Family (from ) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictability, structure, and safety as members mature and learn to participate in the community. Historically, most human societies use family as the primary purpose of attachment, nurturance, and socialization.Alhussain, Khalid, Shah, Drishti, Thornton, James, Kelly, Kimberly. Familial Opioid Misuse and Family Cohesion: Impact on Family Communication and Well-being. Addictive Disorders & Their Treatment 2019;18(4):194–204. .Lander L, Howsare J, Byrne M. The impact of substance use disorders on families and children: from theory to practice. Soc Work Public Health. 2013;28:194–205.
Anthropologists classify most family organizations as matrifocal (a mother and her children), patrifocal (a father and his children), conjugal (a married couple with children, also called the nuclear family), avuncular (a man, his sister, and her children), or extended (in addition to parents, spouse and children, may include grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins).
The field of genealogy aims to trace family lineages through history. The family is also an important economic unit studied in family economics. The word "families" can be used metaphorically to create more inclusive categories such as community, nationhood, and global village.
Social One of the primary functions of the family involves providing a framework for the production and reproduction of persons biologically and socially. This can occur through the sharing of material substances (such as food); the giving and receiving of care and nurture (nurture kinship); jural rights and obligations; also moral and sentimental ties.Schneider, David 1984 A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 182Deleuze-Guattari (1972). Part 2, ch. 3, p. 80 Thus, one's experience of one's family shifts over time.
There are different perspectives of the term 'family', from the perspective of children, the family is a "family of orientation": the family serves to locate children socially and plays a major role in their enculturation and socialization.Russon, John, (2003) Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life, Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 61–68. From the point of view of the parent(s), the family is a "family of procreation", the goal of which is to produce, enculturate and socialize children.George Peter Murdoch Social Structure p. 13 However, producing children is not the only function of the family; in societies with a sexual division of labor, marriage, and the resulting relationship between two people, it is necessary for the formation of an economically productive household.Wolf, Eric. 1982 Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. 92Harner, Michael 1975 "Scarcity, the Factors of Production, and Social Evolution," in Population, Ecology, and Social Evolution, Steven Polgar, ed. Mouton Publishers: The Hague.Rivière, Peter 1987 "Of Women, Men, and Manioc", Etnologiska Studier (38).
C. C. Harris notes that the western conception of a family is ambiguous and confused with the household, as revealed in the different contexts in which the word is used."We have seen that people can refer to their relatives as 'the family'. 'All the family turned up for the funeral... But of course, my brother didn't bring his family along— they're much too young.' Here the reference is to the offspring (as distinct from 'all' the family). The neighbors were very good, too. 'The Jones came, and their two children. It was nice, the whole family turning up like that.' Here the usage is more restricted than 'relatives' or 'his relatives,' but includes just both parents and offspring. 'Of course, the children will be leaving home soon. It's always sad to see the family break up like that.' Here the reference is not only to parents and children but to their co-residence, that is, to the household." The Family and Industrial Society", 1983, George Allen Unwin, London, p. 30 Olivia Harris states this confusion is not accidental, but indicative of the familial ideology of capitalist, western countries that pass social legislation that insists members of a nuclear family should live together, and that those not so related should not live together. Despite the ideological and legal pressures, a large percentage of families do not conform to the ideal nuclear family type. Powell, Bolzendahl, Geist, and Steelman asked Americans who counts as family among 11 different household structures, and found a wide variety of responses depending on how people defined the family. Some respondents had a limited definition of family, only including heterosexual married couples (and their children) as family. Others considered that simply the presence of children signified a family. A third group required that it "feel and function like a family," regardless of the structure.
Size
The total fertility rate of women varies from country to country, from a high rate of 6.76 children born per woman in Niger to a low rate of 0.81 in Singapore (as of 2015). Fertility is below replacement in all Eastern European and Southern European countries, and particularly high in Sub-Saharan African countries.
In some cultures, the mother's preference of family size influences that of the children's through early adulthood. A parent's number of children strongly correlates with the number of children that their children will eventually have.
Types
Although early western cultural anthropologists and sociologists considered family and kinship to be universally associated with relations by "blood" (based on ideas common in their own cultures) later research has shown that many societies instead understand family through ideas of living together, the sharing of food (e.g. milk kinship) and sharing care and nurture. Sociologists have a special interest in the function and status of family forms in stratified (especially capitalist) societies.
