is the nuclear family universal essay

Nuclear Family Functions In Sociology

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A nuclear family is a family unit consisting of an adult male and female and dependent children. It is regarded by some sociologists (in particular functionalists) as the basic universal form of family structure.

The (white) nuclear family is sometimes referred to as the cereal packet family, because of its frequent portrayal by advertisers as the norm.

The concept of the nuclear family is thought to have arisen in the Western world during the Industrial Revolution, when families left farms and moved to small towns and cities for work. During this time, young people began to delay marriage and childbearing, living instead with their parents until they had established a career.

Functionalists such as Parsons suggest that the nuclear family replaced the extended family as the dominant form in industrial societies because it provided a better “fit”, and more closely matched the needs of society.

Despite the fact that by 2000 only 21% of all house holds consisted of a married or cohabiting couple with dependent children, the notion of the nuclear family remains central to family ideology.

Sociologists and politicians of the New Right frequently suggest that many social problems in Britain stem from the fact that not enough children are being brought up in stable, two-parent families.

Key Takeaways

• A nuclear family is a family consisting of of 2 generations, husband and wife and immature children who constitute a unit from the rest of the community.
• The term “nuclear family” is commonly used in the United States, where it was first coined by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1955. It has been suggested that the nuclear family is a universal human social grouping.
• Nuclear family is not universal, the structure of the family changes as the needs of the society changes. Pre-industrial families were extended families with multiple generations living together, where as post industrial families needed to be
• However, some scholars argue that the nuclear family is not a natural or inevitable human institution but rather a product of specific historical and cultural circumstances.
• In sociology, the nuclear family has been historically treated as the basic unit of social organization, but this has come into question over the past several decades, as the structure of families has become more and more diverse.

Functions of the Nuclear Family

Marxists believe that the family is a tool of capitalism and its main function is to maintain capitalism and reinforce social inequalities.

According to Marxism, the monogamous nuclear family emerged with capitalism. Before capitalism, traditional and tribal societies were classless and did not have private property.

Instead, property was collectively owned, and this was reflected in family structures.

An isolated nuclear family means that men can confirm whether a child belongs to them and ensure that wealth remains in the family through private inheritance.

Ultimately, however, this arrangement served to reproduce inequality. As the children of the rich grew into wealth, the children of the poor remained. Thus, the nuclear family served to benefit the bourgeois more than the proletariat.

A nuclear family system, one in which nuclear families live by themselves independent from the families they grew up in, is thought to be particularly well adopted to the needs of the American, and many other western economies, for a fluid and mobile labor market (Sussman, 1958).

Patriarchal Ideology

Feminists are critical of the family as a social institutions. They believe that the family is a tool of female oppression and in particular the nuclear family serves the needs of men rather than women.

This is through issues such as unequal division of domestic labour and domestic violence.

Some feminists view the function of the nuclear family as a place where patriarchal values are learned by individuals, which in turn add to the patriarchal society .

Young girls may be socialized to believe that inequality and oppression is a normal part of being a woman and boys are socialized to believe that they are superior and have authority over women.

Feminists often believe that the nuclear family teaches children gender roles which translate to gender roles in wider society.

For instance, girls may learn to accept that being a housewife is the only possible or acceptable role for women. Some feminists also believe that the division of labor is unequal in nuclear families, with women and girls accepting subservient roles in the household.

Murdock: Four Universal Residual Functions

Murdock (1949) claimed that the nuclear family performs four functions that benefit society because they reduce the potential for chaos and conflict and consequently bring about relatively well ordered, structured and predictable societies

Socialization : The family is the primary socializing agent for children. Parents teach their children the norms and values of society.

Economic stability : The family provides economic stability for its members. In many families, both parents work to earn an income.

Reproductive/Procreative : The nuclear family provides new members of society, without which society would cease to exist.

Sexual relationships : The family as an institution also regulates sexual behavior. Many societies, for example, have historically forbidden sex outside the family-creating bond of marriage.

Primary Socialization

According to Parsons (1951), although the nuclear family performs functions that are reduced in comparison to what it did in the past, it is still the only institution that can perform the core functions of primary socialization and the stabilization of adult personalities.

Primary socialization refers to the early period in a person”s life where they learn and develop themselves through interactions and experiences around them. This results in a child learning the attitudes, values, and actions appropriate to individuals as members of a particular culture.

The Stabilization of Adult Personalities

The stabilization of adult personalities, otherwise known as “warm bath theory,” emphasizes the emotional security found within marital relationships.

This stabilization serves to balance out the stresses and strains of life faced by most adults.

In addition, the stabilization of adult personalities within marriage allows adults to act on the child-like dimension of their personality by playing with their children, using their toys, and so forth (Parsons, 1951).

Another factor that aids the stabilization of adult personalities is the sexual division of labor within nuclear families.

Within isolated nuclear families, people are allocated particular roles in order to allow the unit to function correctly. There are the aforementioned expressive and instrumental roles (Parsons, 1951).

Instrumental and Expressive Roles

Murdock argued that nuclear families consist of instrumental and expressive roles . Instrumental roles provide financial support and establish family status, while expressive roles involve providing emotional support and physical care.

In a 20th-century view of the nuclear family, the father is typically the head of the household and is responsible for providing for the family financially. The mother is typically responsible for taking care of the home and raising the children.

Parsons suggested that children needed to grow up in a family in which the instrumental and expressive roles are performed by the respective parents if the children were to develop “stable adult personalities”.

Parsons’ understanding of expressive and instrumental roles was derived from, and constituted a reflection of, middle-class American society in the 1950s.

Disadvantages of the Nuclear Family

Postmodernists have called the nuclear family an inherently fragile structure, prosporous only in a time marked by especially easy to come by home ownership and economic progress during the post-war boom.

Proponents of this view argue that the nuclear family is beset by a number of serious problems. They point to high rates of divorce and single parenthood, as well as to the difficulty many families have in maintaining close relationships (Bengtson, 2001).

Even dynamics as common as sibling rivalry and parent-child differences can place tension on a small family with little contact with other members of an extended family. The lack of a support network can make it difficult for nuclear families to deal with problems, leading to further isolation and feelings of loneliness or helplessness (Bengtson, 2001).

For children in particular, growing up in a nuclear family can be quite difficult. With both parents working full-time, many kids feel neglected or abandoned. In some cases, this can lead to serious behavioral problems.

However, not all families are functional. Some families may be considered dysfunctional due to a variety of factors such as alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, physical abuse, or simply a lack of love and communication.

When a family is dysfunctional, it can have a negative impact on the individuals involved as well as on society as a whole. Children from dysfunctional families are more likely to experience problems in school, mental health issues, and substance abuse problems. They may also be more likely to engage in criminal activity (Bertrand, 1962).

Additionally, children in nuclear families often don not have the benefit of learning from extended family members such as grandparents or cousins. They also miss out on the opportunity to develop close relationships with those relatives.

Researchers have denied the functionality of the nuclear family – in the sense of being isolated and socially mobile – since the 1960s (Cervantes, 1965).

Indeed, the family is not an isolated unit but one that is linked to other families through marriage, blood ties, and friendship networks. The family functions within a community of kin and neighbors where information, cultural values, and material resources are exchanged (Friedlander, 1963).

Even though the nuclear family has its own private domain – the home – its members cannot avoid interacting with people outside the immediate family. In reality, then, the nuclear family is embedded in a web of social relations.

The structure of the nuclear family has also been critiqued on economic grounds. Critics argue that the nuclear family is an inefficient way to organize society because it requires duplicating services that could be provided more efficiently by the government or businesses.

For example, instead of each family having its own washing machine, all the families in a neighborhood could share a laundromat. Similarly, daycare, eldercare, and schooling could be provided more efficiently on a community-wide basis rather than by individual families.

