Family as a social institution - signs, functions and essence

The essence of social institutions

The definition of “social institution” was first used in his works by the Italian philosopher and historian Giambattista Vico. He used this term to refer to a system of social norms and connections that unite significant values ​​and procedures of society. It is institutions that are the very support for humanity that does not allow chaos to break out.

Philosophers identify more than 10 social institutions. The largest systems include the state, religion, education, business and family. All these groups have several common features:

1. Presence of specific symbols.
2. All institutions are based on attitudes and specific patterns of behavior.
3. The presence of utilitarian cultural characteristics.
4. Norms are enshrined in oral or written sources of law.
5. Presence of ideology.

Philosophers consider the family to be the most important social system. institute. After all, it is she who is the bearer of cultural attitudes and patterns of behavior that are passed on from generation to generation. The main characteristics of the family as a social institution can be briefly illustrated using the table:

It is worth noting that the family is not only an important institution, but also the basic unit of society. It is in the environment of parents and close relatives that a person socializes, receives primary education and masters basic norms of behavior.

Basic characteristics of a family

Naturally, with the development of society, marriage and family undergo some changes. However, the established factors of this issue remain unchanged. Among them are signs of the family as a socially important institution. Thus, the fundamental elements of the category under consideration are the following:

• A union between a man and a woman that has official reasoning.
• Marriage is by voluntary consent of both parties.
• The commonality of everyday life is the main bond between family members.
• Entering into a marital relationship.
• The desire for further birth, socialization and, naturally, raising children.

Based on the presented provisions, we can say with confidence that the characteristics of the family fully explain the reason for classifying this institution as one of the most important values ​​of society. Thus, on the basis of the presented points, it is possible to form a functional family system and highlight a number of individual functions that characterize a social institution.

Brief characteristics of the system

A family is a group of people based on blood or marriage. This social The institute has its own characteristic features and performs important functions.

Classification of family relationships

The family arose simultaneously with the first society. In the primitive era, relations between a man and a woman were regulated by tribal and clan customs, which were based on religion and moral ideas. Later, after the emergence of the foundations of statehood, regulation began to have a legal nature.

Researchers identify several stages in the family life cycle:

• marriage;
• birth or adoption of children;
• parents becoming grandparents;
• termination of the existence of a family, for example, due to the death of one of the spouses.

The basis of the family is marriage. This is a form of regulation and sanctioning of relations between a man and a woman. But a family cannot be considered only as a marriage union, because it includes children, grandparents, and close relatives. That is why philosophers identify this complex system with a social institution.

Based on the number of people, nuclear and multigenerational families are distinguished. The first type of system consists of only parents and children, while the second includes several generations of relatives. In modern society, it is nuclear species that predominate.

Depending on the type of marriage, families are divided into monogamous and polygamous. Based on the presence of spouses, they are divided into full and incomplete. Depending on the number of children, three types are distinguished: those with many children, those with one child and those without children.

Main functions of the group

Before classifying the family as a social institution, researchers tried to determine what the true purpose of this system was. The Russian sociologist A. Kharchev and the American scientist N. Smelser studied this issue.

For a long time, philosophers believed that the main function of the family as a social institution was the biological reproduction of the population. But the more intensively society develops, the greater the role this system plays. There are several functions of the family institution:

1. Educational. Transfer of knowledge from generation to generation, primary education of children.
2. Household. Maintaining the health of members of society.
3. Economic. Production and exchange of materials.
4. Spiritual. Cultural development of personality.
5. Social status. Providing each family member with a certain status.

In addition, the family performs the function of primary social control. This means that it is the parents and close relatives who regulate the child’s behavior and instill morality and ethics. The leisure and emotional purpose of the institute is no less important.

Features of modern society

After the revolution of 1917, the lifestyle of the entire population changed significantly. Generally accepted values ​​have faded into the background, so the system cannot cope with its basic functions. Trying to determine the type of marriage in modern Russia, researchers point out that parents do not strive to have more than two children. When describing the family, one can note the predominance of the nuclear, incomplete type.

Sociologists are increasingly talking about a crisis. There are several sad trends:

1. Changing social roles. Women are the main breadwinners. Men can act as mothers in same-sex marriages.
2. Increase in the number of civil marriages and single-parent families.
3. The fall of traditional values.
4. Increase in the number of street children.

To prevent a crisis, the state is taking measures to support this important institution. Allowances, benefits and encouragement of marriage are used.

