, which often cannot provide the kind of
stimulating environment offered by high-quality daycare.

The third criticism lodged against generous family support policies is that they are
expensive and have to be paid for by high taxes. That is true. Swedes are one of the most
highly taxed people in the world. They have made the political decision to pay high taxes,
partly to avoid the social problems and associated costs that sometimes emerge when the
traditional nuclear family is replaced with other family forms and no institutions are
available to help family members in need. The Swedish experience teaches us, then, that
there is a clear trade-off between expensive family support policies and low taxes. It is
impossible to have both, and the degree to which any country favours one or the other is a
political choice.

In Review
Learning Objectives
LO1 Appreciate that the traditional nuclear family has been
weakening since the 1800s, although it strengthened
temporarily in the years immediately following World War II

Trends in divorce, marriage, and child-bearing show a gradual weakening of the nuclear
family from the second half of the nineteenth century until the mid-1940s, and continued
weakening after the 1950s. Specifically, throughout the nineteenth century, the crude
divorce rate rose slowly. The crude divorce rate is the number of divorces that occur in a
year for every 1000 people in the population. Meanwhile, the marriage rate fell. The crude
marriage rate is the number of marriages that occur in a year for every 1000 people in the
population. The total fertility rate also fell. The total fertility rate is the average number of
children that would be born to a woman over her lifetime if she had the same number of
children as do women in each age cohort in a given year. Canada’s marriage rate started
falling after 1946. The divorce rate started rising in the 1960s when the law was changed to
make it easier to divorce. The total fertility rate started falling after 1961. Thus, by the early
1960s, the earlier trends had reasserted themselves. Only the peculiar historical
circumstances of the postwar years temporarily reversed them.

Specifically, during the Great Depression (1929–39) and World War II (1939–45), many
Canadians were forced to postpone marriage because of widespread poverty, government-
imposed austerity, and physical separation. After this ordeal, many Canadians wanted to
settle down, have children, and enjoy the peace, pleasure, and security that family life
seemed to offer. Conditions could not have been better for doing just that. The immediate
postwar era was one of unparalleled optimism and prosperity. Real per capita income rose,
as did the percentage of Canadians who owned their own homes. Laws passed out of
necessity during World War II to encourage women to join the paid labour force were
cancelled. Things were now supposed to return to “normal,” meaning that women were
supposed to go back to being housewives and men to being breadwinners.

LO2 List the factors contributing to variation in patterns of mate

selection, marital satisfaction, divorce, reproductive choice,
housework and child care, and spousal violence

In most societies throughout human history, marriages were typically arranged by third
parties, not by brides and grooms. The selection of marriage partners was based mainly on
calculations intended to increase their families’ prestige, economic benefits, and political
advantages. Especially since the early twentieth century, mate selection has come to
depend more on romantic love. Yet social factors continue to affect mate selection. These
factors include the resources people bring to the marriage market, demographic factors
such as the ratio of men to women in one’s community, and the constraints imposed by
third parties. Nonetheless, mate selection is less constrained than it used to be, as
evidenced by the growing percentage of Canadians (particularly young Canadians) who
consider themselves to be multi-racial and multi-ethnic—a consequence of the increasing
frequency of multi-racial and multi-ethnic marriages and common-law relationships.

Marital stability has come to depend more on having a happy rather than merely a useful
marriage. This change occurred because women in Canada and many other societies have
become more autonomous, especially over the past half-century. Factors contributing to
women’s growing autonomy were the legalization of birth control measures in Canada in
1969; the increased participation of women in the paid labour force; and changes in
Canadian laws that made divorce easier. Marital satisfaction now depends on such factors
as the economic security of the family (dissatisfaction grows as one moves down the
socioeconomic hierarchy), the ease with which people can get a divorce (married people
are more satisfied with their marriages in countries with liberal divorce laws), and the
phase of the family life cycle (marital satisfaction reaches a low point when children are in
their teenage years).

Women’s income usually falls after divorce, while men’s income generally stays about the
same. That is because husbands tend to earn more than wives do, children typically live
with their mothers after divorce, and child-support payments are often inadequate. On
divorce, the wife may receive an equal share of tangible property, but that does not usually
result in her beginning post-divorce life on an equal footing with her former husband,
especially if she retains physical custody of the couple’s children and if she sacrificed her
education and career so that he could earn a college or university degree. The degree of
emotional distress of children post-divorce is tied to three factors: the level of ongoing
parental conflict, a decline in living standards, and the absence of one parent as a role
model and a source of emotional support, practical help, and supervision.