The nuclear family is also criticized for being too small to meet all an individual”s needs. In particular, it is argued that the nuclear family cannot provide the same level of emotional support as a larger extended family.

Additionally, because the nuclear family is so small, it is often unable to provide adequate financial support to its members during times of need. This can lead to feelings of insecurity and anxiety, particularly among children and older adults (Bengtson, 2001).

The nuclear family has been declining in prevalence since the late 20th century as a result of factors such as increased divorce rates, cohabitation, single-parent households, and same-sex marriage.

Economic stressors  such as the Great Recession, stagnating wages, and the inflation of housing prices have also contributed to the decline of the nuclear family through reducing access to isolated housing.

Multigenerational, non-nuclear households are on the rise as a way to reduce costs and the burden of childcare distributed to one person in the household.

The rise of women in the workforce has also lessened a need for defined nuclear family roles, as there is less need for a husband to be the sole breadwinner. Another explanation is that people are delaying marriage and childbearing until later  in life, allowing them to develop deeper ties within their birth families and communities. The median age of first marriage in the United States has risen from 20 for women and 23 for men in 1950 to 27 for women and 29 for men in 2018 (Hemez, 2020).

Alternative Family Structures

Non-nuclear families can take on many different forms, including single-parent households, same-sex parents, adoptive parents, childless couples, blended families, and more.

There are a variety of reasons why a family may not be considered nuclear. In some cases, one or both parents may be absent due to death, divorce, or other circumstances. In other instances, the family may simply choose not to live together in a traditional nuclear arrangement.

There are many advantages to non-nuclear families. For example, single-parent households often provide a more nurturing and supportive environment for children than two-parent homes, especially in cases where the family would have otherwise been affected by abuse.

Same-sex parents can provide role models of healthy relationships for their children, and adoptive parents often create tightly-knit bonds with their children that are just as strong as any biological connection.

One historical example of a non-nuclear family is the extensive nuclear family, which is common in many cultures around the world. In an extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all live together in one household.

This arrangement provides support and stability for all members of the family, and offers a built-in network of caretakers for children. Increasingly over the past few decades, a new family structure is taking shape: grandparents raising their grandchildren.

This may be necessary when parents are not available to care for their children, such as by mental or medical or substance abuse issues.

Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1970). Reading Capital (B. Brewster, Trans.). London: New Left. (Original work published 1968) Brown, H. (2012). Marx on gender and the family: A critical study (Vol. 39). Brill.

Bales, R. F., & Parsons, T. (2014). Family: Socialization and interaction process. Routledge.

Bell, N. W. and E. F. Vogel (eds.) (1968). A Modern Introduction to the Family. Glencoe: Free Press.

Bengtson, V. L. (2001). Beyond the nuclear family: the increasing importance of multigenerational bonds: the burgess award lecture. Journal of marriage and family, 63 (1), 1-16.

Bertrand, A. L. (1962). School attendance and attainment: Function and dysfunction of school and family social systems. Social Forces, 40 (3), 228-233.

Cervantes, L. F. (1965). Family background, primary relationships, and the high school dropout. Journal of Marriage and the Family , 218-223.

Della Porta, D., & Diani, M. (2014). Introduction: The field of social movement studies.

Friedlander, F. (1963). Underlying sources of job satisfaction. Journal of Applied Psychology, 47 (4), 246.

Gamache, S. J. (1997). Confronting nuclear family bias in stepfamily research. Marriage & Family Review, 26 (1-2), 41-69.

Hemez, P. (2020). Distributions of age at first marriage, 1960-2018. Family Profiles, FP-20, 9.

Murdock, G. P. (1949). Social Structure . Macmillan.

Parsons, T. (1943). The kinship system of the contemporary United States. American anthropologist, 45 (1), 22-38.

Parsons, T. (1959). The Social Structure of the Family, in Ruth Anshen (ed.), The Family:Its Functions and Destiny . Harper.

Stern, B. J. (1948). Engels on the Family. Science & Society , 42-64.

Sussman, M. B. (1958). The isolated nuclear family: Fact or fiction. Soc. Probs. , 6, 333.

Zelditch, M. (1955). Role differentiation in the nuclear family: A comparative study. Family, Socialization and Interaction Process, 307-351.

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The Nuclear Family

Table of Contents

Historical context of the nuclear family, theoretical perspectives on the nuclear family, functional roles of the nuclear family, criticisms of the nuclear family.

• Contemporary Relevance of the Nuclear Family

The concept of the nuclear family has been a cornerstone in sociological discussions, primarily within the contexts of family structures, socialization, and societal norms . The term “nuclear family” traditionally refers to a family unit consisting of two parents and their biological children living together. This essay will delve into the historical context, theoretical frameworks, functional roles, criticisms, and contemporary relevance of the nuclear family, providing a comprehensive understanding suitable for an undergraduate audience.

Early Origins

The origins of the nuclear family can be traced back to pre-industrial societies, where extended family structures were more common. However, the nuclear family as a distinct social unit became more pronounced during the industrial revolution. This period marked a significant shift in family structures, influenced by the changing economic landscape.

Industrialization and Urbanization

The industrial revolution brought about urbanization and the need for a mobile workforce. As a result, the extended family units, which were predominant in agrarian societies, began to fragment. The nuclear family emerged as a more functional unit in urban settings, where smaller households were easier to maintain and more adaptable to the demands of industrial work schedules.

From a functionalist perspective, the nuclear family is seen as a fundamental building block of society. Talcott Parsons , a prominent functionalist sociologist, argued that the nuclear family performs essential functions that contribute to societal stability. These functions include socialization of children, emotional support, and the stabilization of adult personalities. The nuclear family is viewed as a unit that adapts to the needs of an industrial society, providing a stable environment for its members.

Conflict Theory

Conflict theorists, such as Friedrich Engels , critique the nuclear family from a different angle. Engels argued that the nuclear family emerged alongside private property and capitalism, serving to perpetuate class inequalities . The family unit is seen as a site of power dynamics and economic disparity, where the roles within the family reflect broader societal hierarchies. This perspective highlights how the nuclear family can reinforce social stratification and limit individual freedoms.

Symbolic interactionists focus on the micro-level interactions within the nuclear family. This perspective emphasizes the meanings and definitions that family members attach to their roles and relationships. According to symbolic interactionism , the nuclear family is not a static institution but is constantly shaped and reshaped through daily interactions. This approach highlights the importance of understanding the subjective experiences of family members and how these experiences influence family dynamics.

Socialization

One of the primary functions of the nuclear family is the socialization of children. Socialization is the process through which individuals learn the norms, values , and behaviors necessary for functioning in society. Within the nuclear family, parents play a crucial role in transmitting cultural norms and values to their children, preparing them for participation in the broader social world.

Emotional Support

The nuclear family provides a source of emotional support and stability for its members. This support is essential for the psychological well-being of individuals. The intimate relationships within a nuclear family offer a sense of belonging and security, which can be vital in navigating the complexities of modern life.

Economic Cooperation

Economically, the nuclear family functions as a cooperative unit. Traditionally, the division of labor within the nuclear family has been based on gender roles, with men typically taking on the role of breadwinner and women managing the household. However, these roles have evolved over time, with increasing numbers of dual-income households and more fluid gender roles .

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nuclear family

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• The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family - Nuclear Family Emotional Process
• BMC - Public Health - Factors associated with quality of life among joint and nuclear families: a population-based study
• Simply Psychology - Nuclear Family Functions In Sociology
• Academia - Joint and Nuclear Family

nuclear family , in sociology and anthropology , a group of people who are united by ties of partnership and parenthood and consisting of a pair of adults and their socially recognized children. Typically, but not always, the adults in a nuclear family are married. Although such couples are most often a man and a woman, the definition of the nuclear family has expanded with the advent of same-sex marriage . Children in a nuclear family may be the couple’s biological or adopted offspring.

