Theoretical perspectives of the family

I am very sure we will all write this week criticizing Talcott Parsons for saying that our “primary status-carrying role is in a sense that of housewife” (1942, p. 609) and that the strain of this duty and insecurity will translate into neurotic behavior. We could argue that things have changed in these seventy years since 1942. I do not agree with Parsons; however I believe that many of his views are still present in many women’s and men’s minds. It is true that the roles of the sexes have changed, but much is constant. For Parsons the working mother and stay home father, homosexuals, single parents, divorced and cohabitating couples are all ‘disfunctional’. But the “swell guy” and the “glamour girl” patterns are still around and have been reinforced by much of the culture and media that developed countries has exported to the rest of the world. The existence of homophobia is just one example that many still believe on Parson’s adult sex roles. Where do LGBT fit? What are the desirable outcomes or life expectations of many?

Yes, women and men are different biologically because our bodies are different and perform different functions. Men cannot have children and I am very sure this has implications on the levels of different hormones and other chemicals in our bodies. Just as what we eat, where we live, genetics and what we do will have effects on the ways our body deals with the different chemicals, hormones, etc. Booth, Carver and Granger’s arguments (2000) search causal relationships that I am unsure you can actually isolate. For example, they say “testosterone-related los occupational success was attributable in part to testosterone-related antisocial behavior during adolescence that got the young men into trouble at school” (p. 1027). What does this imply? I do not know what the implications for intervention were if they were thinking intervention was needed. For me, the issue of the tabula rasa (Steven Pinker, TED talk) and socialization versus biology cannot take us far in understanding the complexity of family theories.

I sympathize with the demographic and life course perspective and the implications that Becker’s models have for empirical research. I agree with Aldous that “life course analysis has forced us to consider how societal events affect the families experiencing them as well as changes in the family institution over broad sweeps of time” (1990, p. 579). While the life course perspective has been criticized for its overcomplexity and the Economics approaches (like Becker’s) have been denounced for its simplicity in the assumptions, I argue that it’s our challenge to deal with multidimensional phenomena with complementary approaches. In this sense, I agree with Ben-Porah that all theories should by “confronted by evidence, by skeptics, and by alternative theories” (1982, p. 62).

1) How are Parsons’ ideas transmitted by the educational system, the media, religion, the rearing of children, etc? How are these ideas different in different cultures in the world?
2) In a future, if the biosocial perspective of the family prospers in academic research, do you think people will discuss the prescription of hormones to prevent couples from divorcing or to encourage women to have children? Where do choices and values fit in this intervention model?
3) How do we deal, as academics, with the different theoretical perspectives in order to study our research problem? How can we convey different approaches into our research to deal with the multidimensionality of the issues and alternative explanations?