Family and society

Add together all the existing families and you get society. It's that simple. Whatever happens within the family circle is immediately reflected in the surrounding society that this family forms. And institutions such as schools, churches, labor collectives, government, etc. are all transitional stages from family forms to non-family ones.

Thus, family and society are small and large versions of the same thing. These two categories are created by people who work together and whose destinies are intertwined with each other. Each includes the same components - the relationship between leaders and those who choose these leaders, the relationship between adults and youth, men and women; everyone is involved in the decision-making process, uses their authority and is engaged in the search for common goals.

Some families teach to be like everyone else, others raise rebels, others adhere to group responsibility, and others preach laxity. Each family teaches how to communicate with the world around them, how to achieve something in life, how to relate to injustice and other negative phenomena in life.

A permissive attitude can be represented in the image of a “cocoon” that is created around children, helping them to go through life without any obstacles, where they do not see any lies or cruelty.

In short, they are protected from all the hardships of life. And the world for them is limited to what they know they will be allowed to see. However, television makes this protection vulnerable. It is very easy and at the same time difficult to look at the world only through the prism of the TV or looking out the window and not take part in it. However, this can also be avoided; if you don’t know the world around you, much less understand your own feelings, then you can simply say that this is alien to you and never think about it again. Believe me or not, I have often met children from 12 to 18 years old who have never seen people of a different race, have never seen beggars (rich people), have never taken a bath. This happens to children who live in ghettos or in fashionable areas that are isolated by their economic and social level.

In order to understand what is happening to families and social groups today, a short excursion into history is required. Since ancient times, the family has been the main school for its members before they become adults. The family was given knowledge about this; how to take care of yourself and how to behave, how to care for others and communicate with them, how to achieve your goal, how to deal with the objective world. The available knowledge was limited, and initially the content of this knowledge was quite primitive. The purpose of life came down to survival - how to stay alive, how to feed yourself, how not to freeze from the cold and not be eaten by wild animals, etc. It was relatively simple knowledge. All that was required during training was to look at the teacher and do the same. It is quite obvious that many of our needs today do not correspond to the needs that existed in ancient society. Why did a young man in ancient times learn to write and read, why follow a diet or, for example, prepare for retirement? Many aspects of man's future life were unknown. People simply did not suspect that they did not know much.

For example, it is hard to believe that ancient people did not know that children are born as a result of sexual intercourse. Sexual relations arose as a reaction to the instinct leading to pleasure, but were in no way associated with the birth of a child. A pregnant woman's big belly was associated with the birth of a child - it was much more obvious. The explanation for how the child ended up there was not related to sexual contact, but rather to what the woman ate, or to divine or diabolical intervention. However, once the connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy was made, many discoveries were made. I give this example to show how easy it is to obtain information and how far we have come. We must agree that today, educating girls about all the difficulties during pregnancy is much more important than following a diet.

It is quite obvious that in our complex modern society, the family cannot teach everything. We train specialists in pedagogical universities to carry out the educational process. Thanks to scientific and technological progress, we have literally burst into an era of deep specialization. I try not to go into specifics, but at the same time I don’t want to oversimplify things. Let's go the next way. Since the learning process is carried out outside the family and carried out in special institutions, and the knowledge itself is saturated with technological achievements, we completely miss the fact that the true value is the people themselves. The family is not in the foreground now; it comes after. business, school, church, government. All of these institutions (which we created ourselves to help us in life) actually have a harmful effect on family well-being. Schools separate parents and children, business implies constant employment, which leads to the fact that a person spends very little time at home, the government sends children to fight in other countries. Of course, I would like all these institutions to take care of the well-being of the family. And I don't think it's impossible.

But I fear that we have become a society where the cult of power and things flourishes. And our families, apparently, have already gotten used to it. We teach our children to be resilient and strong in order to cope with difficulties. But what's going on? After you defeat someone, what happens to you? You are forced to constantly look back in fear that as soon as you relax, someone will immediately take over you. Your life turns into a series of worries, anxieties, fears and suspicions. Imagine that you are given power and all kinds of material benefits. Can things speak to you, calm you and support you? In my life I have never seen money being capable of love. But at the same time, I do not believe that this problem has a clear solution: either/or. Or we accept human values ​​and do not pursue power and money; or it’s the other way around, and we completely lack humanistic values. The whole issue comes down to the use of power; The word use is key here. Very often we identify the state of power with personality. (“I am strong, I mean something”; “I am powerless, I am nothing”). Compare these two ideas with the words: “I use my power for my own growth, for your growth.” Such an attitude not only does not exclude human values, but, on the contrary, increases them.