Thus defined, the nuclear family was once widely held to be the most basic and universal form of social organization. Anthropological research, however, has illuminated so much variability of this form that it is safer to assume that what is universal is a “nuclear family complex” in which the roles of husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister are embodied by people whose biological relationships do not necessarily conform to the Western definitions of these terms. In matrilineal societies, for example, a child may be the responsibility not of his biological genitor but of his mother’s brother, who fulfills the roles typical of Western fatherhood.

Closely related in form to the predominant nuclear-family unit are the conjugal family and the consanguineal family. As its name implies, the conjugal family is knit together primarily by the marriage tie and consists of mother, father, their children, and some close relatives. The consanguineal family, on the other hand, typically groups itself around a unilineal descent group known as a lineage , a form that reckons kinship through either the father’s or the mother’s line but not both. Whether a culture is patrilineal or matrilineal, a consanguineal family comprises lineage relatives and consists of parents, their children, and their children’s children. Rules regarding lineage exogamy , or out-marriage, are common in these groups; within a given community , marriages thus create cross-cutting social and political ties between lineages.

The stability of the conjugal family depends on the quality of the marriage of the husband and wife, a relationship that is more emphasized in the kinds of industrialized, highly mobile societies that frequently demand that people reside away from their kin groups. The consanguineal family derives its stability from its corporate nature and its permanence, as its relationships emphasize the perpetuation of the line.

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Is the Nuclear Family Universal

2019, Oxbridge Tutorial College

The nuclear family or the “cereal packet family” typically involves parents and their children living in one household together. Traditionally, the father had the important role of providing for the family while the mother takes care of the home. This ‘perfect’ family structure has been celebrated through media, particularly in the 50s and the 60s. However, the portrayal of the ‘ideal’ nuclear family has evolved and become more inclusive. Although, sociologists like George Peter Murdock claim that the typical and conventional nuclear family is the ‘right’ and most common type of family structure. Is the nuclear family truly universal?

Related Papers

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The concept of joint family is very oldest in Indian culture and tradition. The members of a joint family are relatively living in the concept of sharing and caring by sacrificing their personal desires. Joint family is an organization of some closely related persons, where a group of peoples, normally living in a same house with each other, eating the food prepared by the single kitchen, participate in a general prayer of God. The children of joint family are growing with lot of love and affection, cooperation, fun, enjoyment and community axiology. Joint family system is one of the great characteristic of Hindu family. It was the base of the social system of India in past. However, with the complexity in social structure due to industrialization, modernization and urbanization joint family system gradually transformed to the nuclear family system in post independence era of India. Amy Baker & Haura Soden (1997), Keitha Keith (1993), Clark (2002), Williams (1998), Rebecca Marclen (1999), Miller and Shumow (2001), have studied the impact of family environment on academic achievement of secondary level students. The concept of nuclear family is not very old. It came into existence by the breakdown of joint family system. According to Dr. K.P. Desai, “The family which has minimum members is called as nuclear family.”A nuclear family in general consists of parents and their children who are more or less self centered, independent and free from their responsibilities for the other members of the family, such as grand father and mother, uncle, aunt and nieces. In conclusive form, the nuclear family is system of minimum family members which like freedom and believe in modernization. The children of nuclear family comparatively lack emotional intelligence and community living values.

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The family is commonly regarded as being an important social institution. In several policy areas, evidence can be found that the family is treated as an entity towards which others can have moral obligations; it has needs and interests that require protection; it can be ill and receive treatment. The interests attributed to the family are not reducible to those of its members – and may even come into conflict with them. Using Warren's criteria for moral status, we show that, although the family is not explicitly described in terms of moral status, the way in which it is treated implies that it has such status.

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There are many different interpretations of what the family should be – its desired member composition, its primary purpose, and its cultural significance – and many different examples of what families actually look like across the globe. I examine the most paradigmatic conceptions of the family that are based upon the supposed primary purpose that the family serves for its members and for the state. I then suggest that we ought to reconceptualize how we understand and define the family in an effort to move away from these paradigmatic conceptions. This approach requires that we examine the way(s) in which the family has been defined descriptively – that is, how families have been defined historically – in an effort to determine what a normative theory of the family might look like. The goal of this inquiry is to define a family in terms of what it ought to be – a goal that moves our understanding of the family to a new conceptual landscape. I then present my own account of familial relations that aims to capture a normative understanding of the unique primary purpose that the family serves for its members.

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The Functionalist Perspective on the Family

Table of Contents

Functionalists see the family as one of the essential building blocks for stable societies. They tend to to see the nuclear family as the ideal family for industrial societies and argue that it performs positive functions such as as socialising children and providing emotional security for parents.

There are two main Functionalist theorists of the family: George Peter Murdock and Talcott Parsons.

Murdock argued that the nuclear family was universal and that it performed four essential functions: stabilising the sex drive, reproduction, socialisation of the young and economic production. (Obviously this has been widely criticised!)

The Functionalist Perspective on the Family: Overview

This post covers:

The Functionalist View of Society

Functionalists regard society as a system made up of different parts which depend on each other. Different institutions perform specific functions within a society to keep society going, in the same way as the different organs of a human body perform different functions in order to maintain the whole.

George Peter Murdock – Four essential functions of the nuclear family

George Murdock was an American Anthropologist who looked at 200 different societies and argued that the nuclear family was a universal feature of all human societies. In other words, the nuclear family is in all societies!

Murdock suggested there were ‘four essential functions’ of the nuclear family:

Criticisms of Murdock

Talcott parsons –  functional fit theory.

Parsons has a historical perspective on the evolution of the nuclear family. His functional fit theory is that as society changes, the type of family that ‘fits’ that society, and the functions it performs change. Over the last 200 years, society has moved from pre-industrial to industrial – and the main family type has changed from the extended family to the nuclear family. The nuclear family fits the more complex industrial society better, but it performs a reduced number of functions.

I really like this brief explanation of Parson’s Functional Fit Theory:

Two irreducible functions of the family

Primary socialisation.

An important part of socialisation according to Functionalists is ‘gender role socialisation. If primary socialisation is done correctly then boys learn to adopt the ‘instrumental role’ (also known as the ‘breadwinner role) – they go on to go out to work and earns money. Girls learn to adopt the ‘expressive role’ – doing all the ‘caring work’, housework and bringing up the children.

The stabilisation of adult personalities

Criticisms of functional fit theory, the positive functions of the family: a summary.

Criticisms of the Functionalist perspective on the family

It is really important to be able to criticise the perspectives. Evaluation is worth around half of the marks in the exam!

Downplaying Conflict

Being out of date, ignoring the exploitation of women.

Functionalists tend to ignore the way women suffer from the sexual division of labour in the family. Even today, women still end up being the primary child carers in 90% of families, and suffer the burden of extra work that this responsibility carries compared to their male partners. Gender roles are socially constructed and usually involve the oppression of women. There are no biological reasons for the functionalist’s view of separation of roles into male breadwinner & female homemaker. These roles lead to the disadvantages being experienced by women.

Functionalism is too deterministic

A level sociology families and households revision bundle.

The bundle contains the following:

Signposting and Related Posts

It is usually followed and critiqued by the Marxist perspective on the family and Feminist Perspectives on the family.

References and Sources for Further Reading

Robb Webb et al (2015) AQA A Level Sociology Book 1, Napier Press. ISBN-10: 0954007913

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Assess the Claim that the Nuclear Family is Universal.

