Concept of a Family

A family consists of a father, mother, and children. Family (from Latin: familia) 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.

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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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”.