But let's not move away from the given topic. What we need to do is understand the connections between family learning and the development of our institutions.

I can give many examples, but in order to be more concise, I will give just one of them, the most striking.

Most adults in the family consider themselves to be the real authorities in teaching children: how to teach them discipline, sex education, the ability to manage money, etc. Then the children go to school, where other people begin to teach them, who are also confident that they know best how and what to teach them. What children are taught at school and at home can be very different. And the following question arises: how does information from two completely different sources fit into a child’s head and how do the school and family look at it?

I remember a boy whose father worked as a car mechanic. He was studying at the School of Commerce and suddenly, out of the blue, he began to have a conflict with his father, and the conflict began because he had improperly secured the car. However, at the heart of this conflict was not only a disagreement over how to properly secure the car. The main role here was played by the father’s confidence that his son should obey him in everything; this was his principle. Many of you will, of course, agree that this is a ridiculous reason, but look at yourself and you will realize that some of you do the same thing.

Now let's give another example. We are talking about a smart little 5-year-old boy who went to kindergarten, could read, knew arithmetic and was a very creative child. In kindergarten he was very bored, and once at home he told his parents about it. His mother wrote a note to the kindergarten teacher asking him to make life more interesting for the children in kindergarten and pay attention to her son. However, according to the teacher, this boy, the only one out of 40 children, undermined discipline in class. The teacher wrote to the parents saying that if they did not do anything, she would expel their child from kindergarten. Thus began the correspondence between little Johnny’s parents and his teacher. However, for some reason the teacher did not know that Johnny could read; and Johnny's parents, in turn, did not know that he was disrupting classroom discipline. Thus, both sides, completely unaware, waged a cold war with each other. According to the teacher, the instigators of this conflict were Johnny’s parents, and according to the parents, it was an incompetent teacher. The boy suffered the most in this situation. In this situation, feedback was needed that would clarify the essence of the situation to the participants in the dispute.

Feedback would help resolve this controversial situation and learn more about this little child. In the end, of course, this conflict was resolved. Parents learned about their son's behavior in kindergarten. Imagine the teacher’s surprise when she realized that Johnny’s parents were not at all irresponsible people, as she had previously believed. The same thing happened to the parents when they found out everything and realized that the label they had attached to the teacher, considering her an incompetent teacher, was not true. Thus, the statement “I know that I know nothing” is by no means meaningless. You also need to remember that whenever something happens, most of the information remains inaccessible to the participants in the event. In such situations, feedback helps, and in any system: be it a family, an institution or other areas where two parties are united by one goal. Without such a feedback system, conflicts inevitably occur.

These insidious and harmful situations reduce self-esteem and become a serious obstacle to resolving problems. They only alienate people from each other, increasing the misunderstanding between them, creating a vacuum and an ever-increasing abyss around them. A person who cannot find understanding feels less self-confidence, which, in turn, leads to a decrease in work productivity, he becomes lethargic and does not enjoy life. And this can happen to anyone: parents, teachers, priests, business leaders, etc.

Let us return to those components that are common both to individual families and to the entire social society. We discussed this at the beginning of the chapter. In each of these categories, there is a struggle associated with the relationship between leaders and followers, young and established people, men and women, associated with making important decisions, using power and authority, and achieving common goals.

Currently, all these components are widely contested both within the family and within social institutions. This is especially evident in our country. People are beginning to understand the basis of any relationship and demand the same from public organizations. This basis is as follows: every leader is a person, every newcomer is also a person, men and women are people. Making decisions, using power, setting goals are all personal work.

As a result, we all must realize that life is made by people, and what happens, what kind of relationships develop between people, determines everything that happens in the world around us. Everything people know, what they believe, how they overcome differences among themselves, it all starts in the family. At the present stage, the activities of social institutions reflect the ideas and ideals of family education. Now we are beginning to realize that some of these ideas are becoming an obstacle to development and it is time to change the basis on which we rely. Don’t be surprised that it all starts with self-esteem, with how it manifests itself, how it affects communication, that friendly relationships in a group are a consequence of the high self-esteem of its members, who communicate on equal terms, who know how to be sincere, who can openly To trust people.