We know that the nuclear family consists of a unit, which has an adult male and female with their dependant offspring, but to start with, we must clarify a common ground on what ‘Universal’ actually means. Well, universal is including or covering all, as a whole, without exception, which occurs everywhere. This means that if the nuclear family is universal, then it must take place in all countries and societies. Despite this indisputable fact, there are so many different views and concepts that conflict with one another from many different sociologists that have studied the universality of the family in close detail.

The first sociologist I am going to look at is Murdock, whose studies were carried out in 1949. The reason that he is a predominant sociologist, when it comes to the family, is mainly because he studied 250 societies, which gave him a large insight to the world around us including minor tribes and LEDC’s (less economically developed counties), but also allows us to make a generalisation.

All of the societies in Murdock's sample displayed some form of family organisation. More specifically, although many societies were organised into polygamous and extended families, even these had at least two nuclear families per polygamous or extended family household as a base, which forms the family. The polygamous family was made up of two or more nuclear families through plural marriage, while the extended family consisted of two or more nuclear families joined together through parent - child ties. Through my research, I found out that during Murdock's sample, he found 47 societies had only the nuclear family level, while 53 possessed polygamous but not extended families, 92 had some form of extended family organization, and the remainder proved impossible to categorise on the basis that information was limited at the time. Obviously, in terms of age, the more contemporary the study undertaken will result in more accurate statistics than earlier studies as there is more information widely available and technology is enhanced than when Murdock’s evaluation was undertaken in 1949.

Murdock's key point that should be noted was, that even where complex forms of family organisation occur, nuclear families are still found as the basis of the more complex forms.

Murdock argued further that the nuclear family is not only universal but also universally important for society.  Other earlier sociologists wrote that the family provided none or few functions in society. Murdock, in denying this view, stated without the family, society would cease to function. He also pointed out the key functions of the nuclear family. Murdock’s main argument was that the nuclear family is the most efficient arrangement for performing the four essential functions and he went on to identify the four essential functions of the family, which are:

• Sexual: the family provides and environment for regulating sexual desires
• Reproduction: essential for the survival of the human society
• Socialisation: learning the norms and values of a society
• Economic: shelter, division of labour

This is a preview of the whole essay

Despite this convincing argument from Murdock, there are many criticisms that can be made of his views. The first downfall of Murdock is that the functions of the nuclear family can also be equally performed in different family structures. Likewise, cross-cultural evidence can suggest that alternatives to the nuclear family do exist or have existed in the past. Thirdly, many families are lone parent or reconstituted. These can be seen as diverse because they do not fit into Murdock’s definition, as there needs to be two parents belonging to both adults. The confusion with this is because although they are classified as families, they are actually households because unless the child is adopted or blood related, then the stepparent does not have any legal duties or obligations towards the child. This can be seen as a growing family diversity within society.

From these criticisms of Murdock, it suggests that his definition is not always true. Where there are exceptions, it demonstrates that the nuclear family is not universal. These are these can be shown by other sociologists views. Which enables me to compare different sources and concepts.

Firstly, a female sociologist named Kathleen Gough researched the Nayar family. Which are situated in Kerala in west India.

Marriage did not exist among the Nayars, although certain customs that bear a resemblance to aspects of marriage did. In particular, these included the tali-tying ceremony and legitimate unions between a woman and a series of lovers known as sambandham husbands. In contrast, the sambandham relationship involved no religious ceremony, but it did involve a sexual union. Each woman took a series of partners through her life. She could, in fact, be involved in more than one such relationship at a time: twelve to be exact!!!

A sandbanham husband had no obligations within the relationship. His only strong ties were to the family in which he grew up, which included his mother and other relatives related through his mother, such as his sisters and brothers. The father was not socially important, and a man had no obligations toward his children. Therefore, we can see that it is doubtful that the term ‘nuclear family’ accurately applies to this so-called arrangement.

Secondly, are the Kibbutz, who mainly live in Israel. Murdock argued that the nuclear family in all societies performs sexual, reproductive, and economic functions. In the kibbutz it is the case that sexual and reproductive functions are served through marriage. After a period of cohabitation, kibbutz members normally marry under Israeli law, yet contrary to Murdock's definition, the relationship called ‘marriage’ has no economic functions. Economic activities such as working in the fields are performed for the whole of the kibbutz.

Likewise, education is often the responsibility of the kibbutz as a whole. But whereas this is true to some extent in all modern societies in which children attend school, the kibbutz takes the principle a step further. In many areas of Kibbutz, children are raised from a young age by nurses and teachers, not by their parents, which conveys that this function is not necessarily performed under the nuclear family life. The structure of kibbutz life therefore raises questions about the universality of the family and the nature of family relations.

The third exception that contradicts Murdock's view is the different concepts that Nancy Gonzalez believes when she carried out her research in 1985. These concepts and arguments stem form the research she did in the West Indian Matrifocal family otherwise know as New world Black families.

Matrifocal can be defined as female orientated, where the female has the authority within the family. For many lower-class West Indians, the role of the father in family life is negligible, hence the focus being revolved around the woman. The mother is the central figure after a household comes into existence when a man and a woman set up house together. Their cohabitation is sometimes based on a legal marriage, but this is not necessarily the case. What makes the Matrifocal family unusual is that the husband takes little or no part in childcare and may spend little time at home, often living elsewhere in the same community. Although in other parts of the world such behaviour would be frowned on even thought of as deviant, in the West Indies it is socially acceptable. Eventually the older children, when they leave school, contribute toward the earnings of the family, and the importance of the father may be reduced even further.

Based on this information, Gonzalez suggests that Murdock should redefine the family on the basis that there doesn’t necessarily need to be a father in the family, just a mother with her dependant children, and maybe perhaps the grandmother (horizontally extended) for financial matters since the father is absent. It has been argued, for example, that the female-headed household descended from the separation of men from their families during the period of plantation slavery. Smith first argued this, whilst Lewis, another sociologist who researched the causes of matrifocal families concluded that poverty is the basic cause of matrifocal families, which year after year has become the norms for West Indian families.

Marxists would view the family as social control and reproduces capitalist society

Although I couldn’t find any research to back this statement up, in my opinion, from a realistic view of my social societal knowledge of families, including my own, is that the reason families reproduce capitalism is because, although in our ever changing society where women nowadays go to work just as much as men, pregnancies keep the female sex off as work and they are still seen as the stereotypical carers of the family, which look after the children and provide domestic labour, whilst, on the other hand, the stereotypical father is usually the breadwinner of our society. His role is to earn most of the money and provide for the family, hence maintaining the capitalism as the family produces the required labour power. This idea, since it is coming from a recent contemporary issue, it displays the current views that can be debated about the society in the UK.

So, obviously, from the previous paragraph, Marxists believe that patriarchal societies dominate the family institution, but they feel that it is extremely exploitative and wish for communism.

This means therefore that Marx argued for a society based on equality which would put an end to alienation and exploitation – where wealth and property does not rest in on the shoulders if one of the parents. He calls this a communist society, which also prevents any sexism in our society.

The strengths of the Marxist approach is that it:

Explores the role of ‘oppressive ideologies’..

• Offers critical approach
• Acknowledges the dark-side of the family
• Offers explanation for the development of the family.
• Links the family to inequality in capitalist society

But on the other hand, it has weaknesses:

• Approach toward the family rests on assumptions about the nature of society i.e. that it is based on conflict between opposing groups. Couldn’t society be based on consensus instead?
• Ignores family diversity. Sees the nuclear family as being simply determined by the economy. It ignores how change may come about because of legal and attitudinal changes.
• Radical Feminists suggest that Marxists ignore the patriarchal nature of society

The fact Marxists feel that the family is too patriarchal, it therefore shows that they must base their concepts on the nuclear family only, which means that they favour the view that the family is one of universality.

