You may already be thinking about some of the reasons that people have different experiences of belonging. You might have some reasons in mind for why families have unequal access to resources and legal protection from the state. Sociological views on family problems generally fall into the structural functionalist, conflict, and social interactionist approaches introduced toward the beginning of this textbook. Let’s review these perspectives, which are summarized in the Snapshot table below.
Theoretical Perspectives Snapshot
| Theoretical perspective |
Major assumptions |
| Structural functionalism |
The family performs several essential functions for society. It socializes children, it provides emotional and practical support for its members, it helps regulate sexual activity and reproduction, and it provides social identity. Family problems stem from sudden or far-reaching changes in the family’s structure or processes; these problems threaten the family’s stability and weaken society. |
| Conflict theory |
The family contributes to social inequality by reinforcing economic inequality and by reinforcing patriarchy. Family problems stem from economic inequality and from patriarchal ideology. The family can also be a source of conflict, including physical violence and emotional cruelty, for its own members. |
| Symbolic interactionism |
The interaction of family members and intimate couples involves shared understandings of their situations. Wives and husbands have different styles of communication, and social class affects the expectations that spouses have of their marriages and of each other. Family problems stem from different understandings and expectations that spouses have of their marriage. |
Structural Functionalism
Recall that the functionalist perspective emphasizes that social institutions perform several important functions to help preserve social stability. Functionalists then uphold the notion that family is an important social institution and that families play a key role in stabilizing society. As such, the family performs several important functions.
First, the family is the primary unit for the socialization of children. No society is possible without adequate socialization of its young. In most societies, the family is the major unit in which socialization happens. Parents, siblings, and, if the family is extended rather than nuclear, other relatives all help socialize children from the time they are born.
One of the most important functions of the family is the socialization of children. In most societies the family is the major unit through which socialization occurs.
Colleen Kelly – Kids Playing Monopoly Chicago – CC BY 2.0
Second, the family is ideally a major source of practical and emotional support for its members. It provides them food, clothing, shelter, and other essentials, and it also provides them love, comfort, and help in times of emotional distress, and other types of support.
Third, the family helps regulate sexual activity and reproduction. All societies have norms governing with whom and how often a person should have sex. The family is the major unit for teaching these norms and the major unit through which sexual reproduction occurs. One reason for this is to ensure that infants have adequate emotional and practical care when they are born.
Fourth, the family provides its members with a social identity. Children are born into their parents’ social class, race and ethnicity, religion, and so forth. Some children have advantages throughout life because of the social identity they acquire from their parents, while others face many obstacles because the social class or race/ethnicity into which they are born is at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Beyond discussing the family’s functions, the functionalist perspective on the family maintains that sudden or far-reaching changes in conventional family structure and processes threaten the family’s stability and thus that of society. For example, most sociology and marriage-and-family textbooks during the 1950s maintained that the breadwinner/homemaker nuclear family was the best arrangement for children, as it provided for a family’s economic and childrearing needs. Any shift in this arrangement, they warned, would harm children and, by extension, the family as a social institution and even society itself.
These views are widely criticized today, because they assume that women are mothers who should work inside the home, and that men are fathers who should work outside the home, which perpetuates gender inequality. It's more likely that functionalists today would identify dysfunctions of the family, such as when they fail to properly socialize or protect children, or dysfunctions of other social institutions such as when the state fails to support families in poverty.
Functionalists can also help us understand the social problem of belonging by looking at how families support belonging. For example, immigrant families face many challenges. Immigrant families are disproportionately poor. They experience nativism, laws and policies which privilege citizens over non-citizens. For example, many immigrants can’t use the usual governmental social safety nets. A function of the family for immigrants, then, is to ensure survival of the members of that family. The family becomes an essential survival strategy. For example, Hispanic families value “la familia” or familism, a strong commitment to family life that stresses the importance of the family group over the interest of an individual. Hispanic families are more likely than white families to live in extended family groups, share economic resources, and encourage reciprocity and solidarity (Landale et al. 2006). La familia creates belonging.