According to the work of scholars Max Weber, Alan Macfarlane, Steven Ozment, Jack Goody and Peter Laslett, the huge transformation that led to modern marriage in Western democracies was "fueled by the religio-cultural value system provided by elements of Judaism, early Christianity, Roman Catholic canon law and the Protestant Reformation".
Much sociological, historical and anthropological research dedicates itself to the understanding of this variation, and of changes in the family that form over time. Levitan claims:
Nonetheless, the results of Steven Ruggles' assessment of world census data suggest "nineteenth-century Northwest Europe and North America did not have exceptionally simple or nuclear family structure."
Multigenerational family Historically, the most common family type was one in which grandparents, parents, and children lived together as a single unit. For example, the household might include the owners of a farm, one (or more) of their adult children, the adult child's spouse, and the adult child's own children (the owners' grandchildren). Members of the extended family are not included in this family group. Sometimes, "skipped" generation families, such as a grandparents living with their grandchildren, are included.
In the US, this arrangement declined after World War II, reaching a low point in 1980, when about one out of every eight people in the US lived in a multigenerational family. The numbers have risen since then, with one in five people in the US living in a multigenerational family as of 2016. The increasing popularity is partly driven by demographic changes and the economic shifts associated with the Boomerang Generation.
Multigenerational households are less common in Canada, where about 6% of people living in Canada were living in multigenerational families as of 2016, but the proportion of multigenerational households was increasing rapidly, driven by increasing numbers of Aboriginal families, immigrant families, and high housing costs in some regions.
Conjugal (nuclear) family The term "nuclear family" is commonly used to refer to conjugal families. A "conjugal" family includes only the spouses and unmarried children who are not of age. Some sociologists distinguish between conjugal families (relatively independent of the kindred of the parents and of other families in general) and nuclear families (which maintain relatively close ties with their kindred).Compare: Compare:
Other family structures – with (for example) blended parents, single parents, and domestic partnerships – have begun to challenge the normality of the nuclear family.
Single-parent family A single-parent family consists of one parent together with their children, where the parent is either widowed, divorced (and not remarried), or never married. The parent may have sole custody of the children, or separated parents may have a shared-parenting arrangement where the children divide their time (possibly equally) between two different single-parent families or between one single-parent family and one blended family. As compared to sole custody, physical, mental and social well-being of children may be improved by shared-parenting arrangements and by children having greater access to both parents.Sanford L. Braver and Michael E. Lamb, Shared Parenting After Parental Separation: The Views of 12 Experts, Journal of Divorce & Remarriage, April 2018: "The empirical evidence currently available supports the view that children of divorce, on average, benefit substantially from SP [shared parenting] arrangements in which they live with each parent at least 35% of the time. Findings from well over 50 individual studies indicate that children whose parents have SP fare better than those with sole physical custody [...]." The number of single-parent families have been increasing due to the divorce rate climbing drastically during the years 1965–1995, and about half of all children in the United States will live in a single-parent family at some point before they reach the age of 18. Most single-parent families are headed by a mother, but the number of single-parent families headed by fathers is increasing.American Psychological Association, Single parenting and today's family Kathryn M. Feltey, Single-Parent Families , International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family
Matrifocal family
A "matrifocal" family consists of a mother and her children. Generally, these children are her biological offspring, although adoption of children occurs in nearly every society. This kind of family occurs commonly where women have the resources to rear their children by themselves, or where men are more mobile than women. As a definition, "a family or domestic group is matrifocal when it is centred on a woman and her children. In this case, the father(s) of these children are intermittently present in the life of the group and occupy a secondary place. The children's mother is not necessarily the wife of one of the children's fathers."Godelier, Maurice, trans. Nora Scott, The Metamorphoses of Kinship (London: Verso, 2011 ()), p. 568 (Glossary, entry matrifocal) (trans. from Métamorphoses de la parenté (Librarie Arthème Fayard (apparently), 2004)) (author prof. anthropology, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris). The name, matrifocal, was coined in Guiana but it is defined differently in other countries. For Nayar families, the family have the male as the "center" or the head of the family, either the step-father/father/brother, rather than the mother.
Extended family
The term "extended family" is also common, especially in the United States. This term has two distinct meanings:
It serves as a synonym of "consanguineal family" (consanguine means "of the same blood").