I believe that families should become partners of any social institutions, public organizations that include one or another family member, and be considered as part of this institution. The family is an integral part of society. A family is a kind of union of a small number of people who can fit in one room and know each other.

A family is such an association where the geographical boundaries are so narrow that real communication occurs between its members, and no boundaries separate its members. Very rarely does a family reach more than 15 people. 15 people are a generally recognized, good, full-fledged group. If there are no more than 15 people in a group, and in one room, a good atmosphere for work is created: everyone knows everything, sees everything, hears everything.

Remember what was said about family meetings in previous chapters.

“Get together with your family and talk to everyone. This will help you find out their attitude towards social institutions: school, business, church, pioneer camp, etc.”

Let your family meetings become a place where everyone can feel the experiences of another family member: his problems, grievances, shortcomings, understand the reasons for mistakes and achievements, tell him what can be changed and how to do it. This way you will create the feedback system that we talked so much about.

So what do I ultimately want to tell you? Start with your family. You already know all the features and ways of interaction between people. Try to use all your knowledge in the family. And when all this starts to function, and function correctly, then you can apply it in a broader context. And this will be the beginning of a completely new society. Once clear connections are established within the family, this will affect society itself

Development of the individuality of each person

The family as a social group and social institution plays an important role. After all, it is she who raises an individual who can live in society. On the other hand, it protects from external factors and supports in difficult times. No one in the world worries or worries about anyone as much as he does about his relative. And, without hesitation, he helps loved ones. It is in the family that one can find comfort, sympathy, consolation, and protection. When this institution falls apart, a person loses the support he had before.

Meaning

The family is a small social group, but it is very important for the whole society. With changes in politics and economics, its structures and functions also change. The emergence of a modernized, urbanized and industrial society had a huge impact on the modern unit of society. The level of mobility of its members began to increase. In other words, situations have become commonplace when one of the family members has to move to another city, where he was offered a job or promotion, leaving his relatives. And since the majority of members of modern society give preference to material well-being, success, and career growth, the proposed options are no longer considered unacceptable for them. And if this happens, then, from a social point of view, in this case the internal relationships of family members also change, because the social status of one of them changes, his financial situation, his views, aspirations. All this leads to the fact that the ties that bind relatives gradually become weak, and then disappear altogether.

How to save a relationship?

Many spouses make a plan of sorts. The family as a social group in this case receives certain tasks and goals. Together we find ways to achieve them. Spouses must preserve their hearth, provide their children with a good upbringing and living conditions, and direct the child’s development in the right direction from childhood. These foundations of the family structure, laid down in ancient generations, still exist. The problems of the family as a social institution should be considered by all relatives. Together they must preserve and pass on to their heirs ideas about the fundamentals of the structure of society, which so influence the preservation of the family, regardless of political regimes. The family is an intermediary between the individual and society. It is she who helps a person find himself in this world, realize his qualities and talents, gives him protection, helps him stand out from the crowd, and be individual. This is the most important task of the family. And if she doesn’t do all this, then she won’t fulfill her functions. A person who does not have a family will feel more and more his own inferiority with each passing year. At the same time, he may appear and develop some negative qualities. These are very important nuances that you should pay attention to when raising a child. After all, the formation of his personality begins from the first days.

Types of family organization

Due to the comprehensive study of the institution of family, several types of its organization can be distinguished. Thus, depending on the form of marriage, it is customary to distinguish between monogamous families, polygamous families, as well as polygyny and polyandry. If we consider the institution by the gender of the spouses, then there are same-sex and opposite-sex families. A factor such as the number of children classifies the objects in question into infertile (childless), one-child, small-child, medium-child and, naturally, large. Depending on the composition, simple (nuclear) and complex (patriarchal) families are distinguished. In turn, the former are divided into elementary and composite. If we consider an institution from the point of view of a person being in it, then there are parental and reproductive objects. Such a factor as the residence of families suggests their classification into matrilocal, patrilocal and neolocal. And finally, depending on the type of upbringing of children, it is customary to distinguish families of the authoritarian type, liberal and democratic.

Stages of family development

As a social institution, each cell goes through several stages of development. Their sequence is usually called the family life cycle.

The following stages are distinguished:

• Education – entry into marriage.
• The beginning of childbearing is the birth of the first child.
• The end of childbearing is the birth of the last heir.
• “Emptying the nest” is the separation of the last child from the home of the parents (moving or entering into marriage).
• Termination of existence is the death of two spouses.