Family
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. We can distinguish the "nuclear" family consisting of husband and wife and their children, and the extended family, which includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
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.
Hence, 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. As developmental psychologist Selma Fraiberg said, 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 dehumanising forces in modern society”[1] The family is often referred to as a haven providing love and protection from the rough and tumble industrialised world, and as a place 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 idea of protection is declining as civil society faces less internal conflict combined with increased civil rights and protection from the state. To many, the ideal of personal or family fulfilment has replaced protection as the major role of the family. The family now supplies what is “vitally needed but missing from other social arrangements”.[2]
The family is also 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 get along with the people of the world because we learn to get along 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.
Attachment theory has it that children form "inner working models" for all future relationships from the interactions they have with their first caretakers—usually their mothers. Empathy is learned from following and imitating the expressions and levels of emotions expressed by mothers as they play with their child, soothe their child, and respond to the infant's needs. The first developmental "crisis" of trust versus mistrust, as Erik Erikson put it, is resolved by a parent's caring responses to her child. Indeed, studies of altruism done by Pearl and Samuel Oliner following World War II showed that there was but one common factor among the people in Europe who risked themselves to save Jews from Nazi horrors: each "rescuer" had a warm, strong bond with one or more parent.
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, modern Utopian attempts to replace the family with collective social structures, viz the Kibbutz, have not had long-term success.
Yet for better or worse, human beings seem to be programmed to live in 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.[3]
Family cross-culturally
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.
Is there a normative family structure?
Today many people tend to idealize the two-parent nuclear family as the ideal type. 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.
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.[5]
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." [6]
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.
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.
Kinship terminology
A kinship terminology is a specific system of familial relationships. The now rather dated anthropologist Louis Henry Morgan argued that kinship terminologies reflect different sets of distinctions. For example, most kinship terminologies distinguish between sexes (this is the difference between a brother and a sister) and between generation (this is the difference between a child and a parent). Moreover, he argued, kinship terminologies distinguish between relatives by blood and marriage (although recently some anthropologists have argued that many societies define kinship in terms other than "blood").
But Morgan also observed that different languages (and thus, societies) organize these distinctions differently. He thus proposed to describe kin terms and terminologies as either descriptive or classificatory. "Descriptive" terms refer to only one type of relationship, while "classificatory" terms refer to many types of relationships. Most kinship terminologies include both descriptive and classificatory terms. For example, in Western societies there is only one way to be related to one's brother (brother = parents' son); thus, in Western society, brother is a descriptive term. But there are many ways to be related to one's cousin (cousin = mother's brother's son, mother's sister's son, father's brother's son, father's sister's son, and so on); thus, in Western society, "cousin" is a classificatory term.
Morgan discovered that what may be a descriptive term in one society can be a classificatory term in another society. For example, in some societies there are many different people that one would call "mother" (the woman of whom one was born, as well as her sister and husband's sister, and also one's father's sister). Moreover, some societies do not lump together relatives that the West classifies together (in other words, in some languages there is no word for cousin because mother's sister's children and father's sister's children are referred to in different terms).
Armed with these different terms, Morgan identified six basic patterns of kinship terminologies:
- Hawaiian: the most classificatory; only distinguishes between sex and generation.
- Sudanese: the most descriptive; no two relatives are referred to by the same term.
- Eskimo: has both classificatory and descriptive terms; in addition to sex and generation, also distinguishes between lineal relatives (who are related directly by a line of descent) and collateral relatives (who are related by blood, but not directly in the line of descent). Lineal relatives have highly descriptive terms, collateral relatives have highly classificatory terms.
- Iroquois: has both classificatory and descriptive terms; in addition to sex and generation, also distinguishes between siblings of opposite sexes in the parental generation. Siblings of the same sex are considered blood relatives, but siblings of the opposite sex are considered relatives by marriage. Thus, one's mother's sister is also called mother, and one's father's brother is also called father; however, one's mother's brother is called father-in-law, and one's father's sister is called mother-in-law.
- Crow: like Iroquois, but further distinguishes between mother's side and father's side. Relatives on the mother's side of the family have more descriptive terms, and relatives on the father's side have more classificatory terms.
- Omaha: like Iroquois, but further distinguishes between mother's side and father's side. Relatives on the mother's side of the family have more classificatory terms, and relatives on the father's side have more descriptive terms.
Societies in different parts of the world and using different languages may share the same basic terminology; in such cases it is very easy to translate the kinship terms of one language into another, although connatations may vary. But it is usually impossible to translate directly the kinship terms of a society that uses one system into the language of a society that uses a different system.
Some languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Hungarian, add another dimension to some relations: relative age. There are, e.g., different words for "older brother" and "younger brother." Thus, although Westerners may naturally agree with Morgan that "brother" is descriptive rather than classificatory, speakers of these languages might disagree.
English kinship terminology
Most Western societies employ English kinship terminology. This kinship terminology is common in societies based on conjugal (or nuclear) families, where nuclear families must be relatively mobile.