Conflict Theory
Conflict theorists agree that the family serves important functions, but they also point to problems within the family that the functionalist perspective minimizes or overlooks all together. Rather than examining the functions of a family, conflict theorists look at power and inequality related to families. The conflict perspective emphasizes that many of the problems we see in today’s families stem from capitalism, economic inequality, and patriarchy.
According to conflict theorists, families reproduce class inequalities (Calder 2016). In other words, the family as a social institution contributes to social inequality. For instance, children of wealthy families usually have access to better education for their than poor families. Because families pass along wealth, resources, and opportunities to their children, and because families differ greatly in the amount of wealth and resources they have, the family helps reinforce existing inequality. Additionally, the problems that many families experience reflect the fact that they live in poverty or near poverty. Money does not always bring happiness, but a dire lack of money produces stress and other difficulties that impair a family’s functioning and relationships.
Applying Social Research
Social Class and the Family
A growing amount of social science research documents social class differences in how well a family functions: The quality of its relationships and the cognitive, psychological, and social development of its children. This focus reflects the fact that what happens during the first months and years of life may have profound effects on how well a newborn prospers during childhood, adolescence, and beyond. To the extent this is true, the social class differences that have been found have troublesome implications.
According to sociologist Frank E. Furstenberg Jr., “steep differences exist across social classes” in mothers’ prenatal experiences, such as the quality of their diet and health care, as well as in the health care that their infants receive. As a result, he says, “children enter the world endowed unequally.” This inequality worsens after they are born for several reasons.
First, low-income families are much more likely to experience negative events, such as death, poor health, unemployment, divorce, and criminal victimization. When these negative events do occur, says Furstenberg, “social class affects a family’s ability to cushion their blow…Life is simply harder and more brutish at the bottom.” These negative events produce great amounts of stress; this stress in turn causes children to experience various developmental problems.
Second, low-income parents are much less likely to read and speak regularly to their infants and young children, who thus are slower to develop cognitive and reading skills; this problem in turn impairs their school performance when they enter elementary school.
Third, low-income parents are also less able to expose their children to cultural experiences (e.g., museum visits) outside the home, to develop their talents in the arts and other areas, and to otherwise be involved in the many non-school activities that are important for a child’s development. In contrast, wealthier parents keep their children very busy in these activities in a pattern that sociologist Annette Lareau calls concerted cultivation. These children’s involvement in these activities provides them various life skills that help enhance their performance in school and later in the workplace.
Fourth, low-income children grow up in low-income neighborhoods, which often have inadequate schools and many other problems, including toxins such as lead paint, that impair a child’s development. In contrast, says Furstenberg, children from wealthier families “are very likely to attend better schools and live in better neighborhoods. It is as if the playing field for families is tilted in ways that are barely visible to the naked eye.”
Fifth, low-income families are less able to afford to send a child to college, and they are more likely to lack the social contacts that wealthier parents can use to help their child get a good job after college.
For all these reasons, social class profoundly shapes how children fare from conception through early adulthood and beyond. Because this body of research documents many negative consequences of living in a low-income family, it reinforces the need for wide-ranging efforts to help such families.
Sources: Bandy, Andrews, & Moore 2012; Furstenberg 2010; Lareau 2010
As family developed through the centuries, and especially during industrialization, it became more and more of a patriarchal unit (since men made money working in factories while women were expected to stay home doing unpaid work), helping to reinforce men’s status at the top of the social hierarchy. In heterosexual contexts, husbands today usually earn more money than their wives, and many men continue to feel that they are the head of their families. When women resist this old-fashioned notion, spousal conflict may occur.
Feminist theories of the family argue that society is structured to privilege men over women; the theory works to understand and transform inequalities. This theory emphasizes how gender roles are constructed within the family, including the socialization of children. Feminist theorists also assert that resistance to patriarchal family structures is an important way to address inequality in social problems.
