Gender Roles & Family Dysfunction
Social science is a way to observe humans in their environment and to ask questions in order to find answers. How do gender roles affect the American families today. How much of family dysfunction is due to changes in family gender roles and what can we do about it? We will explore why this is an important question, who would be invested in the answer, how have major developments in social science changed our understanding when looking into these problems, and why studying human behavior is valuable to the human species.
Why is it important to understand how much of American family dissonance comes from gender role changes? This is an important question because this issue is permeating our families, and all individual psychology starts within the family relationships. Relationships are the foundation for all societies and to have discord in a relationship such as marriage affects the whole family. Families affect society, society affects culture changes.
This question is important to me as an individual because my life has been directly affected by gender roles in the family. I have seen my parents struggle due to my father thinking his wife needs to do all of the cooking, cleaning, and other female roles. To be a functioning individual that is not overwhelmed by life, we need our spouses to help with the female roles. Women are now moving into the masculine role of working full time jobs. Many women are feeling more burdened by their husbands than from their children. To maintain the female roles of cooking, cleaning, and child rearing while women are now working full time jobs is not going to lead to health or functional families. Stereotypical gender roles must change for families and for society to be healthy.
Social science strives to answer the questions to why individuals, societies, and cultures are having specific problems and what ways each discipline can make interventions to help address these issues. Let's examine some of the developments that led to studying the individual and how these developments affect the question posed.
In 1913, Behaviorism was launched by John B. Watson, with the idea that when observing individuals we can look at their observable and measurable behavior. This development changed the way social scientists study individuals. We could look at the behaviors in individuals such as why does someone feel that they should or should not do the house work in their homes and what do gender stereotypes tell us about ourselves? In 1938, B.F. Skinner developed the theory of conditioning and this development brought a whole new understanding of how individuals get conditioned over time. When looking at gender roles we can see that these roles have been conditioned over thousands of years and only in the last 100 years or less are they beginning to change rapidly. Looking at evolutionary psychology, 1976, we can look at how evolution plays a part in social and gender roles. How has the evolution of women going into full time jobs changed the path of evolution? Finally, cognitive psychology was a major development in 1956, that changed the way we study individuals. This development now allows us to look at the thoughts people have about themselves and the world. In application of the topic, how do men and women think of themselves in their roles? How are their thoughts about how they “should be”, making roles more difficult? How can society lead people to accept new roles in the family?
Finding the answers to these questions could help people become more aware of what is happening on a larger scale. From the closer, this issue could just look like fights about house work, dishes, laundry, and cooking, but from a social science viewpoint there are real changes happening in society and throughout the world, that are affecting the stressors people are having in their lives. If people understood that evolution is taking place in society, that because women are now working full time, life and family roles will have to change.
Who might be vested in this answer? I believe working women, women who are stressed out by their husbands, therapists, and sociologists would be the most vested in learning about the answer. Therapist and sociologist could implement interventions that could assist families with their difficulties. The writers of textbooks could also include information on this subject to make these changes known and to teach them to students. I believe the first step to making change is to educate people about the problem.
“Émile Durkheim believed that sociologists could study objective “social facts” (Poggi 2000). He also believed that through such studies it would be possible to determine if a society was “healthy” or “pathological.” He saw healthy societies as stable, while pathological societies experienced a breakdown in social norms between individuals and society.” Emile Durkheim suggested through social science study we can determine if a society is healthy. Looking at the divorce rates, increase in the opioid epidemic, school shootings, and mass shootings, we can determine that our society is not healthy. “Although suicide is generally considered an individual phenomenon, Émile Durkheim was interested in studying the social factors that affect it.” Do any of these things lead back to gender roles, and discord within the family? Having two parents working and minimal time together, I believe the answer is yes. Social scientists could ask how many families are happy with their spouses? Do gender roles affect this? The development of quantitative measures has been another way to look into these questions.
Studying human behavior is a valuable endeavor because we must study ourselves, society, and cultures in order to grow. If we didn’t study human behavior and identity we wouldn’t be able to create interventions in order to solve problems. Problems will always arise in humans because we are a complex species. Social science helps to look at both the past and present in order to continue to evolve and make changes where necessary. It is also important to understand how identity affects an individual’s integration into the society they live in. Without studying society and solving problems the world would be much different than it is today. Each new development in life poses its own challenges which social scientists strive to find solutions for.
Social sciences are important, valuable and necessary to keep societies functioning. One major development in social science was functionalism. “Functionalism, also called structural-functional theory, sees society as a structure with interrelated parts designed to meet the biological and social needs of the individuals in that society. Functionalism grew out of the writings of English philosopher and biologist, Hebert Spencer (1820–1903), who saw similarities between society and the human body; he argued that just as the various organs of the body work together to keep the body functioning, the various parts of society work together to keep society functioning (Spencer 1898).” Without the social sciences studying humans and society to determine how to address problems, our societies would not function at their best. Social science is a valuable part of this world and we should continue to make observations about the world around us, ask questions, and promote change.