Family Role
This five-page paper discusses the nature of the family in the developing world and examines whether the family is more important, less important, or neutral in the movement from technologically simple or agrarian societies to industrial societies.
The Role of the Family
Family systems, like biological organisms, evolve with time and circumstance.
It seems readily evident from an examination of the nature and role of the family in the developing world that form may indeed follow function. Many sociological studies conducted in recent years have indicated that the nuclear family is found at both the primitive and modern stages of economic evolution. The nuclear family predominated in early societies with subsistence hunting and gathering economies where food supplies were uncertain, and still predominates in modern industrial societies where the marketplace requires the geographical mobility of small, nuclear systems. This pattern of family roles in society, established over long centuries, still applies in most of the developing nations of the Third World. Examinations of the sociological histories of various areas of Europe, Asia, and South America provide us with useful examples of the durability of the nuclear family. The nuclear family has always been important in the Third World societies of Eastern Europe, where households have been small and based on monogamous marriage, even where polygamy has been permitted. Ties to both parents' relatives have been and still are respected, even when descent has been traced through only one line. Bonds between parent and child have always been legally and emotionally important. (Wolfe 198) Many families in Third World nations are products of discontinuity. The intensification of agricultural production and the development of social systems based on land ownership have been important developments, as have changes in inheritance systems, which have evolved towards passing wealth to daughters as
The Role of the Family
Family systems, like biological organisms, evolve with time and circumstance.
It seems readily evident from an examination of the nature and role of the family in the developing world that form may indeed follow function. Many sociological studies conducted in recent years have indicated that the nuclear family is found at both the primitive and modern stages of economic evolution. The nuclear family predominated in early societies with subsistence hunting and gathering economies where food supplies were uncertain, and still predominates in modern industrial societies where the marketplace requires the geographical mobility of small, nuclear systems. This pattern of family roles in society, established over long centuries, still applies in most of the developing nations of the Third World. Examinations of the sociological histories of various areas of Europe, Asia, and South America provide us with useful examples of the durability of the nuclear family. The nuclear family has always been important in the Third World societies of Eastern Europe, where households have been small and based on monogamous marriage, even where polygamy has been permitted. Ties to both parents' relatives have been and still are respected, even when descent has been traced through only one line. Bonds between parent and child have always been legally and emotionally important. (Wolfe 198) Many families in Third World nations are products of discontinuity. The intensification of agricultural production and the development of social systems based on land ownership have been important developments, as have changes in inheritance systems, which have evolved towards passing wealth to daughters as
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