More recently, conflict theorists say that families differ in their experiences of family autonomy, the ability of a family to make their own decisions about their future or about the treatment of their members (Calder 2016). The idea of family autonomy is often championed by politically conservative people. They argue that a family has its own integrity. Families should not be subject to the intervention of the state. Parents should be able to make decisions for their children, like whether or not to be immunized, without the county health department or the school board requiring compliance. However, liberals also support family autonomy, like the protesters in the figure below.
A sociological concept that helps us understand how power and the problem of belonging connect is the immigration industrial complex: "The immigration industrial complex is the confluence of public and private sector interests in the criminalization of undocumented migration, immigration law enforcement, and the promotion of 'anti-illegal' rhetoric" (Golash-Boza 2009:295). Like the military industrial complex and prison industrial complex that we discuss in other areas of this textbook, the immigration industrial complex criminalizes, detains, and deports undocumented immigrants. Conflict sociologists ask, who benefits from these actions? Although some of the original work related to the military-industrial complex comes from functionalist sociologists, conflict theories have deepened this work.
In this analysis, we see economic and social forces at work. On the one hand, the number of available immigrant visas is very low. However, businesses in the US are dependent on low-wage workers to sustain their profits. The undocumented labor force constitutes nearly 5% of the civilian labor force in the US. This includes 29% of all agricultural workers, 29% of all roofers, 22% of all maids and housekeepers, and 27% of all people working in food processing. Without the undocumented labor force, it is likely that food grown in the US would be grown elsewhere, thereby raising prices for consumers (Golash-Boza 2009).
With high labor force numbers, it would seem useful to reform immigration laws so that people could come here legally. Instead, the US has invested in a War on Terror. The Department of Homeland Security, which houses the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), had a budget of over $1 trillion for a 20-year period. The number of agents and officers dedicated to immigration and border protection almost doubled between 2003 and 2019. The related agency budgets increased similarly. This money supports increased detaining and deporting of undocumented people in ways that often violate their human rights (Golash-Boza 2009).
Sociologist Tanya Golash-Boza (2009) summarizes the connection between money, power, and oppression. She compares the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the immigration industrial complex in this way:
"These three complexes share three major features: (a) a rhetoric of fear; (b) the confluence of powerful interests; and (c) a discourse of other-ization. With the military build-up during the Cold War, the ‘others’ were communists. With the prison expansion of the 1990s, the ‘others’ were criminals (often racialized and gendered as Black men). With the expansion of the immigration industrial complex, the ‘others’ are ‘illegals’ (racialized as Mexicans). In each case, the creation of an undesirable other creates popular support for government spending to safeguard the nation" (Golash-Boza 2009:306).
By examining power and resources, conflict theorists focus on why inequality in belonging occurs. We will discuss inequality in belonging for immigrant families on the following page.
This image shows the border wall between the United States and Mexico at Nogales, Mexico. The white crosses contain the names of people who have died while trying to cross the border. Conflict theorists would ask, who truly benefits when border crossings are restricted?
“Wall of Crosses” by Jonathan McIntosh is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Symbolic Interactionism
Symbolic interactionists view the world in terms of symbols and the meanings assigned to them (LaRossa and Reitzes 1993). The family itself is a symbol. Through interaction, we create and maintain a definition of what family means. To some, it is a father, mother, and children; to others, it is any union that involves respect and compassion. Interactionists stress that family is not an objective, concrete reality. Like other social phenomena, it is a social construct that is subject to the ebb and flow of social norms and ever-changing meanings. Problems, however, would arise when the meanings and expectations about family or marriage do not coincide with reality.
Some studies, for example, focus on how husbands and wives in heterosexual cisgender families communicate and the degree to which they communicate successfully (Tannen 2001). A classic study by Mirra Komarovsky (1964) found that wives in blue-collar marriages liked to talk with their husbands about problems they were having, while husbands tended to be quiet when problems occurred. Such gender differences are less common in middle-class families, where men are better educated and more emotionally expressive than their working-class counterparts, but gender differences in communication still exist in these families. Another classic study by Lillian Rubin (1976) found that wives in middle-class families say that ideal husbands are ones who communicate well and share their feelings, while wives in working-class families are more apt to say that ideal husbands are ones who do not drink too much and who go to work every day.
