Changing Relationships Within Families
How Have Families Changed Over Time?
Sociologists examine how family relationships have changed across three broad historical periods: pre-industrial, industrial and contemporary. Understanding this historical trajectory — and the competing perspectives on whether change has been progressive or problematic — is central to the families topic. Different perspectives offer strikingly different evaluations of the same changes.
The Pre-Industrial Family
In pre-industrial Britain (before approximately the mid-eighteenth century), the family was primarily a unit of economic production. Most families worked together in agriculture or craft production. The household typically included not just parents and children but also servants, apprentices and extended kin. The boundary between work and home was blurred; family members of all ages contributed economically. Peter Laslett’s historical research challenged the idea that the pre-industrial family was predominantly an extended unit, finding that nuclear family households were more common than often assumed. However, extended kinship networks of support remained significant even if not co-resident.
The Industrial Family
Industrialisation (roughly 1750–1900) transformed the family. Paid work moved out of the home and into factories and offices. This created a sharper separation between the public sphere (paid work) and the private sphere (the home). The nuclear family became the dominant household form, with a clear gender division: the man in paid employment, the woman managing the home. Working-class families often had both adults and children in paid work in early industrialisation, but as the nineteenth century progressed, middle-class values of the male breadwinner and the “domestic wife” spread downward through the principle of stratified diffusion. The family shifted from a unit of production to a unit of consumption.
Willmott and Young: Towards the Symmetrical Family
Peter Willmott and Michael Young (1973) developed an influential account of the contemporary family in their study The Symmetrical Family. They argued that the family had passed through three historical stages. The third and most recent stage is the symmetrical family. In this form, both partners are likely to be in paid employment, both participate in domestic tasks and child rearing, and both have leisure time together. Willmott and Young saw this as a positive “march of progress.”
Central to their explanation was the principle of stratified diffusion. They observed that the symmetrical family pattern appeared first among middle-class households and was gradually spreading to the working class as material conditions improved. Higher incomes, better housing and the growth of home-centred leisure (television, home ownership) all contributed to what sociologists call privatised instrumentalism — families becoming increasingly self-contained and home-focused.
Willmott and Young (1973) argued that the family was becoming “symmetrical” — roles more equally shared — and that this change spread from middle-class to working-class families through the principle of stratified diffusion. They presented this as a positive historical progression.
Ann Oakley challenged Willmott and Young directly, arguing that the “march of progress” narrative was misleading. Her research found that the domestic division of labour remained highly unequal: women still performed the vast majority of domestic tasks and child care, even when in full-time paid employment. Oakley criticised the low threshold used by Willmott and Young to define male domestic participation. From her feminist perspective, the symmetrical family was a myth that served to obscure continuing gender inequality in the home.
From a Marxist perspective, the “march of progress” in family life is better understood as a change in the form of family serving capitalism rather than as genuine liberation. Higher wages and consumerism drew the working-class family into the home-centred, high-consumption lifestyle that generates profit for the bourgeoisie. Privatised instrumentalism, far from representing freedom, ties families more closely to consumption patterns that benefit capitalism.
Contemporary Family Issues
The spec identifies several contemporary family issues that sociologists study. These reflect the ways in which family relationships continue to evolve and the challenges that arise from changing social conditions:
- Quality of parenting: sociologists debate whether parenting standards are changing. Some argue that greater awareness of child development and increased investment of time and resources in children has improved parenting; others point to the pressures of long working hours, poverty and social media as creating new challenges. Perspectives differ on what “good parenting” means and who defines it.
- Relationships between teenagers and adults: the concept of adolescence as a distinct life stage is itself a modern, socially constructed category. Sociologists note that the extension of education and financial dependence on parents has prolonged adolescence. Intergenerational tensions within families are studied as social phenomena rather than as natural or inevitable.
- Care of disabled and elderly family members: as life expectancy has increased, the issue of who cares for elderly or disabled family members has grown. Feminist sociologists note that caring responsibilities fall disproportionately on women. The state provides some care services, but much informal care is provided by female relatives.
- Arranged marriage: sociologists distinguish between arranged marriage (where families identify suitable partners but individuals give their consent) and forced marriage (where individuals are compelled to marry against their will, which is illegal in the UK). Arranged marriage is practised in various communities in the UK and globally and is not inherently coercive; sociologists study it without imposing a single moral judgement.
The spec requires knowledge of contemporary family issues including quality of parenting, teenager–adult relationships, care of the disabled and elderly, and arranged marriage. Sociologists study each of these as social phenomena shaped by wider structural factors — not as simply individual or natural.
From a functionalist perspective, changes in family relationships across history represent the family adapting to meet the changing needs of society. As the economy shifted from agriculture to industry to post-industrial service work, the family shed functions it could no longer efficiently perform (transferred to schools, hospitals and the state) and retained those it was best placed to deliver — primary socialisation and personality stabilisation. Willmott and Young’s symmetrical family thesis can be read as a functionalist account: the family evolves to meet the needs of a more egalitarian society. Critics of the functionalist view, however, argue that it presents change as evolutionary and benign while obscuring the structural inequalities that shape family life.