The last society that I have researched is by Callahan, who whilst studying the Gay family, found that most children from gay couples are from previous heterosexual relationships. There are also more lesbian mothers than gay fathers, the obvious reason being because the mother has more rights than the father and the judicial system would prefer a child be brought up by two women rather than two men. During his research he also found that if homosexuals could marry, then most gay couples would take that option, despite the social diversity.

As a whole, Callahan’s main point of the family is that gay households are the same as homosexual ones, which also hinders the case that the family is universal.

On the other hand, it was not only Murdock that believed that the nuclear family was universal as his claim was aided by Talcot Parsons, who was an American sociologist, which shared similar views on the family. Parsons suggests that the nuclear family is the best organisational basis for society.

Because Murdock and Parsons theories and concepts of the family it makes them both functionalists. Functionalists are groups that support the family, which also believe that the family regulates sexual behaviour.

Parsons says that the family has to include two irreducible functions. These are primary socialisation, which is the teaching of basic norms, beliefs and values within the family; and, the second, which is that the family is a vehicle to release tension and let off steam, before going out into the outside community in a calm and civil manner.

So basically, the main argument for the essay is dependant on how the universal is defined. For the basis of my essay I have defined it so that the nuclear family must take place in all countries and societies, without exceptions, and, here I have found in my research a number of these, which obviously shows that although there are nuclear families around the globe, not all societies have them.

Therefore to conclude the discussion, I believe that after studying the concepts, theories and many, many sociologist perspectives, it has become quite apparent that although the nuclear family is commonly found in societies, it is not in all.

The fact that a rookie sociologist like myself disagrees with a great sociologist such as Murdock is because he was working within different parameters, i.e. because he defined ‘universal’ differently to me, he felt that as exceptions are few in number and are not statistically different, it didn’t affect his case, whereas I feel it does.

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• v.376(1827); June 21, 2021

The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences

Rebecca sear.

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

Associated Data

This article has no additional data.

The importance of social support for parental and child health and wellbeing is not yet sufficiently widely recognized. The widespread myth in Western contexts that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family is the ‘traditional’ family structure leads to a focus on mothers alone as the individuals with responsibility for child wellbeing. Inaccurate perceptions about the family have the potential to distort academic research and public perceptions, and hamper attempts to improve parental and child health. These perceptions may have arisen partly from academic research in disciplines that focus on the Western middle classes, where this particular family form was idealized in the mid-twentieth century, when many of these disciplines were developing their foundational research. By contrast, evidence from disciplines that take a cross-cultural or historical perspective shows that in most human societies, multiple individuals beyond the mother are typically involved in raising children: in evolutionary anthropology, it is now widely accepted that we have evolved a strategy of cooperative reproduction. Expecting mothers to care for children with little support, while expecting fathers to provide for their families with little support, is, therefore, likely to lead to adverse health consequences for mothers, fathers and children. Incorporating evidence-based evolutionary, and anthropological, perspectives into research on health is vital if we are to ensure the wellbeing of individuals across a wide range of contexts.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Multidisciplinary perspectives on social support and maternal–child health’.

1.  Introduction

To misquote John Donne ‘no woman is an island’, able to raise children alone. In evolutionary anthropology, it is now widely accepted that we are a species that practises cooperative reproduction: throughout human history, children have been raised by cooperative networks of individuals [ 1 , 2 ]. In Western contexts, this idea does not yet appear to be particularly widespread much beyond anthropology, either in academia, in popular culture or among policy-makers. Instead, the ‘traditional’ family is widely regarded to be a nuclear family, where the husband–wife unit is assumed to be economically autonomous and responsible for raising children with little help, with an extreme sexual division of labour in which men are solely responsible for ‘breadwinning’ and women ‘homemaking’. In reality, across most societies, the husband–wife unit is rarely autonomous, but is instead engaged in extensive cooperative relationships with other individuals, particularly other family members. These include extensive help with raising children. The male breadwinner–female homemaker division of labour is also unusual. While there is often a sexual division of labour, such that women and men do not have exactly the same roles (for example, women do typically spend more time in childcare), childcare is not the exclusive preserve of women in most societies and, even more so, productive labour is not the exclusive preserve of men.

Inaccurate assumptions about the ‘traditional’ human family matter because they are reflected in academic research, policy and health interventions, and popular discussions, meaning they have the potential to distort research, hamper attempts to improve health and wellbeing, and feed into problematic political narratives. These assumptions also spread into research and public health interventions in the Global South, given the loudness of the Global North's voice in these arenas. Such assumptions are particularly problematic because of the ease with which ‘traditional’ becomes ‘natural’ and ‘good’, despite endless repetition of the dangers of the naturalistic and is/ought fallacies. Behaviour that is ‘natural’ or that is typically performed is not necessarily always the ‘right’ behaviour, but moral judgements are frequently made about family form, likely because of the importance of family in human lives. To avoid hampering research, public health and policy, and misinforming popular culture, it is important, therefore, to promote an accurate picture of what the human family actually looks like worldwide, emphasizing the diversity of family forms in which children can be successfully raised.

2.  Where does the idea that the ‘traditional’ human family is a male breadwinner nuclear family come from?

If the male breadwinner nuclear family is a relatively unusual family form, then where does the idea that it is the ‘traditional’ family come from? Evolutionary researchers need to bear some responsibility for promoting this view. Social norms surrounding the family and gender roles undoubtedly have complex origins, but in popular discourse in the West, they are often given an evolutionary justification; for example, the male breadwinner–female homemaker family may be considered the ‘natural’ way of things because of the assumption that women are biologically designed to bear and raise children, while men provide for them. This view unfortunately does appear in some evolutionary research, particularly from the mid-to-late twentieth century. For example, ‘Man the Hunter’ was an influential conference and subsequent book in the 1960s which promoted a vision of an evolutionary past in which hunting by men and provisioning of women and children was of key importance in human evolution [ 3 ]. Lovejoy's aptly titled 1981 paper ‘The origin of man’ extrapolated this vision beyond male provisioning into the claim that female homemaking also had a long history: ‘the nuclear family …may have [its] ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene’ [ 4 , p. 348]. There were always some voices in evolutionary social science emphasizing the importance of the extended family, and recent decades have seen an explosion of evolutionary anthropological literature providing evidence that male breadwinner nuclear families are far from ‘traditional’ (see the next section), but even in 2020, some evolutionary psychologists are still publishing papers that explicitly refer to this family form as ‘traditional’. Given that this idea is still being (inaccurately) promoted in some areas of the evolutionary behavioural sciences, it is not too surprising that there should still be a popular perception that the male breadwinner family is ‘traditional’.

Some social sciences also need to shoulder responsibility for promoting the view that the male breadwinner nuclear family is ‘traditional’. Research on the family by the economist Gary Becker, which has been highly influential far beyond economics, assumes the nuclear family is the organizational unit on which economic production is focused. In his widely read A treatise on the family , he explicitly attributed household specialization to biological differences between the sexes: ‘The most pervasive division [of labour] is between married women, who traditionally have devoted most of their time to childbearing and other domestic activities, and married men, who have hunted, soldiered, farmed, and engaged in other “market” activities’ [ 5 , p. 30]. He even referred to men in the household and women in the labour market as a ‘deviant division of labour’ [ 5 , p. 40], though he backtracked on biological differences as the cause of household specialization in domestic or market work in other writings [ 6 ]. Despite acknowledging the important economic contributions of children to the household in some societies, he also did not appear to be aware of the considerable support that mothers receive for childrearing: ‘over the years most households in Western and Eastern societies have been headed by married men and women who raise their own children’ [ 5 , p. 80].

