Family

George R. King

AN ESKIMO FAMILY

Tenderness and responsibility in their treatment of children is a virtue of the Eskimo which binds them closer to the brotherhood of civilized peoples than their skill at carving or with the needle.

A family is a domestic group of people, or a number of domestic groups, typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships including adoption.

The family is the basic social unit for the expression of love between man and woman and the creation and raising of children. The family tames the wilder impulses of men to the responsibilities of fatherhood, enables young women to blossom as mothers, and cultivates morality in children. Moral virtues, empathy, and good human relationships are learned in the family.

There are a number of variations in the basic family structure. The nuclear family consists of husband and wife and their children, while the extended family includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Other family patterns include polygamous (usually patriarchal) and single-parent families (usually headed by a female).

Throughout history, families have been central to human society; a key indicator of a society's well-being is the health of its families. For this reason, as stated in Article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "The [family is the] natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State."

The significance of the family

The family is universally formed to protect and nurture children. Although the term "dysfunctional" has often been applied to the family in modern times, in fact, the vast majorities of families produce viable, peaceable, and productive citizens. Developmental psychologist Selma Fraiberg reported that children in average families outperform children in ideal institutional settings in a number of basic developmental ways and—importantly—in impulse control. Children raised outside of families—in cold and impersonal institutions, for instance, or who move from foster home to foster home, behave anti-socially—even pathologically. The three- or four-generation extended family, including grandparents in addition to parents and children, provides the richest network of human relationships and greatest support for the raising of children and continuation of the lineage.

Martin Luther termed the family "the school of love." It is in the family that people can realize love in all its dimensions: children's love for parents, love among siblings, conjugal love, and parental love. For this reason, the family can rightly be called the "school of love." As people's hearts are cultivated through their family relationships, they can find fulfillment in their lives far beyond what they could attain as solitary beings.

Contemporary society generally views family as a haven from the world, supplying “intimacy, love and trust where individuals may escape the competition of dehumanizing forces in modern society” The family provides love and protection from the rough and tumble industrialized world, where warmth, tenderness and understanding can be expected from a loving mother and protection from the world can be expected from the father. However, the role of the family as protector is declining as civil society faces less internal conflict, as income levels allow for economic security independent of family support, and as individuals enjoy increased civil rights and protection from the state. Yet what remains as the major purpose of family life is its function as the locus of character development and personal fulfillment.

The family is the school of virtue, where children learn manners, obedience to their parents, helpfulness to their siblings, care for their younger siblings, and so on. More lessons are learned in the school of marriage and still more in the school of parenthood. Anthropologist James Q. Wilson has called the family "a continuing locus of moral instruction... we learn to cope with the people of the world because we learn to cope with members of our family." The family provides the socialization and character education required of good citizens, who practice these same virtues in the larger contexts of society.

However, family life can also magnify people's shortcomings. Family dysfunction can cause such emotional damage that people will risk everything to escape their families. Some have lost confidence in family life and chose the option of remaining single. Indeed, there has never been an ideal human family. Christianity explains that this ideal—represented by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—was lost at the Fall of Man. Marxism holds that the family is a structure of human domination. Nevertheless, Utopian attempts to replace the family with collective social structures, viz the Kibbutz, have not had long-term success.

For better or worse, human beings seem to be programmed to live in families. Research indicates that most Americans (71%) still idealize the traditional family even as they grow more accepting of divorce (78%), cohabitation (49%) and single-parent families. Margaret Mead, based on her anthropological research, affirmed the centrality of the family in human society:

As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period where this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it ... Again and again, in spite of proposals for change and actual experiments, human societies have reaffirmed their dependence on the family as the basic unit of human living—the family of father, mother and children.

Love in the family and personal growth

The family is the primary means through which most people cultivate their character and learn about love. The family of origin is the context for a child's lessons about love and virtue, as he or she relates to parents and siblings. The challenges of marriage and parenting bring further lessons. The family's efficacy for personal growth is such that some religious and traditions equate honorable and loving relationships in the family with a template for a person’s right relationship with God. In the Talmud, for instance, it is written, "When a man honors his father and mother, God says, 'I regard it as though I had dwelt among them and they had honored me.'" (Kiddushin 30b) Confucius said, “Surely proper behavior toward parents and elder brothers is the trunk of goodness,” (Analects 1.2) and “Filial piety is the root of all virtue” (Classic of Filial Piety). Jesus encouraged his followers to relate to God as their loving father.

The family structure provides the basic context for human development, as its members take on successive roles as children, siblings, spouses, parents and grandparents. As educator Gabriel Moran put it, "The family teaches by its form." These roles require four different and distinct types of love: children's love, sibling love, conjugal love and parental love. Taken together, they describe a developmental sequence, the later roles building upon the earlier ones. Each role provides opportunities to develop a particular type of love, and carries with it specific norms and duties.

