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An ambiguous term, referring to both the group formed by a co-resident husband, wife, and children (which sociologists term the nuclear family) or to a wider category of relatives, including non-resident grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc (the extended family). The nuclear family was once regarded as the key domestic institution of modern Western societies, but marriage has become somewhat less common, and the divorce rate has greatly increased, so that in societies such as contemporary England and the USA the majority of the population no longer lives within a nuclear family group. According to some estimates, only c.20% of all households are made up of nuclear families, the rest being constituted by single parents, foster, childless, or extended families, or simply individuals living alone. For different reasons, the same may have been true in many European peasant communities and in the early industrial cities. In many parts of the world, and in Europe in the pre-industrial period, the nuclear family was commonly part of a larger domestic group including some other relatives, and also employees, apprentices, etc. Anthropologists have been particularly interested in the circle of kin beyond the nuclear family, and have demonstrated that kinship groupings wider than the nuclear family may have crucial social functions.

A family consists of a domestic group of people (or a number of domestic groups), typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships ?

Although many people (including social scientists) have understood familial relationships in terms of "blood", many anthropologists have argued that one must understand the notion of "blood" metaphorically, and that many societies understand 'family' through other concepts rather than through genetics.

Article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State".

The family cross-culturally

According to sociology and anthropology, the family has the primary function of reproducing ? From the perspective of children, the family functions as a family of orientation: the family serves to locate children socially, and plays a major role in their enculturation and socialization. In societies with a sexual division of labor, marriage (and the resulting relationship between a husband and wife) must precede the formation of an economically productive household. All societies tolerate some acceptable deviations from the ideal or statistical norm, owing either to incidental circumstances (such as the death of a member of the family), to infertility or to personal preferences.

Patrifocal families

A patrifocal family consists of a father and his children.

Matrifocal families

A matrifocal family consists of a mother and her children ? generally her biological offspring, although nearly every society also practises adoption of children. This kind of family commonly evolves where mothers do not have the resources to rear their children on their own, fathers are not often present, and especially where property changes ownership through inheritance. When men own important property, consanguineal families commonly consist of a husband and wife, their children, and other members of the husband's family. This kind of family occurs commonly where a division of labor requires the participation of both men and women, and where families have relatively high mobility. A notable subset of this family type, the nuclear family, has one woman with one husband, and they raise their children. Sociologists have an especial interest in the function and status of these forms in stratified (especially capitalist) societies.

Non-scholars, especially in the United States and Europe, use the term "nuclear family" to refer to conjugal families. Sociologists distinguish between conjugal families (relatively independent of the kindreds of the parents and of other families in general) and nuclear families (which maintain relatively close ties with their kindreds).

Non-scholars, especially in the United States and Europe, also use the term "extended family". Second, in societies dominated by the conjugal family, it refers to kindred (an egocentric network of relatives that extends beyond the domestic group) who do not belong to the conjugal family.

These types refer to ideal or normative structures found in particular societies. Much sociological, historical and anthropological research dedicates itself to the understanding of this variation, and of changes in the family form over time. Thus, some speak of the bourgeois family, a family structure arising out of 16th-century and 17th-century European households, in which the family centers on a marriage between a man and woman, with strictly-defined gender-roles.

In contemporary Europe and the United States, people in academic, political and civil sectors have called attention to single-father-headed households, and families headed by same-sex couples, although academics point out that these forms exist in other societies.

Roman Catholic Church tradition places the family under the special protection of Saint Joseph, the patron of families, fathers, expectant mothers, house-sellers and house-buyers (in contradistinction to Saint Monica, patroness of wives, mothers, and abuse-victims).

Economic function of the family

Anthropologists have often supposed that the family in a traditional society forms the primary economic unit. This economic role has gradually diminished in modern times, and in societies like the United States it has become much smaller ? 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 remain highly complex.

Families and other sociological institutions

Wherever people agree that families seem fundamental to the ordered nature of society, other social institutions such as the state and organised religion will make special provisions for families and will support (in word and/or in deed) the idea of the family. The now rather dated anthropologist Louis Henry Morgan (1818?1881) argued that kinship terminologies reflect different sets of distinctions. 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").