Using symbolic interactionism, sociologists examine how queer families do gender. For example, in same-gender couples, there often isn’t a 'mother' and a 'father' or a man breadwinner and woman homemaker. Therefore, the couple negotiates who does what rather than falling back on cultural gender expectations. Family roles are no longer tied to gender. They are negotiated related to the skills, abilities, and needs of each person in the family. The family does gender every day, with the choices that they make about who pays bills, who changes diapers, and who takes out the trash.
Social interactionist perspectives on the institution of family also examine how family members and intimate partners interact on a daily basis and arrive at shared understandings of their situations. Studies grounded in social interactionism give us a keen understanding of how and why families operate the way they do. According to this perspective, family problems often stem from the different understandings, perceptions, and expectations that spouses have of their marriage and of their family. When these differences become too extreme and the spouses cannot reconcile their disagreements, spousal conflict and possibly separation may occur (Kaufman & Taniguchi 2006).
Other Perspectives
Beyond the classical theories of family problems discussed above, there are queer theorists and critical race theorists who explain social problems of family. They challenge traditional ideas of family and power, arguing that our changing family structures demonstrate resistance to patriarchy, racism, classism, and heteropatriarchy.
Heteropatriarchy is a system of oppression designed to reproduce and reinforce the dominance of heterosexual cisgender men and oppression of women and queer people (Everett et al. 2022), combining both gender oppression and sexuality oppression in ways that other systems of power do not capture alone. Queer theorists challenge the idea that marriage and family are the only healthy ways to be in a relationship. Early in queer politics activism, many lesbians and gay men argued that it was important to explore non-heteropatriarchal relationships. Marriage itself was illegal, so many queer people formed families of choice (aka, chosen families). Queer theorists also explore how queer people choose their families.
A chosen family is a deliberately chosen group of people that satisfies the typical role of family as a support system. These people may or may not be related to the person who chose them. These family groups are connected by conscious decision and lived experience rather than biology, adoption, or legalized relationships. Queer people often construct families of choice to create social resilience because many are kicked out of their families of origin (Levin et al. 2020). Some of the original research related to families of choice was conducted during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. To take care of each other, queer folk created families of choice to get groceries, take care of the sick, or bury the dead, like a family of origin might (Jackson Levin et al. 2020).
Thus, the family can be a source of strength for its members. Educator and researcher Tara Yosso expands on this idea, from a critical race theory perspective. She argues that students of color draw upon community cultural wealth, the interdependent overlapping forms of knowledge, skills, abilities and networks possessed and utilized by communities of color to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination (Yosso 2023).
Community Cultural Wealth is the interdependent overlapping forms of knowledge, skills, abilities, and networks possessed and utilized by Communities of Color to survive and resist racism and other forms of subordination (Yosso 2023) Other than income and wealth, what resources do you bring to support your family’s belonging?
“Community Cultural Wealth” from “Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth” by Tara J. Yosso, Race Ethnicity and Education, © Taylor & Francis Group Ltd is included under fair use; Yosso recommended using this image in a personal email communication to the original authors of the Puttman et al (2025) textbook
One of the components supporting community cultural wealth is familial capital. Yosso writes:
"Acknowledging the racialized, classed, and heterosexualized inferences that comprise traditional understandings of ‘familia”, familial capital is nurtured by our ‘extended family’, which may include immediate family (living or long passed on) as well as aunts, uncles, grandparents, and friends who we might consider part of our familia. From these kinship ties, we learn the importance of maintaining a healthy connection to our community and its resources. Our kin also model lessons of caring, coping and providing (educación), which inform our emotional, moral, educational and occupational consciousness" (Yosso 2006:79).
The family itself can be a source of power for people of color to resist white supremacy and thrive despite economic and social inequality. Yosso’s model is a powerful critique of previous models of social capital. If you’d like to read her work directly, please see: Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth.