Growing in Love as a Child

The heart of a son or daughter develops from that of a very young child and matures through a lifetime—from the toddler who clings trustingly to his or her parents’ hand to the adult child who nurses his or her elderly parents in their last years of life. Yet the essence of the child's love for parents remains the same: a heart of attachment, veneration, appreciation and love that deepens and becomes more conscious and responsible over time. Growth in love as a child also determines the person’s attitudes toward authority figures in society, and ultimately toward God.

In the East, a child’s devotion toward his or her parents is called filial piety and is considered the root of all goodness and morality. Confucius taught that responsiveness to one’s parents is the root or fountainhead of jen, empathy for human beings in general.

Religion and family life

Strong families have traditionally been grounded in religious values. In the Letter to the Ephesians (5:25), St. Paul likened the virtues of love in a Christian marriage to the love of Christ for the church. It is, first and foremost, a giving love, a sacrificial love that resembles the love of Jesus. Christian marital love has been characterized as “a love that seeks to give way to the other whenever possible.” Thus religion, by cultivating character virtues such as steadfastness, responsibility and modesty, and by promoting the ethics of sacrifice, humility and charity, certainly provides valuable support for family members as they seek to maintain lasting love amidst the demands of family life.

Furthermore, traditional religious teachings lift up the expectation that marriage should last a lifetime and decry divorce as a moral failure. "I hate divorce," declares God through the prophet Malachi (2:16). When Muhammad was asked about divorce, he said it was "the lawful thing that God hates most." (Hadith of Abu Dawud). When Jesus was asked about divorce, he said that God only allowed it because of peoples hardness of heart, and that it was not His way "from the beginning," adding "What God has joined together, let no man separate." (Matthew 19:5-8) Religions likewise condemn sex outside the context of marriage and family, as this violates the sanctity of marriage and creates difficult entanglements of soul and spirit that can interfere with a person's eventual marriage.

These normative teachings provide both resources and sanctions which predispose traditional believers to maintain and make the best of even a difficult marriage. Not surprisingly, religion and family tend to go hand in hand. A 2004 survey by the National Marriage Project (Rutgers University) found that married men are more religiously active than the unmarrieds. Nearly half say that they go to religious services several times a month, versus less than a quarter of the unmarrieds. Compared to unmarried men, they are also significantly more likely (75% v. 59%) to agree that "children should be raised in a religion." Unmarried men who attend religious services several times per month or more are also more disposed to marry; they are likely to agree with the statement, "I would be ready to get married tomorrow" (55%) compared with nonobservant men (43%).

While religious faith tends to make people less accepting of alternative family patterns, secularism tends to promote them. For example, Sweden, a highly secular country, leads the Western nations in the degree to which cohabitation has replaced marriage. Its marriage rate is one of the lowest in the Western world. Many couples in Sweden don’t marry even when they have children. Due to the weakness of religion, there is no longer any religious or cultural stigma in Sweden against cohabitation; it is regarded as irrelevant to question whether a couple is married or just living together. Rather, there is a dominant left-wing belief that families have been an impediment to full equality, based on the feminist view that the family is a structure of patriarchy and oppression and the Marxist view that the family is a bourgeois social institution with traditional ties to nobility and privilege. Finally, unlike in the United States all government benefits in Sweden are given to individuals irrespective of their intimate relationships or family form. There is no such thing, for example, as spousal benefits in health care or lower income tax rates for for married couples filing jointly. Nevertheless, when it comes to the welfare of children, whose parents are often not married, Swedish society boasts strong legal protections for children and a communitarian ethos; these factors compensate for the weaker family structure. It is doubtful whether such compensations could apply to the diverse, libertarian and mobile society that is the U.S.

Religions recognize that the ideal of the God-centered family runs up against the widespread corruption of the human heart due to the Fall of Man, creating difficulty and resentments between men and women, parents and children ever since. All the families in the Bible seem to be dysfunctional to one degree or another, and often the protagonist is challenged to overcome a festering family problem—Jacob and Joseph are two notable examples. Therefore, the centering of marriage upon God and striving to practice true love—divine love—within marriage can be viewed as a redemptive act and as opening the way to divine healing and personal growth. For believers who practice a life of faith, marriage and family can be a blessing, a restorative relationship to heal the most primal of human wounds and opening the way to future hope.

Anthropology of the family

Borg Mesch

WARM HEARTS OF THE NORTH

The Lapland father may measure his wealth in herds of reindeer, in hides and pelts, but the Lapland mother knows that her bright-eyed, smiling baby and her sturdy two-year-old are treasures beyond price.

