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noun

1. A group of usually related people living together as a unit: house, household, ménage. See group.
2. A group of people sharing common ancestry: clan, house, kindred, lineage, stock, tribe. Idioms: flesh and blood, kith and kin. See kin.
3. One's relatives collectively: kin, kindred, kinfolk. See kin.
4. One's ancestors or their character or one's ancestral derivation: ancestry, birth, blood, bloodline, descent, extraction, genealogy, line, lineage, origin, parentage, pedigree, seed, stock. See kin, precede/follow.

adjective

Of or relating to the family or household: domestic, familial, home, homely, household. See kin, group.

Definition

A family is a group of two people or more related by marriage, blood relation, or adoption and who live together. The immediate family traditionally consists of parents and their offspring.

Description

No other factor influences children as deeply as their families. As a social unit with genetic, emotional, and legal dimensions, the family can foster the child's growth, development, health, and well-being. The family can provide the child with affection, a sense of belonging, and validation. Every area of a child's life is affected by the family.

Family Functions

The family has basic functions. In order for the family to meet a child's psychological needs, its members must be nurturing, convey mutual respect, provide for intimacy, and engage in bonding and attachment. The family also socializes the child, guiding the child to be members of the society beyond the family. The family conveys religious and cultural beliefs and traditions to the next generation. The family is the child's source of economic resources, which meet the child's various physical needs for food, shelter, and clothing. Then, too, the family sees to it that the child receives health and dental care.

Demographics

Family structure is dynamic. In 1970, traditional nuclear families made up 40 percent of all households, but only 26 percent of all households in 1991. In addition, roles have changed within the nuclear family. The role of provider, once assigned mainly to the father, gradually came in the early 2000s to be shared by both parents, and as of 2004 many fathers are more active in parenting their children than their fathers were in parenting them.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, increasing numbers of families did not fit the nuclear profile. Some families have only one parent; others are combinations based on second marriages; still others are comprised of unmarried couples living with or without children.

The number of single-parent families increased from 12.9 percent of all families in 1970 to 29 percent in 1991 and 28 percent (20 million) in 1997. The increases are mostly the result of the increase in the divorce rate and the increase in births to single mothers. Many women are single parents and heads of households, and many of these live in poverty.

Common Problems

Poverty is the single most powerful risk for families and children and affects families in many ways. Poverty exerts its greatest impact during children's preschool years, the age group in which children are most likely to live in poverty. Poor families are less likely or able to provide educational and cultural experiences for their children.

Parents' economic status (education, occupation, and income) controls the parent's ability provide adequate housing, a safe environment, and responsible child care while the parents work. Availability of and quality of social support influence family life and well-being as individuals cope with raising children in poverty.

Unemployment by either or both parents causes financial hardships and social and emotional strain, which can disrupt family life. The quality of the parent's work and the satisfaction the parent gets from it affects the parents and, in turn, their effectiveness in parenting.

Child abuse and neglect is a destructive force in families and results in children's anxiety, depression, lowered self-esteem, and a decline in school performance. Similarly, children who witness domestic violence suffer some of these same consequences.

Parental Concerns

Parents are troubled by children who are out of control and have problem behaviors such as running away, truancy, school failings or suspensions, and delinquency. Youths who are habitually truant may need school counseling. Truancy specialists provide topic-focused workshops and referrals to family counseling; court intervention is sometimes necessary.

The frequency of divorce and remarriage produces stepfamilies with their own difficulties and challenges. The new stepfamily members may have no shared family history or common lifestyle, and members may have different beliefs. In addition, children may feel torn between the custodial parent, with whom they live, and the noncustodial parent, with whom they visit.

Economic stress affects the whole family. When financial problems occur, the family may be forced to move for employment. Families have lifestyle commitments and ties to their community. When these ties break-up, children, especially adolescents, are likely to experience a loss of hope. Parental career disappointments can cause anxiety and self-doubt in children. Family economic stress may cause parental substance abuse, which can lead to school distraction and declining academic performance in young people.

Finally, children may feel isolated from parents and friends. The most stressful time for a family can be the period preceding a possible foreclosure or business failure. Parents may make desperate attempts to save their source of income. They may also be trying to keep their loss hidden from the rest of the community. Such behaviors can isolate children from parents who are too busy to notice and from neighbors who are not even aware of their trouble.

The long-term effects of continued family stress can cause physical and psychological problems for children. If problems occur often and if several problems appear at the same time, serious attention should be given the child.

