ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on ideologies about family forms. Although West and East European countries conceptualise the issues of family forms differently and neither began by espousing diversity, it is toward a recognition of diversity that both sets of countries are converging. In East European countries, where Marxist ideologies have provided the dominant value orientations, the criticism of the conventional model of the nuclear family stemmed from an idealist source, that is, the social evolutionary orientation characteristic of nineteenth-century social philosophers. There has always been diversity in family forms; rich and poor families, one-parent families as well as two-parent families, large and small families, and families with diverse extensions and connections. With the diversity model, each particular family form - conventional, dual-worker, single-parent, reconstituted, etc. - is seen as providing the structure for a lifestyle. The diversity model has implications both for policy/practice and for social theory.
