Personal Development Planning

Outline

This piece of work in which I have used different resources (books, journals, electronic resources) to collect the information regarding family and social change are highlighting the importance of my topic. I have accessed all these sources from different places like college and university libraries, social institutions and internet. While collecting all the information I have come to know that, the presence of the modern family in the West was first documented in England in the mid-1600s, at which time the élite gradually stopped sending their infants away to be wet-nursed and swaddling of infants declined; there was heightened regard for the infant as a person and the woman's role as a mother; there were new ideals of intimacy and privacy for the couple; and there was growing emphasis on love, personal attraction, and compatibility as the basis for mate selection. Within the next hundred years, these changes gradually became predominant; the young were choosing their own mates even if resorting to pregnancy before marriage was necessary to do so.

The emphasis on emotional bonds between husband and wife set the modern family off from its predecessors. The modern family is expected to be emotionally self-sufficient. Other relatives become peripheral, while the bonds among nuclear family members grow more intense and emotional. The modern nuclear family was shaped by three sentiments: romantic love between spouses rather than marriage arranged for reasons of property and social status; maternal love, or the idea that women have a maternal instinct and a need to care for young children; and domesticity, or the belief that relationships within the family are always more binding than are those outside it. As a family based on the personal satisfaction of its individual members, the modern family also has been termed the psychological family; its chief value is satisfaction.

Forces Driving Family Transition

The modern family evolved in concert with industrialisation, science, and technology. With the growth of specialized wage labour, economically productive work moved beyond the reach of the family compound. Individualised remuneration and liability led to a redefinition of kinship obligations. (Stone 1977) The family that was engaged in farming or crafts could be expanded because extra hands could produce extra food and other products. (Doherty 1992). Its boundaries were elastic. The resources of the salaried family and the number of people who could be supported by its wage-earners were fixed. Living space in the neighbourhood of factories and other specialized worksites was expensive and non-expansible. Where neighbours were strangers, the modern family became a "haven in a heartless world" (Lasch 1977).

Even without significant industrial growth, the expansion of global markets, the mass media, the civil service, and other services such as health care, education, and transportation led to the formation of modern families in developing countries. Caldwell and Caldwell (1977) described this change in Nigeria and Ghana as a movement toward monogamy, a strengthening of the conjugal bond over all others, a strengthening of the parent-child bond over all relationships external to the nuclear family, and ultimately ...