Breaking down the question
The question asks how industrialisation has altered the functions performed by the family. It is descriptive and analytical rather than argumentative, but a good answer must do more than list changes: it should explain the connection between the industrial mode of production and the reorganisation of family functions, and it should register the debate over whether the family has lost functions or merely changed their character.
The classic framing comes from structural functionalism — the thesis that industrialisation strips the family of many of its earlier functions and leaves it structurally isolated and specialised. A strong note presents this thesis, qualifies it with critical and comparative evidence, and thereby shows awareness that the loss-of-functions story is contested. Our notes on the types and forms of the family provide the structural background against which these functional changes can be read.
How to approach it
Open by sketching the pre-industrial family as a multifunctional unit of production, reproduction, socialisation, welfare and education, bound into a wider kin group. Then introduce industrialisation as the solvent: the separation of workplace from home, geographical and social mobility, wage labour and the growth of specialised institutions.
Set out the functionalist account associated with Parsons — the transfer of functions to specialised agencies, the structural isolation of the conjugal family, and its narrowing to two irreducible functions. Then complicate the picture with critical and comparative material: Goode's world revolution thesis, the persistence of kin networks, and the argument that functions have been transformed rather than simply lost. Close with a balanced judgement.
Model answer
Industrialisation, the shift from an agrarian economy of household production to one of factory-based wage labour, profoundly reorganised the functions of the family. In pre-industrial society the family was a multifunctional institution. As a unit of production it made or grew much of what it consumed; it was simultaneously the site of reproduction, the primary agency of socialisation and education, a provider of welfare for the sick and aged, and often a unit of religious and political life. These functions were embedded in an extended kinship network that supplied labour, security and identity.
The most influential sociological account of the change is that of Talcott Parsons. He argued that an industrial economy requires a geographically and socially mobile labour force, recruited on the basis of achievement rather than ascription. The large extended family, tying individuals to a fixed locality and status, is ill-suited to these demands, whereas the small nuclear or conjugal family can move with the labour market. Industrialisation therefore favoured the structural isolation of the nuclear family — its detachment from the wider kin group and from the economy of production.
In Parsons' view the family did not so much lose its importance as shed functions to specialised institutions better fitted to perform them. Economic production moved to the factory and office; formal education passed to schools; care of the sick moved to hospitals and the welfare state; the maintenance of order to police and courts. The family, no longer a unit of production, became a unit of consumption. Stripped of these tasks, it was left with two basic and irreducible functions: the primary socialisation of children, by which the culture is implanted in the new generation, and the stabilisation of adult personalities, through the emotional support and security the conjugal relationship provides. The family thus became more specialised, concentrating on the affective and personality functions that other institutions could not supply.
This functionalist narrative, however, has been substantially qualified. William J. Goode's comparative study argued that the movement toward the conjugal family was a worldwide tendency associated with industrialisation and its ideology of individualism, but he stressed that the relationship was not simple or uniform and that family change also had its own dynamics. Historical research showed that nuclear households in fact predated industrialisation in parts of Western Europe, so the causal story is more complicated than Parsons implied. Critics such as Michael Anderson and later scholars demonstrated that extended kin ties did not disappear but were reconstituted: kin continued to supply financial help, childcare, information about jobs and support in crisis, producing a modified extended family maintained across distance by modern communication and transport. In many societies, including India, joint family sentiment and obligation persist even where residence has become nuclear.
The soundest conclusion is that industrialisation changed the character of the family's functions rather than simply reducing them. The family surrendered many of its productive, educational and welfare tasks to specialised agencies and became structurally more isolated and functionally more specialised, centred on emotional support and childrearing. Yet it retained vital functions, kin networks proved resilient, and the pace and form of change varied by culture and class. The family is best seen not as a declining institution but as one continually adapting its functions to the demands of a changing economy.
Examiner's perspective
At 20 marks the examiner expects the Parsonian loss-of-functions thesis to be stated accurately — the transfer of functions to specialised institutions, the structural isolation of the nuclear family, and its narrowing to primary socialisation and the stabilisation of adult personalities. Answers that merely say the family has become nuclear, without explaining why an industrial economy selects for that form or what functions it retains, remain thin.
The distinguishing feature of a strong note is critical balance. Bringing in Goode, the historical evidence that nuclear households predated industrialisation, and the persistence of modified extended kin networks shows that the candidate can evaluate rather than reproduce the functionalist story. A concluding judgement that functions were transformed and specialised rather than lost demonstrates the analytical control that secures the higher marks.