Thanks to contraception and the availability of abortion, women now have more say than
they used to over whether they will have children and, if so, when they will have them and
how many they will have. Men take a more active role in the day-to-day running of the
household than they used to. Still, Canadian women are two-and-a-half times more likely
than men to devote 30 hours or more to unpaid household work every week while men are
nearly twice as likely as women to devote no time to such work. In addition, men tend to do
low-stress chores that can often wait a day or a week while women tend to do more
stressful domestic work that requires their immediate attention. Domestic responsibilities
tend to be shared more equally the smaller the difference between the husband’s and the
wife’s earnings and the greater the agreement between spouses that equality in the
household division of labour is desirable. Such agreement tends to be associated with the
spouses’ level of education.

For heterosexual couples, spousal violence is associated with the level of gender equality in
the family and in the larger society. The higher the level of gender inequality, the greater
the frequency of spousal violence. Severe wife assault is therefore more common in lower-
class, less highly educated families in which gender inequality tends to be high and men are
likely to believe that male domination is justified. Severe wife abuse is also more common
among couples who witnessed their mothers being abused and who were themselves
abused when they were children, although research suggests that these socialization
factors are considerably less influential than was once believed.

LO3 Describe the characteristics of diverse family forms

Several family forms are increasingly common in Canada: heterosexual cohabitation, same-
sex unions, lone-parent families, zero-child families, and mixed-race families. Notable
features of these family forms include the following: (1) The proportion of common-law
families quadrupled between 1981 and 2016, reaching more than a fifth of Canadian
families (nearly two-fifths in Quebec). (2) Same-sex marriage was first recognized in the
Netherlands in 2001. Canada followed suit in 2005, and now 31 countries (nationwide or in
some parts) recognize same-sex marriage. In 2016, nearly 1 percent of families in Canada
were same-sex families. In about a third of them, the spouses were married and in the
remainder, they were living common-law. Raising a child in a homosexual family has few if
any negative effects on the child’s development, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender
role behavior, emotional/behavioral development, social relationships, and cognitive
functioning, and it has some benefits in terms of child care and marital satisfaction. (3) Solo
parenting is usually the product of separation or divorce, after which child custody is
typically granted to mothers. The poverty rate in female-headed single-parent families is
more than double the rate in male-headed single-parent families. Children who grow up in
low-income households are more likely than other children are to experience reduced
cognitive ability and achievement, among other negative outcomes, with lifelong
consequences for income and health. (4) Roughly a fifth of women between the ages of 40
and 44 have never given birth. This may be due to infertility of one of the spouses or the
decision not to have children because of the expense and stress associated with raising a
child and the alternative attractions available to spouses. People with high income, high
education, and professional and managerial occupations are most likely to have zero-child
families. They tend to be neither frustrated nor unhappy that they do not have a child.
Despite their tendency to feel negatively stereotyped as “selfish,” they tend to be more
satisfied with their marriage than are couples with a child. (5) Mixed-race families
comprise about 6 percent of all Canadian families—more than 10 percent in Vancouver and
Toronto. Children of mixed-race families often think of themselves as Canadian but many
others don’t see them that way. They may feel that they are perfectly Canadian but others
repeatedly send the message that “Canadian” should be associated with “white.”
Consequently, by the time they are adults and have to answer census questions on ethnic
identity, few mixed-race people select “Canadian.” However, it seems that young Canadians
with mixed-race parents seem to be increasingly inclined to insist that they are Canadian
when asked the “What are you?” question, thus challenging the prevailing notion that
“Canadian” must be associated with “white.” Mixed-race couples commonly experience
tension when in public—people routinely stare at them as if they are a curiosity—and their
children are still frequent victims of racial slurs in the schoolyard, at least in schoolyards
with relatively few such children.