Members of the nuclear family use descriptive kinship terms:
- Mother: the female parent
- Father: the male parent
- Son: the males born of the mother; sired by the father
- Daughter: the females born of the mother; sired by the father
- Brother: a male born of the same mother; sired by the same father
- Sister: a female born of the same mother; sired by the same father
It is generally assumed that the mother's husband is also the genitor. In some families, a woman may have children with more than one man or a man may have children with more than one woman. Children who share one parent but not another are called "half-brothers" or "half-sisters." Children who do not share parents, but whose parents are married, are called "step-brothers" or "step-sisters."
If a person is married to the parent of a child, but is not the parent of the child themselves, then they are the "step-parent" of the child, either the "stepmother" or "stepfather". Children who are adopted into a family are generally called by the same terms as children born into the family.
Typically, societies with conjugal families also favor neolocal residence; thus upon marriage a person separates from the nuclear family of their childhood (family of orientation) and forms a new nuclear family (family of procreation). This practice means that members of one's own nuclear family were once members of another nuclear family, or may one day become members of another nuclear family.
Members of the nuclear families of members of one's own nuclear family may be lineal or collateral. When they are lineal, they are referred to in terms that build on the terms used within the nuclear family:
- Grandfather: a parent's father
- Grandmother: a parent's mother
- Grandson: a child's son
- Granddaughter: a child's daughter
When they are collateral, they are referred to in more classificatory terms that do not build on the terms used within the nuclear family:
- Uncle: father's brother, father's sister's husband, mother's brother, mother's sister's husband
- Aunt: father's sister, father's brother's wife, mother's sister, mother's brother's wife
- Nephew: sister's sons, brother's sons
- Niece: sister's daughters, brother's daughters
When separated by additional generations (in other words, when one's collateral relatives belong to the same generation as one's grandparents or grandchildren), these terms are modified by the prefix "great".
Most collateral relatives were never members of the nuclear family of the members of one's own nuclear family.
- Cousin: the most classificatory term; the children of aunts or uncles. Cousins may be further distinguished by degree of collaterality and generation. Two persons of the same generation who share a grandparent are "first cousins" (one degree of collaterality); if they share a great-grandparent they are "second cousins" (two degrees of collaterality) and so on. If the shared ancestor is the grandparent of one individual and the great-grandparent of the other, the individuals are said to be "first cousins once removed" (removed by one generation); if the shared ancestor is the grandparent of one individual and the great-great-grandparent of the other, the individuals are said to be "first cousins twice removed" (removed by two generations), and so on. Similarly, if the shared ancestor is the great-grandparent of one person and the great-great-grandparent of the other, the individuals are said to be "second cousins once removed."
Distant cousins of an older generation (in other words, one's parents' first cousins) are technically first cousins once removed, but are often classified with "aunts" and "uncles".
Similarly, a person may refer to close friends of one's parents as "aunt" or "uncle," or may refer to close friends as "brother" or "sister". This practice is called fictive kinship.
Relationships by marriage, except for wife/husband, are qualified by the term "-in-law". The mother and father of one's spouse are one's mother-in-law and father-in-law; the spouse of one's son or daughter is one's son-in-law or daughter-in-law.
The term "sister-in-law" refers to three essentially different relationships, either the wife of one's brother, or the sister of one's spouse, or the wife of one's spouse's sibling. "Brother-in-law" is similarly ambiguous. There are no special terms for the rest of one's spouse's family.
Specific distinctions vary among Western societies. For instance, in French, the prefix beau- or belle- is used for both "-in-law" and "step-"; in other words, one's belle-soeur could be the sister of one's spouse, the wife of one's sibling, the wife of one's spouse's sibling, or the daughter of one's parent's spouse. In Spanish, each of the roles that English creates with the suffix "-in-law" has a different word (suegros- parents-in-law, yerno-son-in-law, nuera-daughter-in-law, cuñados-siblings-in-law), but there is a suffix -astro or -astra that is equivalent to "step-". In Swedish, terms for grandparents differ on the side of the parents, i.e., "farfar" and "farmor" (father-father, father-mother) vs. "mormor" and "morfar" (mother-mother, mother-father). There is also a term, "half-sibling" (and -brother, -sister) for siblings with whom one shares only one parent.
Contemporary perception
Notes
- ↑ Zinn, M. and Stanley Eitzen, D. (1987). Diversity in American Families. Harper and Row Publishers, New York
- ↑ Ibid., Zinn and Eitzen(1987)
- ↑ Mead, Margaret and Ken Heyman. 1965. Family. New York: Macmillan. pp. 77-78.
- ↑ Williams, Brian and Stacey C. Sawyer, Carl M. Wahlstrom (2005). Marriages, Families & Intinamte Relationships. Boston, MA: Pearson. 0-205-36674-0.
- ↑ Wilson, James Q. 1993. The Moral Sense. Reprint edition, 1997. New York: Free Press. ISBN 0684833328. p. 158.
- ↑ Maslow, Abraham. 1954. Motivation and Personality. Third edition, 1987. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. ISBN 0060419873. p. 183.
ReferencesISBN 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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