SOAN 351 - Family, Marriage, and Parenting

How do you define family? Who may engage in a partnership called marriage? And, how should a society’s next generation be parented? In the last two decades, social rules and cultural practices around families, marriage, and parenting have changed dramatically in both the US and worldwide. This course examines the family as the smallest organizational unit of a society; the marriages that bind families together in working units; and the parents who nurture the next generation of a society. Culturally defined roles related to the work of financially supporting the family group, sharing resources, protection, socialization, and nurturance are examined in relation to various forms of societal inequality. This class explores ideas about relatedness and biology in the making of family through physiological reproduction, infertility treatments, surrogacy, and adoption. Ethnographic data and case studies of divorce, abuse, and unemployment are used to explore challenges to family cohesion. Connections are drawn between the well-being of families and larger, economic, and legal policies. No prerequisites. (Group I) (Group I)