Extended family

Extended middle-class Midwestern U.S. family of Danish/German extraction

Extended family (or joint family) is a term with several distinct meanings. First, it is used synonymously with consanguineal family. Second, in societies dominated by the conjugal or nuclear family, it is used to refer to kindred who extend beyond the immediate family of parents and children. Often there could be many generations living under the same roof, depending on the circumstances. Generally, the extended family is contrasted with the nuclear family.

The three- or four-generation extended family, including grandparents in addition to parents and children, provides a rich network for human relationships and great support for the raising of children and continuation of the lineage.

Definitions

The extended family consists not only of the basic family unit of parents and children but extends to include other adults and children with kinship ties. These may include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and beyond.

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 consanguineal family consists of a husband and wife, their children, and other members of either the husband's and/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.

In a joint family, parents and their children's families often live under a single roof. This type of family often includes multiple generations in the family.

Complex family is a generic term for any family structure involving more than two adults. The term can refer to a joint family, consanguineal family, or to a polygamy of any type. It is often used to refer to the group marriage form of polygamy.

Roles and Responsibilities

In cultures where the nuclear family is the norm for establishing a household, members of the extended family live in separate homes, possibly at significant distances. In societies where the consanguineal or joint family predominates for living arrangements, members of the extended family will live in the same home.

In the cultures where the extended family is the basic family unit, growing up to adulthood does not necessarily mean severing bonds between oneself and one's parents or even grandparents. When the child grows up, he or she moves into the larger and more real world of adulthood, yet he or she does not, under normal circumstances, establish an identity separate from that of the community.

The network of relatives (including biological, adopted, and [[foster care|foster) that forms the extended family acts as a close-knit community. Extended families can include, aside from the parents and their children:

• grandparents
• spouses of children
• cousins, aunts, uncles

In cases where there have been second (and more) marriages producing children, the extended family includes step-children and their kin.

In the joint family setup the workload is shared among the members, often unequally. The women are often housewives and cook for the entire family. The patriarch of the family (often the oldest male member) lays down the rules and arbitrates disputes. Other senior members of the household baby sit infants in case their mother is working. They are also responsible in teaching the younger children their mother tongue, manners, and etiquette.

The house often has a large reception area and a common kitchen. Each family has their own bedroom. The members of the household also look after each other and take over their responsibilities in situations where a member is ill or otherwise disabled.

Around the world

Charles Sprague Pearce, Family (1896). Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

In many cultures, such as in those of many Africans, Koreans, Middle Easterners, Jewish families of central Europe, Latin Americans, Indians, East Asians, and Pacific Islanders, extended families are the basic family unit. Even in the United States, the extended family has a significant role.

Australia

Australian Aborigines are a group for whom the concept of family extends well beyond the nuclear model. Aboriginal immediate families include aunts, uncles, and a number of other relatives who would be considered "distant relations" in context of the nuclear family. Aboriginal families also have strict social rules regarding whom they can marry.

Balkans

The Balkan zadruga (Cyrillic: задруга) is a type of rural community historically common among South Slavs. Generally formed of one extended family consisting of married brothers and their families, they lived in a single household and functioned as a single agricultural and economic unit. The zadruga held its property, herds, and money in common, with the oldest capable patriarch usually ruling and making decisions for the family. Thus, the zadruga was a single household Because the zadruga was based on a patrilocal system, when a girl married, she left her parents' zadruga and joined that of her husband. Within the zadruga, all of the family members worked to insure that the needs of every other member were met.

The zadruga in this form eventually went into decline beginning in the late nineteenth century, as the largest started to become unmanageable and broke into smaller zadrugas or formed villages. After World War II the zadruga and increasing industrialization, the zadruga lost its economic significance. However, rather than disappearing, the zadruga transformed itself from the horizontal extension of brothers to a vertical extension between generations. Thus, a significant proportion of the people (around 70 percent), continue to live in extended family households.

The zadruga system continues to color life in the Balkans; the typically intense concern for family found among South Slavs today is partly due to centuries of living in the zadruga system. Many modern-day villages in the Balkans have their roots in a zadruga, a large number of them carrying the name of the one that founded them.

India

In India, the family is a patriarchal society, with the sons' families often staying in the same house. A joint Hindu family, otherwise called as 'Hindu Undivided Family' [HUF], consists of all persons lineally descended from a common ancestor, and includes their wives and unmarried daughters. A daughter ceases to be a member of her father’s family on marriage and becomes a member of her husband’s family.

The joint and undivided family is the normal condition of Hindu society. An undivided Hindu family is ordinarily joint not only in estate, but also in food and worship. The existence of joint estate is not an essential prerequisite to constitute a joint family. A family that does not own any property may, nevertheless, be joint. Where there is joint estate, and the members of the family become separate in estate, the family ceases to be joint family. Mere severance in food and worship does not operate as a separation.

Businesses carried out by Hindu joint families in India are governed by the Hindu Law, where the liability of the entire business is borne out by the oldest surviving male member, who is the head of family and is also the head of the business of the Hindu Undivided Family by default.

The lack of a joint liability usually leads to disputes and splits and is one of the prime causes for the breakup of the joint family system in India.

United States

Although industrialization and the proliferation of ideas of individualism have led to the increase of nuclear families as the unit of many societies, yet the extended family continues to play an important role. The extended family becomes valuable in contemporary society when young adults face unemployment or divorce, or when older adults become widowed or face declining health and consequent lack of ability to care for themselves and their house. Social welfare provisions made the extended family less essential for the elderly in the twentieth century.

However, reductions in government funding for such services may make the role of the extended family take on greater importance again in the twenty-first century. Low income urban groups, including single-parent households, benefit greatly from the involvement of grandparents. Extended family networks have also been found of assistance in the assimilation of immigrants.

Is there an ideal family structure?

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

Today, many people tend to idealize the two-parent nuclear family as the ideal family structure. 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 vulnerable 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 and 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."

The emotional pull of these intergenerational encounters remains strong even for those who have split off to form nuclear families. Individuals who leave the village and their extended families for the economic benefits of life in the city may 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.

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 he or she 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 provides a superior alternative to 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

• International Educational Foundation. 2006. Educating for True Love. New York, NY: International Educational Foundation. ISBN 1891858070
• Maslow, Abraham. 1987. Motivation and Personality, 3rd ed. New York, NY: HarperCollins. ISBN 0060419873
• Williams, Brian, Stacey C. Sawyer, and Carl M. Wahlstrom. 2005. Marriage, Families, and Intimate Relationships. Boston, MA: Pearson 2005 ISBN 0205366740
• Wilson, James Q. 1997. The Moral Sense. New York, NY: Free Press. ISBN 978-0684833323

External links

• Extended Families - Study Of The Extended Family Marriage and Family Encyclopedia

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