CHAPTER 2

Family Function: An Historical and

Research Review

Introduction and Definitions

We focused our research on the functions of the family and its functioning
because they are essential to each individual's personality development and
character formation as well as to the family, the quality of life in the
community, and the wider society. In the USA, changing family functions
has been a topic of concern throughout this century for many researchers
and an array of professionals and semi-professionals, some of whom apply
the term, dysfunctional, indiscriminately to families in distress. Confusion
about family function/dysfunction is increased by the common failure to
specify what the terms mean, how they are associated with the functioning
of the family, and their often being equated with the degree of family well-
being/distress--an obvious tautology. Therefore, we conceptualized and
defined family functions and functioning for our research on family mental
health, and have attempted to avoid the function/functioning equals
health/illness tautology. We began with a summary of our extensive review
offamily function research.
The two traditional family functions have been, first, to rear children to
become autonomous members of society and, second, to meet the adults'
sexual and emotional needs. Lidz (1980) added a third, enculturating its
members so that they could carry out the society's vital activities. We
specified five essential family functions: (a) the maintenance of the group;
(b) the perpetuation of the group; (c) the regulation of the adults' sexuality;
(d) the provision of emotional support for family members; and (e) learning
and enculturation-the inculcation of values, beliefs, and skills (Schwab,
Bell, & Stephenson 1987). The sociologists, Smith & Preston (1977),
maintain that in the USA in the latter part of the 20th century there are 7
major family functions: (a) the economic; (b) the reproductive; (c) the
regulation of sexual activity; (d) socialization, especially the transmission of
the culture to the children; (e) the conferral of status; (f) provision of
affection and companionship; and (g) child-raring.

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Earlier in this century, when scholars saw the family as changing, "from
institution to companionship," Ogburn and Tibbits (1933), Burgess and
Locke (1945), and other family scholars discussed an even longer list of
family functions. Also, they maintained that the family was losing many
functions, e.g. the educational, security, and the religious, as a result of the
rapid social change and the state's assuming more control of persons' daily
lives. Consequently, the affectional, companionable, and psychological
(personality development) activities were becoming the foremost family
functions.
As can be seen, generally the family functions are mainly its purposes.
But how the family functions, i.e., its functioning, is a somewhat different
concern that is related directly and indirectly to how well it fulfills its
functions, and is of importance for the various levels of biosocial
integration-e.g. the individual, the group, the community, and the wider
society. Thus, research on family mental health and illnesses needs to look
at both how the family is functioning and also at how well it fulfills its
functions. Either an emotionally healthy family or one in which there is
mental illness may or may not fulfill its purposes as a biosocial unit, and its
quality of functioning may or may not be directly associated with the mental
health/illness ofits members.
Many of the functions mentioned have been essential to family life,
probably since families were first formed thousands ofyears ago. However,
the importance of one or another of them changes at different times in
accord with socioculturalevents and historical developments, and they also
vary from culture to culture. For example, prior to the urbanization of
Western society, the family was primarily an economic unit, especially in
rural areas. In contrast, in such Eastern cultures as in India, reproduction
often has been the chief function despite dire poverty.

Early Social Studies Associated With Family Functioning

During the first half of the 19th century, increasing concern about
existing institutions and the structure of society following the American and
French Revolutions, along with industrialization, urbanization, and
secularization, aroused interest in associations between the level of family
well-being and the vitality of the community/society. Frederic LePlay
(Silver, 1982), a French mining engineer and political scientist, started his
pioneering studies of family functioning in the 1850s. He hypothesized that
members of families that functioned well would be healthy, maintain
themselves effectively, and be committed to the well-being of the family.
Such families would most likely be found in vital, integrated societies,
whereas families that were unstable and not meeting their members' basic
material, interpersonal, and spiritual needs would be common in fragmented
or decadent societies.