Sociology Now, Census Update

innocent of the more graphic aspects of life, like sex and

death, and they needed love, nurturing, and constant care

and attention. The number of children per family declined,

both because they would no longer be providing economic

support for the family and because each child now required

a greater investment of time and emotional energy.

In modern societies, children don’t often work along-

side their parents, and the family has become a unit of con-

sumption rather than production; its economic security is

tied to the workplace and the national economy. Instead,

the major functions of the family are to provide lifelong

psychological support and emotional security. The family

has been so closely associated with love and belonging that

friends and even groups of co-workers express their emo-

tional intimacy by saying they are “a family.”

Family and Ethnicity

The contemporary American nuclear family—the breadwinning husband, his home-

maker wife, and their 2.2 children, who live in a detached single-family house in a

suburb we call Anytown, USA—developed historically. But even today, it is only one

of several family forms. Families vary not only from culture to culture but also within

our society—by race and ethnicity. As each racial and ethnic group has a different

history, their family units developed in different ways, in response to different con-

ditions. For example, how can we understand the modern African American family

outside the deliberate policies of slavery whereby families were broken up, and hus-

bands, wives, and children deliberately sold to different slave owners, so as to dilute

the power of family as a tie of loyalty to something other than the master?

Sociologists are interested in the diversity of family forms by race and ethnicity.

Some of these differences are now so well documented that to enumerate them sounds

almost like a stereotype. And, to be sure, each ethnic group exhibits wide variation

in their families (not all Catholic families have nine kids, but most American fami-

lies with nine kids are Catholic). Sociologists are also interested in the process by which

one family form became the standard against which all other family forms were meas-

ured—and found wanting. In addition, although these family adaptations are seen

largely among ethnic minorities, they are also seen among the White working class,

which suggests that they are less “ethnic” adaptations to a White family norm and

more “class” adaptations to a middle- and upper-class family norm. As each ethnic

group develops a stable middle class, their families come to resemble the companion-

ate-marriage nuclear family of the White middle class. It may be the case not that the

nuclear family is inevitable, but that it is expensive—and that without significant

governmental support, it does not flourish.

The European American Family

This family form that became the dominant model was itself the product of a vari-

ety of social factors that are unlikely to return. Based initially on the Anglo-Irish

family of the seventeenth century, the European American family has also taken on

characteristics from each of the large immigrant groups, especially those that arrived

in the late nineteenth century. Many of these immigrant families were Catholic and

388 CHAPTER 12THE FAMILY

JThe nuclear family, with its
strict division of household
labor, is a relatively recent
historical invention—and does
not apply to all cultures, even
in the United States. In the
Chicano family, everyone
cooks, so everyone eats.