According to sociology and anthropology, the primary function of the family is to reproduce society, biologically and socially. Thus, one's experience of one's family shifts over time. 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. From the point of view of the parent(s), the family is a family of procreation the goal of which is to produce and enculturate and socialize children. 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 a husband and wife, is necessary for the formation of an economically productive household. In modern societies marriage entails particular rights and privilege that encourage the formation of new families even when there is no intention of having children.

The structure of families traditionally hinges on relations between parents and children, between spouses, or both. Consequently, there are four major types of family: patrifocal, matrifocal, consanguineal and conjugal. (Note: these are ideal types. In all societies there are acceptable deviations from the ideal or statistical norm, owing either to incidental circumstances, such as the death of a member of the family, infertility or personal preferences).

A consanguineal or extended family consists of a husband and wife, their children, and other members of either the husband's or wife's family. This kind of family is common in cultures where property is inherited. In patriarchal societies where important property is owned by men, extended families commonly consist of a husband and wife, their children, the husband's parents, and other members of the husband's family. In societies where fathers are absent and mothers do not have the resources to rear their children on their own, the consanguineal family may consist of a mother and her children, and members of the mother's family.

A conjugal or nuclear family consists of a father, mother and their children. This kind of family is common where families are relatively mobile, as in modern industrialized societies. Usually there is a division of labor requiring the participation of both men and women. Nuclear families vary in the degree to which they are independent or maintain close ties to the kindreds of the parents and to other families in general.

A patrifocal family consists of a father and his children and is found in societies where men take multiple wives (polygamy or polygyny)and/or remain involved with each for a relatively short time. This type of family is rare from a worldwide perspective but occurs in Islamic states with considerable frequency. In some emirates the laws encourage this structure by allowing a maximum of four wives per man at any given time, and automatic deflection of custody rights to the father in the case of a divorce. In these societies a man will often take a wife and may conceive a child with her, but after a relatively short time put her out of his harem so he can take another woman without exceeding the quota of four. The man then keeps his child and thus a patrifocal structure emerges. Even without the expulsion of the mother, the structure may be patrifocal because the children (often as infants) are removed from the harem structure and placed into the father's family.

A matrifocal family consists of a mother and her children. Generally, these children are her biological offspring, although adoption of children is a practice in nearly every society. This kind of family is common where women have the resources to rear their children by themselves, or where men are more mobile than women. Today's single-parent families can be classed in this category.

Family arrangements in the United States have become more diverse with no particular household arrangement representing half of the United States population.

Is there an ideal family structure?

Today many people tend to idealize the two-parent nuclear family as the ideal family structure. However, historians point out that this family type may be of recent origin—the bourgeois family—a structure arising out of 16th and 17th century European households in which the center of the family is a marriage between a man and woman with strictly defined gender roles. The man typically is responsible for income and support, the woman for home and family matters. Social conservatives often express concern over a purported decay of the family and see this as a sign of the crumbling of contemporary society. They look with alarm at the dramatic increase in households headed by single mothers and by same-sex couples. Yet anthropologists point out that these are merely variations on family types that have existed in other societies.

Even when people bypass the traditional configuration of father, mother and their biological children, they tend to follow its patterns anyway, showing the fundamental need they feel for its structure. Couples live together and raise children, even children from previous relationships. Same-sex couples assume masculine and feminine roles and demand legal recognition of their unions; many seek to adopt children. Homeless children tend to congregate in gangs that serve as surrogate families.

On the other hand, as families universally are built around the marriage bond and the responsibilities for raising children, there would seem to be some rationality to giving preference to the two-parent nuclear family—particularly over family structures headed by only one parent. As James Q. Wilson has stated:

In virtually every society in which historians or anthropologists have inquired, one finds people living together on the basis of kinship ties and having responsibility for raising children. The kinship ties invariably imply restrictions on who has sexual access to whom; the child-care responsibilities invariably imply both economic and non-economic obligations. And in virtually every society, the family is defined by marriage; that is, by a publicly announced contract that makes legitimate the sexual union of a man and a woman.

In other words, while single-parent and matrifocal families form a recognizable type, they are not the first choice where there is the possibility of forming stable two-parent families. However, where men are not strongly bound to the family unit, i.e. where a culture does not support lasting marriage or where economic hardships cause men to be apart from their wives for long periods of time, this family type becomes prevalent.

By the same token, societies where patrifocal families are the norm are vulerable to movements for women's rights and human rights that attack marriage arrangements that do not give wives equal status with their husbands. This may lead in the long run to the decline of polygamy.

In many cultures, the need to be self-supporting is hard to meet, particularly where rents/property values are very high, and the foundation of a new household can be an obstacle to nuclear family formation. In these cases, extended families form. People remain single and live with their parents for a long period of time. Generally, the trend to shift from extended to nuclear family structures has been supported by increasing mobility and modernization.