In much of sociology and demography too, there seems to be a pervasive assumption that the male breadwinner nuclear family is the norm: changes in family structure that have happened in (some sections of) Western populations since the Second World War, such as increasing female labour force participation, childbearing outside of marriage and decreasing marriage rates, have been described as the ‘decline’ of the family [ 7 ] and ‘the earthquake that shuddered through the American family in the past 20 years’ [ 8 , p. 451]. While these ideas may have been partly influenced by Becker's views on the ‘traditional' nature of the male breadwinner nuclear family [ 5 ], they may also arise from work by sociologists such as Talcott Parsons. Parsons, while acknowledging that other family forms existed, concluded that the ‘isolated' male breadwinner nuclear family was best suited to (the most ‘natural’ in?) industrialized societies (e.g. [ 9 ]). These ideas about late twentieth century ‘declines' in the family led to concerns about mothers ‘abandoning’ their children by going out to work, though subsequently demographers were ‘perplexed’ that this did not seem to have the expected catastrophic consequences for child wellbeing [ 10 ]. McLanahan's widely cited ‘diverging destinies’ framework in demography, however, does argue that a shift away from ‘traditional’ marriages—of which the mainstay is ‘gender-role specialization’—is having adverse effects on children. Similar assumptions about the importance of mothers dedicating themselves exclusively to childrearing, influenced by Bowlby's mid-twentieth century evolutionary work on ‘attachment’, are made in psychology, where the responsibility for children's development and success is typically placed squarely in mothers' laps [ 11 ].

What all of these lines of research that emphasize the male breadwinner nuclear family have in common is that they arose shortly after the Second World War, as many academic disciplines burgeoned. It was during this time period that the idealization of the male breadwinner nuclear family reached its zenith in the West. This family form seems to have been deliberately promoted by some governments as a way to get women out of the labour force immediately after the Second World War in order to ensure jobs were available for returning servicemen [ 11 ]. This promotion was made easier by the rise of new forms of mass media such as television, and the rise of powerful media corporations, which allowed this family form to be stamped on the consciousness of academics and the general public alike [ 12 , 13 ]. Academic researchers responsible for some foundational work in various disciplines during this period may have drawn conclusions about what is the ‘traditional’ or ‘natural’ human family from the family arrangements in which they grew up and raised their own children, and that they saw represented in the media. These ideas have since been influential in the development of these academic disciplines. Further, the perverse incentives in academia that encourage academics to stay within their disciplinary lanes mean that there may be little interaction between disciplines that draw conclusions about the ‘traditional’ family from a particular context and time period and those that might have different perspectives on the family, such as anthropology or history. The next two sections review research from these latter disciplines to show that the male breadwinner nuclear family, to the extent that it exists at all, is likely relatively novel in human history.

3.  What does the ‘traditional’ human family actually look like?

A more accurate picture of the human family is one of flexibility. Anthropology, including evolutionary anthropology, has produced a large body of work on family structure and the division of labour within families from cultures worldwide. There are some features of the male breadwinner nuclear family that are common worldwide: the tendency to form pair-bonds between individuals who work together to raise children, and the tendency for women to devote more time to childrearing than men. But these pair-bonds are not always lifelong, exclusive or co-residential, and do not necessarily involve only the parents of the children [ 14 ]; nor are children always raised by their own parents [ 15 , 16 ]. Greater emphasis on childrearing among women also does not mean that exclusive female domesticity automatically follows. For mothers across species and in most human societies, ‘childrearing’ involves making sure children are fed, which, for our species, means women typically work in productive labour to produce food, alongside other family members. What is particularly missing from the ‘traditional’ view of the family is acknowledgement of cooperative relationships beyond the parents: the food that men and women produce is not necessarily used to feed their own children, but shared more widely with both extended family and other group members. The extended family and other group members also share other tasks needed to raise children successfully, such as direct childcare.

It is now widely accepted in evolutionary anthropology that humans have evolved a cooperative strategy of reproduction. In comparison with other apes, we humans bear a relatively large number of children in quick succession, and our children are dependent on adult provisioning for an unusually long time. This creates a heavy burden of care since mothers simultaneously have multiple dependent children—a burden mothers cannot manage alone, as other ape mothers tend to do. We are also a species that relies heavily on social learning, and other family and group members provide support for children to develop the skills necessary in adulthood, both for productive work and for raising children. These characteristics of our species mean that we adopt a reproductive strategy that involves an unusually high degree of investment from fathers, compared with other mammals. But paternal investment is not universal nor necessarily sufficient [ 17 ], so that typically multiple other individuals are also involved in raising children, though exactly who is involved in childraising varies between societies [ 1 , 18 – 21 ].

Evidence both for the significant contributions of women to the family diet and of a cooperative reproduction strategy come from data on production patterns across the life course, i.e. how much individuals of different sex and age contribute to the diet, in terms of number of calories produced. Across subsistence societies—those that are entirely or very largely self-sufficient in producing food—women typically contribute a substantial proportion of calories to the diet. On average, female contributions hover slightly below 50% [ 22 , 23 ], though these patterns do vary between populations: there are some societies in which women produce few calories, but there are also some in which women contribute the majority of food produced [ 24 – 27 ]. Analyses of how both production and consumption patterns vary across the life course also demonstrate that both sexes tend to remain net producers, producing more calories than they consume, until late in life [ 28 – 30 ]. The excess food they produce is then used to help support their existing children and grandchildren.

Such intergenerational support from the grandparental generation is common worldwide, and not just in terms of providing children with food. Grandparents provide a range of other types of support to their adult children and grandchildren, including direct childcare, and help with domestic work, as well as emotional support and advice. Aubel's reviews of the literature in lower- and middle-income countries illustrate the influential role that grandmothers and older women have as advisors and carers around the perinatal period and in child feeding [ 31 , 32 ]. Another recent literature review assessed the evidence for the impact of grandparental investment (measured by coresidence, caregiving, financial and other support) on grandchild outcomes (including physical health, socio-emotional wellbeing and cognitive development) [ 33 ]. These associations were quite heterogeneous, with the exception that studies on cognitive development tended to show beneficial associations between grandparental investment and child outcomes. An earlier literature review suggested that the presence of grandmothers, particularly maternal grandmothers, was associated with higher child survival in some settings [ 34 , 35 ].

These reviews on grandparents and child outcomes do need to be interpreted cautiously, as few studies on the topic have used methods that provide evidence for a causal association between grandparental presence or investment and grandchild outcomes (but see [ 36 , 37 ]). Associations are also not always positive, at least when public health metrics are used. For example, some studies have found that grandparental involvement tends to be positively associated with child BMI in high- or middle-income contexts, meaning that higher rates of ‘over-nutrition’ may be seen in such children. These findings could be interpreted as grandparents trying to support their children and grandchildren, even if these attempts are not in accord with public health recommendations (see also [ 38 , 39 ]). A further difficulty is that the non-maternal childcare literature often takes a narrow perspective, with a heavy focus on the grandmother—possibly influenced by the abundance of grandparents in the West, because of higher longevity (though grandparents are not a novel phenomenon: [ 40 ]). But our cooperative reproduction strategy is a flexible one, with mothers seeking help where available. If grandmothers are not available, mothers may turn to other carers instead, meaning that children without grandmothers may not appear to be any worse off than those with grandmothers [ 41 – 43 ]. Nevertheless, these reviews do present clear evidence that grandparents provide many different types of support to their children and grandchildren across a wide range of contexts worldwide, supporting the hypothesis that childraising requires cooperation in our species.

Despite the idealization of the nuclear family and emphasis on mother-as-carer in the West, cooperative reproduction is also seen in these societies. Recent research has shown that high proportions of grandparents in Europe provide childcare for their grandchildren [ 44 ], as well as emotional support, advice and transfers of financial resources [ 45 ]—support that has been shown to be sufficient to increase women's labour force participation [ 46 ]. Even in 1959, around the height of the idealization of the male breadwinner family, research that explored intergenerational relations concluded: ‘The answer to the question “The isolated nuclear family, 1959: fact or fiction?” is mostly fiction. Kin ties, especially intergenerational ones, have far more significance than we have been led to believe in the life processes of the urban [US] family’ [ 47 , p. 338].