LO4 Apply major sociological theories to the analysis of families

Theories at a Glance Families

Theory Main Question
Functionalism How do social structures and
the values underlying them
contribute to social stability?
Conflict theory How does the structure of
inequality between privileged
groups seeking to maintain
their advantages and
subordinate groups seeking to
increase theirs lead to conflict
and often to social change?
Symbolic How do people communicate
interactionism to make their social settings
meaningful, thus helping to
create their social
circumstances?
Feminism How do social conventions
maintain male dominance and
female subordination, and how
do these conventions get
overturned?
LO5 Explain how public policy can prevent the emergence of
certain social problems that might otherwise result from
the decline of the traditional nuclear family
Application
For any society to survive, its members must cooperate
economically. They must have babies. And they must
raise offspring in an emotionally supportive environment
so the offspring can learn the ways of the group and
eventually operate as productive adults. Since the
1940s, functionalists have argued that the nuclear family
—a cohabiting man and woman who maintain a socially
approved sexual relationship and have at least one child
—is ideally suited to meet these challenges. In their
view, the nuclear family provides a basis for five main
social functions: regulated sexual activity, economic
cooperation, reproduction, socialization, and emotional
support. Functionalists cite the supposed pervasiveness
of the nuclear family as evidence of its ability to perform
these functions.
According to conflict theorists, rising demand for women
to pursue a higher education and enter the paid labour
force, together with the availability of contraception,
child-care services, and reproduction outside the nuclear
family have altered the traditional division of labour
between husband and wife and, more generally, power
relations between women and men.
Mixed-race families face unique issues negotiating their
identity and raising their children because the meaning
they attach to their racial status typically differs from the
meaning that others commonly attach to it. For example,
children with mixed-race parents commonly think of
themselves as Canadian but others tend to equate
“Canadian” with “white.” Consequently, such children are
often asked where they come from, making them feel as
if they do not belong. This feeling is reinforced by racial
discrimination, sometimes from members of the
extended family; in mixed-race families with a white
parent, it can even lead to young children developing the
view that whites are superior to non-whites.
Like conflict theorists, feminist theorists highlight change
in power relations between women and men as the
driving force behind change in family structures.
However, unlike Marxist-inspired conflict theorists, most
feminist theorists think these changes have less to do
with class relations than with the gender revolution in
patriarchy that has been taking place for the past half-
century.
Many social problems develop in societies where the nuclear family is in decline and the
state fails to provide much family support. These problems include high levels of child
poverty, juvenile delinquency, suicide, and infant mortality. A comparison of Sweden and
the United States shows that Sweden has experienced more of a decline in the nuclear
family but has fewer social problems such as those just listed because, unlike the United
States, it provides families with much more social support: substantial paid parental leave
when a child is born or gets sick, free health care, heavily government-subsidized, high-
quality daycare, and generous direct cash payments based on the number of children in
each family. Swedes pay high taxes for these services, but they have decided to do so to
avoid the social problems that crop up when the nuclear family is in decline and the state
fails to provide much family support.

Multiple-Choice Questions
Questions marked with an asterisk are higher-order questions on the Bloom taxonomy.

1. In which historical period did North America witness an especially rapid increase in
the number of nuclear families?

during the nineteenth century

during the Great Depression (1929–39)

during World War II (1939–46)

during the 1950s and early 1960s

2. In societies where polygamy is widespread, intense competition for women creates

numerous social problems. Which of the following conclusions does the text reach
about how these social problems can be minimized?

The social problems caused by widespread polygamy can be minimized only if

heterosexual monogamous families replace polygamous families.

The social problems caused by widespread polygamy can be minimized if a wide

variety of family forms, including common-law heterosexual families and
homosexual monogamous families, replace polygamous families.

The social problems caused by widespread polygamy can be minimized if the

state intervenes to ban polygamy.

The social problems caused by widespread polygamy can be minimized by

economic development, which makes polygamy dysfunctional.
*3. Researchers conducted a survey of mate selection among online daters in
Vancouver in January 2018. They discovered that 10 percent of the people surveyed
developed long-term intimate partnerships with people whose race was different than
their own. What could the researchers reasonably infer from this finding?

The rate of interracial unions is significantly higher among Vancouver’s online

daters than it is among Vancouver’s population in general.

The rate at which Vancouver’s daters form inter-racial unions has increased over
time.

both (a) and (b)

none of the above

4. Why is marital satisfaction higher on average in countries with relatively liberal

divorce laws?

Liberal divorce laws encourage a high rate of divorce, and unmarried people are
happier than married people.

Liberal divorce laws allow people to leave unhappy marriages and find marriage
partners with whom they are happy.

In countries with less liberal divorces, more marriages are arranged, so couples
are less frequently in love with one another.

Countries with less liberal divorce laws tend to be poor countries, and since
money issues often lead to unhappy marriages, married couples tend to be
relatively unhappy in such countries.

5. In families that experience divorce, which of the following is the most important
factor with negative consequences for the emotional health of children?

persistent conflict between the spouses

a decline in living standards

absence of the non-custodial parent

The three factors listed above are of approximately equal importance.