Still, some argue that the extended family, or at least the three-generational family including grandparents, provides a broader and deeper foundation for raising children as well as support for the new parents. In particular, the role of grandparents has been recognized as an important aspect of the family dynamic. Having experienced the challenges of creating a family themselves, they offer wisdom and encouragement to the young parents and become a reassuring presence in the lives of their grandchildren. Abraham Maslow described the love of grandparents as "the purest love for the being of the other."

Given the substantial benefits of these intergenerational encounters, many who, in search of economic advancement, leave the village and their extended families for life in the city where they formed nuclear families, feel a sense of isolation and a longing for the thick relationships and warm love of the extended family of their origin. This suggests that, economic issues aside, people are happiest living in extended families, or in nuclear families that treasure close bonds with their kinfolk.

Personal benefits of family life

Despite controversies over what the "family" is, there is considerable evidence about what the consequences of family life are for individuals. For instance:

Between 1973 and 1981, Yankelovich found that about three-fourths of Americans interviewed claiming that family life was their most important value.

Studies of the various life spheres Americans report as being sources of a "great deal of satisfaction" consistently show family life being the most important.

Married individuals are healthier than their never-married, divorced, and widowed counterparts, according to the CDC report "Marital Status and Health: United States, 1999-2002." Marriage increases life-expectancy by as much as five years. James Goodwin and his associates (Journal of the American Medical Association 258:3125-3130) found in their analyses of 25,000 cases listed in the New Mexico Tumor Registry, which tracks all malignancies in the state, a higher percentage of married people survive cancer at nearly every age (see "Health and Selected Socioeconomic Characteristics of the Family: U.S., 1988-90" from the Centers for Disease Control)

In Lewis Terman's famous longitudinal study of gifted California children (n=1,521), begun in 1921 with follow-ups every 5 or 10 years, it was found that those whose parents divorced faced a 33 percent greater risk of an earlier death (average age at death=76 years) than those whose parents remained married until the children reached age 21 (average age at death=80). According to Dr. Howard Friedman, who did the analyses, there was no such mortality effect for children whose parents had died (cited in Daniel Goleman. 1995. "75 Years Later, Study Is Still Tracking Geniuses." New York Times [March 7]).

Economic function of the family

In traditional society the family is often supposed to have been the primary economic unit. This role has gradually diminished in modern times and in societies like the United States is much smaller except for certain sectors such as agriculture and a few upper class families. In China the family as an economic unit still plays a strong role in the countryside. However, the relations between the economic role of the family, its socio-economic mode of production and cultural values are highly complex.

Conclusion

A strong nuclear or extended family provides a haven of love and intimacy. It offers maximum opportunities for personal growth through its matrix of relationships—with spouse, parents, grandparents, siblings and children. A strong family provides a social support network that its members are able to rely on in times of stress. The rise of single parent households due to the absence of husbands represents reversion to a different family structure, one that is prone to isolation and provides weaker social support.

The two-parent family is important in the development of children and beneficial to their mental and emotional health. A strong conjugal bond between the parents provides the child security and a model for conjugal love to which s/he can aspire. The father's steady and responsible provision for the family provides a positive male role model for boys and a model of an ideal husband for young girls. Thus from an early age, children gain a positive sense of self-worth, sexual identity, and confidence about their future. Divorce or the chronic absence of one parent teaches the opposite lesson: that life is insecure, that the child is not lovable, that the child cannot hope for a successful marriage, that men are irresponsible and unsuitable as marriage partners, and so on. Statistically, children of single-parent families have a higher incidence of criminality, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and depression.

The extended family augments the nuclear family in many cultures, expanding the family dynamic intergenerationally. Grandparents offer a unique form of support to the family, both to the parents and to the children. When a newly married couple moves far away from their parents, establishing their own nuclear family, isolation from their extended family may prove stressful. Families in which three generations interact in close harmony provide the greatest support for successfully raising children, connecting them to their family traditions and giving value to their lineage.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• American Kinship, David Schneider
• A Natural History of Families, Scott Forbes, Princeton University Press, 2005, ISBN 0691094829
• More Than Kin and Less Than Kind, Douglas W. Mock, Belknap Press, 2004, ISBN 0674012852
• Georgas, James, John W. Berry, Fons J. R. van de Vijver, Çigdem Kagitçibasi, and Ype H. Poortinga (Editors). 2006. Families Across Cultures: A 30-Nation Psychological Study. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521822971

External links

• WikiTree.org - freely-edited family tree of all human beings.
• Online Dictionary of the Social Sciences: http://bitbucket.icaap.org/
• Cousins: http://www.tedpack.org/cousins.html
• Muslim Matrimonial and Muslim Family
• The Good Enough Family: http://samvak.tripod.com/family.html
• Cousin marriages: http://www.cousincouples.com/
• Family Court: http://www.stephenbaskerville.net/
• Family Research Laboratory

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