If the extended family has been so consistently important, then again this begs the question of why is there so much idealization of the nuclear family in the West? Part of the answer may lie in some differences in how cooperative reproduction is practised in higher income, market-integrated populations compared with the subsistence societies humans have lived in for most of our history. In high-income populations, an important component of cooperative childraising involves state-provided or private childcare and schooling (Hughes et al . [ 48 ] highlight how the paid childcare sector is also rapidly growing in lower and middle-income countries). Formal education may not typically be perceived as ‘childcare’, but it provides parents with a safe and socially acceptable place to leave children, where they develop skills needed for adulthood, while parents can engage in productive work. Failure to recognize paid childcare or formal schooling as one plank in our strategy of cooperative reproduction may feed into the perception that parents are solely responsible for raising children. The COVID pandemic may shift these perceptions, as it has clearly highlighted, in their absence, the reliance of parents on schools and childcare facilities.

Intergenerational transfers are also somewhat different between contemporary high income and subsistence societies. In the former, older individuals support their families in many ways and private financial transfers still flow down generations, but older individuals often become economically inactive relatively early in life. The provision of state-provided pensions and healthcare means that net financial transfers flow up generations, once these public transfers are taken into account. This contrasts with subsistence societies, where older individuals remain net producers until near the end of their lives, meaning net transfers of resources flow down generations [ 29 ]. Another notable difference between cooperative reproduction as practised throughout most of human history and in contemporary high-income societies is the role of children. In high-income populations, children are expected to attend school rather than work, but in subsistence societies children make substantial contributions to the family economy by engaging in a range of subsistence and domestic work, including caring for younger siblings or relatives [ 49 – 53 ]. The economic inactivity of both children and the older generation in high-income populations may reinforce ideals about the married couple as the foundational family unit, responsible for caring for both children and their parents even if—in reality—the grandparental generation, at least, is still providing substantial support of various kinds for raising children.

Before moving on to the next section, it is worth noting that there may be some unexpected side effects to our cooperative strategy of reproduction. Hrdy [ 54 ] has suggested that the reason that humans and callitrichids (marmosets and tamarins) share the relatively unusual characteristic among primates of maternal infanticide is because both are cooperative breeders. In the absence of helpers, it may be better for mothers to end investment in a particular offspring and wait for a time when help is available to attempt to raise a child. Our cooperative strategy of reproduction might therefore help explain the contingent nature of mother love, as described by Hrdy [ 55 ], by anthropologists such as Scheper-Hughes [ 56 ] and by historians such as Badinter [ 57 ], whereby mothers do not always lavish unconditional love on their children, but might withdraw or reduce investment under some circumstances. Our cooperative strategy of reproduction also opens up the possibility of conflict within the family. If family members cooperate to raise children then this means that family resources are shared between family members, who may then compete over access to these resources [ 58 – 60 ]. It is important to remember that our cooperative reproductive strategy, though it does suggest supportive relationships are often seen between mothers and other family, does not paint an entirely rosy picture of unconditional love and devotion between all family members.

4.  Male breadwinning appears to be relatively novel in human history

So research in anthropology has presented clear evidence that the male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ family form, in that, across societies, women mostly work and parents typically receive considerable support for childrearing. Nevertheless, there is variation between societies in exactly what the human family looks like, with some conforming a little more closely to the male breadwinner nuclear family model than others—though, as described above, even those that look more like isolated nuclear families typically receive a lot of ‘hidden’ support for raising children. Historical disciplines have contributed to this discussion by demonstrating that male breadwinning appears to be relatively novel in our history; the rise of male breadwinning seems to be associated with industrialization in Western Europe [ 61 – 64 ]. In most subsistence economies, economic contributions of women and children are vital to family success; the exceptions, where women contribute relatively few calories to the diet, typically involve cooperation between men to produce food [ 65 ]. Male breadwinning is a strategy that is often inefficient—wasting the potential economic contributions of women and children—and risky—given that death, incapacity or desertion of the breadwinner endangers the mother and children left behind, if they have no means to support themselves. In Europe, in recent centuries, a combination of increasing agricultural productivity, wealth extracted from colonies and the industrial revolution meant that market economies grew and standards of living rose. This made a male breadwinning strategy more feasible, since it relies on the breadwinner being able to bring in a sufficiently high and reliable flow of resources to support an entire family.

This broad brush overview does hide considerable variation in family structure in the industrializing West, though: in more economically disadvantaged regions and groups, male breadwinning may never have gained a strong foothold, because it requires a certain level of resources and security [ 66 ]. The tendency of academics to come from the kind of affluent families in which male breadwinning is feasible, incidentally, is likely another reason why some academic research is particularly fixated on this family form. Once established in those economically advantaged regions and families, historians have suggested that the male breadwinner norm was then exported to other parts of the world from the West [ 63 ]. In parts of Africa, for example, there is evidence that the male breadwinner norm was introduced by colonial authorities and by the Christian missionaries who accompanied colonization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [ 67 ]. Elsewhere, in South Asia, for example, industrialization may also have led to the emergence of a male breadwinner norm, but through a slightly different trajectory from that in Europe, with a progressive differentiation of men's and women's work and devaluation of women's work [ 68 ].

Changing economic conditions may well have been the catalyst for a shift towards male breadwinning in Western Europe, but there has been a long-standing debate as to whether some elements of the nuclear family form—notably residence patterns that involve nuclear families residing apart from extended family members—may have predated industrialization in this part of the world [ 69 – 71 ]. Henrich has recently contributed to this debate by arguing that the Christian church was responsible for unusual European marriage patterns which extend back several centuries, where couples tended to marry late and formed independent households after marriage. In particular, the Church banned polygyny and discouraged extended families and strong kinship networks ([ 72 ], but see [ 73 ]). This may have resulted in a shift towards nuclear families, and away from coresidence with extended family members, but these nuclear families were not ‘isolated’ in the sense that mothers and fathers provided, and cared, entirely for their own children. Domestic servants (hired helpers at the nest) were commonly employed in households in historical Europe, suggesting that support for childrearing from non-kin may have a relatively long history in Europe [ 74 ].

Returning to the catalyst of industrialization, this allowed not only sufficient income for a male breadwinner strategy to become more feasible, but also a clear public/private divide, as productive work increasingly took place outside the home. This meant a separation of ‘breadwinner’ and ‘homemaker’ roles, whereas in subsistence economies, work and home lives are typically more blurred [ 68 ]. This illustrates an important point about the ‘traditional male breadwinner nuclear family’ norm: it is associated not just with a particular division of labour within the household, but also with rigid gender roles [ 75 , 76 ]. This vision of the family is a patriarchal model, in which men's roles are firmly in the public sphere, and they have authority over wives and children; women's roles lie firmly in the private sphere. This model is also associated with idealization of a particular kind of childhood and of motherhood. Children in most societies contributed productively to the family economy [ 77 , 78 ], because their help was a necessary part of our cooperative reproduction strategy, but also because children's work both in raising younger children and in subsistence tasks allowed them to learn the skills needed for adulthood [ 79 , 80 ]. Perceptions of childhood changed during and after the industrial revolution, likely influenced by declining child mortality and the rise of formal education, associated with changing patterns of productive labour. The former meant that raising children successfully became a less stochastic process and so intensive investment in children may have had more of an impact in determining child success. The latter meant children were educated away from the home, so that they may have had less opportunity for contributing to the family economy.

