4.2.2 - Functionalist and New Right Perspectives on the Family

Functionalist starting points

Functionalists see society as a system whose parts work together to produce stability. From this perspective, the family matters because it helps create social order by socialising children, supporting adults, and reproducing a shared culture. This is a consensus view: it assumes most people are tied together by common values rather than deep conflict.

Murdock argued that the nuclear family is universal because every society needs certain tasks to be performed. He identified four main functions. The family regulates sexual behaviour, reproduces the next generation, provides economic support, and socialises children into the norms and values of the culture. For functionalists, this makes the family more than a private relationship; it is a social institution that helps society continue over time.

Parsons narrowed the argument for modern industrial society. He claimed that many older family functions had been taken over by specialist institutions such as schools, workplaces, and welfare agencies. Even so, the family still kept two essential jobs. First, it carried out primary socialisation, turning biological infants into social members of society. Second, it stabilised adult personalities by giving adults emotional security and a private sphere away from competitive work life.

This helps explain why functionalists treat the family as a key link between culture and identity. Children do not simply learn rules; they learn how to behave as gendered, disciplined, and socially approved members of society. In that sense, the family helps reproduce the wider social structure.

Family change and the economy

Functionalists do not just describe what families do; they also explain why family forms change. Parsons developed a functional fit theory, arguing that the shape of the family changes as the economy changes. In pre-industrial society, he saw the extended family as more useful because it could work, care, and provide welfare together. In industrial society, he argued that the isolated nuclear family became more useful because modern economies needed a smaller and more mobile unit.

The nuclear family supposedly fitted industrial society in two main ways. It was geographically mobile, so people could move to where jobs existed. It was also more compatible with achieved status, because success in industrial society depended less on kinship ties and more on individual performance. In this view, the family helps the economy by producing disciplined workers and by freeing them to relocate when necessary.

Parsons also linked this to gender roles. He argued that the husband performed the instrumental role as breadwinner, while the wife performed the expressive role as emotional carer and main socialiser of children. This makes his theory not just about family structure, but about power and stratification too: gender inequality is treated as useful and natural rather than as something to challenge.

Young and Willmott extended this broad march of progress picture by arguing that family life had become more home-centred and companionate. Their symmetrical family thesis suggested that husbands and wives were becoming more similar in their roles, with more shared leisure, childcare, and decision-making.

New Right and state policy

The New Right overlaps with functionalism because it also values social order, discipline, and the traditional nuclear family. However, it is more openly political. It makes stronger moral judgements about family diversity and argues that the state should stop encouraging dependency while supporting marriage and parental responsibility.