CHANGES IN FAMILY STRUCTURE

         There has been considerable debate over many years as to whether the industrialization process that took place in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the pre-industrial extended family to evolve into the nuclear family. The majority of sociologists accepted that pre-industrial society was characterized by large extended families that were self-supporting and acted as units of production. The functionalist writers such as Talcott Parsons(Parsons and Bales, 1995) and Ronald Fletcher(1966) viewed this as the dominant family form and described the way in which it evolved through industrialization into a modern, isolated, nuclear family; small, mobile and well suited to today’s society. Another functionalist, William Goode(1963), argues that all over the world the traditional extended family form has been or is in the process of being replaced by the universal nuclear family. This process has been helped along not only by industrialization but also by the spread of the ideology of the nuclear family from Western societies.

           Also, a number of historians have studied parish dating from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century and found that the structure of the English family was much more like our modern family than was formerly thought. They show how the nuclear family was the norm during this period. Workers were not tired to the land but usually rented it for money or worked as day laborers, which means they often moved in search of work, thus breaking up the extended family. Many studies emphasized the fact that, even as recently the 1950s, for much the coming industrialization certainly did not mean the coming of the nuclear family. Rather than industrialization destroying the extended family structure, historical research indicates that opposite was generally true – industrialization seemed to increase the likelihood of such structure, especially in the earlier.