As children's roles in the family changed with industrialization, so did women's. The emergence of the male breadwinner model pushed women into the home, where childhood was being re-interpreted as a period of consumption rather than production. Women's roles, therefore, became focused on being ‘good mothers’ who devoted their energies to caring for husbands and children [ 81 ] . Basu [ 81 ] considers that these new ideals of maternal self-sacrifice—which could be measured, for example, in reduced leisure time for women—also shifted power relations within the family, by ‘clamping down’ on women's autonomy. This is not to suggest that pre-industrial societies were paradises of female empowerment. Patriarchal families existed long before the industrial revolution. But some elements of women's status do seem to track their contributions to subsistence; various lines of evidence suggest that in those subsistence societies where women contribute more productive labour, they have higher status [ 82 ]: for example, higher nutritional status [ 83 ]. The male breadwinner nuclear family represents a family form in which women have little economic power and, potentially, reduced access to support from their families, suggesting the status of women may not be high in societies that idealize this family form.

5.  What are the implications of a male breadwinner isolated nuclear family norm for health and wellbeing?

So, there is considerable evidence that the idea that the ‘traditional’ human family is an isolated nuclear family, in which mothers are solely responsible for childcare and fathers solely responsible for providing for their families, is a myth. Isolated nuclear families, who raise children without help beyond the parental unit, barely seem to exist at all, even in twentieth or twenty-first century Western societies, and male breadwinning is both rare and novel in our history. Myths about the ‘traditional’ family, and what ‘traditional’ maternal and paternal roles should look like, are likely to have real-world implications. The assumption that mothers are primarily responsible for childrearing, that they should sacrifice themselves to invest intensively and over a long period in their children, may put considerable pressure on women to behave in ways compatible with this difficult-to-attain, and novel, ideal of motherhood [ 11 ]. Particularly damaging may be the idea that mothers should be able to cope with relatively little support. Research has shown that new mothers in the UK spend a significant proportion of their time alone with their infants (one study found 38% of mothers spent more than 8 h a day alone, and 34% between 4 and 8 h [ 84 ]). This is a situation that appears to be less than desirable in a social species that relies on cooperation to raise children, and on social learning for developing skills in a wide range of behaviours including parenting. Such isolation and the expectation that mothers should cope with little support is not likely to provide ideal childrearing conditions for either mother or child: for example, prompting maternal guilt where mothers feel they are not living up to this ideal [ 85 , 86 ], increased rates of postnatal depression [ 87 ] and decreased breastfeeding [ 88 ] in the absence of support, and other negative effects on mother's wellbeing [ 89 ].

Assumptions about the adverse effect of the ‘breakdown’ of marriages, which idealize the nuclear family as the best way to raise children, and blame adverse child outcomes on the absence of such a family structure, have also led to government interventions aimed at persuading couples to marry rather than cohabit in the USA [ 90 ]. These interventions tend to focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged groups because such groups have lower rates of marriage than more advantaged groups. A belief underlying these interventions appears to be that if disadvantaged groups can be made to form marital relationships that mirror the family structure of advantaged groups, then their disadvantage will melt away. Such interventions have attracted criticism, because a more effective way of reducing ‘bad family outcomes’ is likely to be to tackle economic disadvantage itself, rather than a marker of disadvantage such as cohabitation [ 91 ]. These marriage interventions also do not work.

Public health initiatives around maternal and child health in lower- and middle-income countries typically also assume a default nuclear family structure in which mothers are largely responsible for the health of their children—this excludes vital support structures such as grandmothers (see [ 92 ]). There are even some perceptions in global health that grandmothers are the ‘guardians of tradition’ [ 93 ] and that, if they have a role at all, it is a role that has the potential for negative maternal and health outcomes, given that the advice of older women may contradict that of public health professionals. This echoes some of the findings from the literature on grandparental investment, which suggests that input from grandparents may not always result in child outcomes that would be approved of by a public health professional. But even if older women's advice does contradict that of public health professionals, they are typically very influential in decisions around maternal and child health, which suggests it is even more important to incorporate older women into public health interventions [ 31 ]. The positive results in the handful of studies that have incorporated grandmothers and older women in public health initiatives suggest this would be a fruitful avenue for improving maternal and child health [ 93 – 96 ], and mental health (Dixon Chibanda's ‘Friendship Bench’ is perhaps the best known example of a successful intervention employing ‘grandmothers’ [ 97 , 98 ]).

Ideologies around the family and ‘traditional’ gender roles feed into political ideologies that promote hierarchies of male dominance over women. Online fora have facilitated the spread of misogynistic movements, including Mens' Rights Activist groups and Incels (involuntary celibates), which are collectively referred to as the ‘manosphere’. These movements use and misuse evolutionary psychology as their theoretical justification, and draw on supposedly biological arguments that women are ‘designed’ to bear and raise children while men are ‘designed’ to do pretty much everything else in society [ 99 , 100 ]. These movements have led to fatal terrorist attacks [ 101 , 102 ]. These ideologies not only present a terrorist threat, but also do not seem to benefit the men who adopt them, given such ideologies sometimes promote ‘men going their own way’ and removing themselves from (female) society [ 103 ]. The cooperative nature of our species suggests that such isolationism may not suit our evolved preferences [ 104 ]. At a less extreme level, the male breadwinner norm promotes ideals of male independence and isolation from others, since it assumes that men should have the ability to entirely provision a wife and children without support, which may feed into gender norms and socialization that have been popularly referred to as ‘toxic masculinity’. These include emphasis on male dominance and self-reliance, and are considered to be detrimental to men, women and children [ 105 ].

Finally, despite the belief in some circles that intensive mothering, and lengthy, dependent childhoods, is optimal for children, the little research on the impact of intensive mothering does not find clear and conclusive evidence that such parenting has substantial positive effects on children [ 106 ]. Such childhoods may even fail to allow children to develop some of the skills they need to succeed in adult life [ 107 ]. Children and adolescents typically lack opportunities to develop parenting skills in Western societies, for example, as they are no longer involved in caring for younger children. Hrdy also cautions us that, if we are a species adapted to a strategy of cooperative reproduction, then mothers raising children with little support from others, and keeping children dependent on mothers for lengthy periods, may hamper children's abilities to develop the social, cognitive and emotional skills they need to succeed in adult society:

If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an ever-increasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won't matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish. [ 1 , p. 239]

6.  Conclusion

Humans are a social species, and our success, our ability to thrive in almost all environments across the globe, is likely related to our cooperative nature [ 108 ]. Hrdy [ 1 , 109 ] suggests that our strategy of cooperative reproduction may even have led to cooperation in other spheres and affected our cognitive evolution, thereby underpinning our success as a species. Contemporary Western society seems in danger of forgetting this, however, and perhaps of encouraging such memory loss in other contexts. Or at least, there is significant idealization of the isolated nuclear family as the ‘traditional’ family in the West, even when mothers do in fact receive support with childcare. It may be the rigid gender roles and stereotypes that are associated with this idealization of the nuclear family that are particularly problematic. Gender roles that expect mothers to be very largely responsible for childcare and men to be able to support families without help may lead to beliefs about what the household division of labour and parenting strategies ‘should’ be and discourage mothers and fathers from adopting strategies that are best suited to their own situations, and from fully accessing all the support they need. A vision of parenting, family life and childhood that both recognizes the cliché that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ and also recognizes that this ‘village’ can encompass considerable diversity may be necessary in order for women, men and children to thrive.

Data accessibility

Competing interests.

I declare I have no competing interests.

This work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, grant ID 61426.

• DOI: 10.3138/jcfs.6.2.125
• Corpus ID: 210586596

Nuclear family universals: fact and faith in the acceptance of an idea

• Published 1 October 1975
• Journal of Comparative Family Studies

8 Citations

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