However, Morgan also observed that different languages (and thus, societies) organize these distinctions differently. "Descriptive" terms refer to only one type of relationship, while "classificatory" terms refer to many types of relationships. thus, in Western society, the word "brother" functions as a descriptive term. But many different ways exist to express relationship with one's male first-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, the word "cousin" operates as a classificatory term.

Morgan discovered that a descriptive term in one society can become a classificatory term in another society. For example, in some societies one would refer to many different people as "mother" (the woman who gave birth to oneself, as well as her sister and husband's sister, and also one's father's sister). For example, some languages have no one word equivalent to "cousin", because different terms refer to mother's sister's children and to father's sister's children.

Armed with these different terms, Morgan identified six basic patterns of kinship terminologies:

• Hawaiian: the most classificatory; Lineal relatives have highly descriptive terms, collateral relatives have highly classificatory terms.
  
• Iroquois: has both classificatory and descriptive terms; however, one refers to one's mother's brother as "father-in-law", and to one's father's sister as "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 patterns; But translators usually find it 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 (see Chinese kinship), Japanese, and Hungarian, add another dimension to some relations: relative age. Thus, although Westerners may "naturally" agree with Morgan in seeing the term "brother" as descriptive rather than classificatory, speakers of these languages might disagree.

Other languages, such as Chiricahua, have reciprocal terms. This kinship terminology commonly occurs in societies based on conjugal (or nuclear) families, where nuclear families have a degree of relatively mobility.

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 same father
  

Such systems generally assume that the mother's husband has also served as the biological father. For children who do not share biological or adoptive parents in common, English-speakers use the term "step-brother" or "step-sister" to refer to their new relationship with each other when one of their biological parents marries one of the other child's biological parents.

Any person (other than the biological parent of a child) who marries the parent of that child becomes the "step-parent" of the child, either the "stepmother" or "stepfather". The same terms generally apply to children adopted into a family as to 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 once functioned as 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 (former) nuclear family may class as lineal or as collateral. Kin who regard them as lineal refer to them in terms that build on the terms used within the nuclear family:

• Grandparent
  
  • Grandfather: a parent's father
    
  • Grandmother: a parent's mother
    
• Grandson: a child's son
  
• Granddaughter: a child's daughter
  

For collateral relatives, more classificatory terms come into play, 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 son, brother's son
  
• Niece: sister's daughter, brother's daughter
  

When additional generations intervene (in other words, when one's collateral relatives belong to the same generation as one's grandparents or grandchildren), the prefix "grand" modifies these terms. (Although in casual usage in the USA a "grand aunt" is often referred to as a "great aunt", for instance.) And as with grandparents and grandchildren, as more generations intervene the prefix becomes "great grand", adding an additional "great" for each additional generation.

Most collateral relatives have never had membership of the nuclear family of the members of one's own nuclear family.

• Cousin: the most classificatory term; Hence the phrase "third cousin once removed upwards".
  

Distant cousins of an older generation (in other words, one's parents' first cousins), though technically first cousins once removed, often get 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", using the practice of fictive kinship.

English-speakers mark relationships by marriage (except for wife/husband) with the tag "-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. No special terms exist for the rest of one's spouse's family.

The terms "half-brother" and "half-sister" indicate siblings who one share only one biological or adoptive parent. in other words, the term belle-soeur could refer to 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. The words brother, sister, aunt, uncle have stronger fictive-kinship nuances in many African cultures than in European ones, as exemplified by the phrase "he is my brother: same mother, same father" for a biological brother.

See also

• Kinship terms
  
• Ancestor
  
• Child
  
  • Illegitimacy
    
• Clan
  
• Consanguinity
  
  • Kin selection
    
  • Pedigree collapse
    
• Domestic violence
  
• Family
  
  • Complex family
    
  • Dysfunctional family
    
  • Grandfamily
    
  • Family history
    
  • Family life in literature
    
  • Family as a model for the state
    
  • Family law
    
  • Family name
    
  • Family therapy
    
  • Parenting
    
  • Father
    
  • Motherhood
    
  • Grandparent
    
• Genealogy
  
  • Cousin chart
    
• Household
  
• Interpersonal relationship and Intimate relationship
  
  • Cohabitation
    
  • Common-law marriage
    
  • Divorce
    
  • Marriage
    
• Sociology of the family
  
• The Family: A Proclamation to the World
  
• Familycentrics
  

References

• American Kinship, David M.