When to Call the Doctor

Parents should call their pediatrician if the child shows unhealthy physical or emotional symptoms that may be in response to family problems or transitions. Physical problems may include weight gain or weight loss, or unexplained stomachaches or headaches. Emotional problems may cause a decline in academic performance, breaking curfews, or getting into trouble in school or with the law.

Resources

Books

Bernstein, Bob. Families of Value: Intimate Profiles of Pioneering Lesbian and Gay Parents. New York: Avalon Publishing Group, 2005.

Cunningham-Burley, Sarah, et al. Families, Relationships, and Boundaries. Livingston, NJ: Policy Press, 2005.

Evans, Tony. Divorce and Remarriage. Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 2003.

Everett, Craig A. The Consequences of Divorce: Economic and Custodial Impact on Children and Adults. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2003.

Forbes, L. S. A Natural History of Families. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Hansen, Karen V. Not-so-Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005.

Jeynes, William. Divorce, Family Structure, and the Academic Success of Children. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press, 2002.

McKenry, Patrick C., et al. Families and Change: Coping with Stressful Events and Transitions. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005.

Organizations

American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. 3615 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016–3007. Web site: www.aacap.org/.

[Article by: Aliene S. Linwood, RN, DPA, FACHE]

In the Bible, the division between men and women is sharply drawn. The men are dominant in the political realm, as leaders in the public domain, while the women dominate the domestic scene, the private domain. The matriarchs are not docile women subservient to their husbands' authority. They argue (Gen. 30:1), give orders (Gen. 16:2), and even deceive their husbands (Gen. 27:5-17), not for the purpose of domination but in order to play a central role in the formation of a nation. Biblical families fought and made up. Strong feelings were expressed, and hurtful as well as caring actions were taken. Their awareness of their historic destiny (Gen. 12:7, 26:2-4), and the values they espoused, sustained them and were transmitted to future generations.

The family in the Bible was called bét av, "house of a father" (Gen. 24:38, 46:31). In founding a family, one was "building a house" (Deut. 25:10). The bayit--- house---was a subdivision of the mishpaḥah---clan, large family (Josh. 7:14). The criteria for membership in a family were blood relationship, legal ties such as marriage, or geographic proximity. It was also the framework for the execution of justice, for example, in avenging the murder of a kinsman (see Blood Avenger).

Each family had its own religious traditions and its own burial ground (Gen. 23:1-20). If one of the family members became indigent and had to sell his land, the other members had the right and duty to redeem it (Lev. 25:25). In the Jubilee Year, land that had been sold reverted to the family. Levirate Marriage (Deut. 24:5-10) was another practice that reflected family interdependence---"To establish a name in Israel ... by building up his brother's house" (Deut. 25:7, 9).

The head of the biblical family was the patriarch who exercised authority over his wife and children. The wife enjoyed an elevated status in the family, but not as high as the husband's. He could force her to submit to a test of infidelity (Num. 5:11-31) and if found guilty, she was executed. Women could participate in religious festivals, were permitted to own property and trade in it even when married, and could inherit from their fathers when there were no sons (Num. 27:1-11). The wife went along with her husband into servitude if he could not repay his debts (Ex. 21:2, 3). Marriage could be dissolved by death or by the husband's giving his wife a bill of Divorce (Deut. 24:1-4). The reason for divorce coulsd be childlessness or finding "something obnoxious about her" (Deut. 24:2; Git 90a).

The functions of a father and mother can be deduced from various passages scattered throughout the Bible. As the head of the family, the father's authority over his children was almost absolute. Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac (Gen. 22); Jephthah sacrificed his daughter (Judg. 11:39); Judah ordered his daughter-in-law Tamar burned for breaking the marriage vow (Gen. 38:24). Children were regarded as the father's property and could be seized for debt (II Kings 4:1). The father could sell his daughter into marriage (Ex. 21:7-11) but not into prostitution (Lev. 19:29). He could annul her vows (Num. 30:4-6). His rights over her extended only until she attained the age of 12 1/2, the age of puberty. Children who struck or cursed their parents could be put to death (Ex. 21:15, 17). The rebellious son was to be stoned to death (Deut. 21:18-21). Though the Talmud says that this never occurred, it still served as a deterrent.

The mother occupied a place of honor in the family despite her subordination to the father. She loved her children (Gen. 25:28) and was more directly involved in their early training (Prov. 1:8). Motherhood was a blessing and barrenness a misfortune (Gen. 30:23; I Sam. 1). Children were a blessing from God (Gen. 22:17) and assured the continuity of the family name. If a woman was childless, she could employ another woman in order to have children vicariously (Gen. 16:1,2, 30:3).

The pattern of Jewish family life established in the Talmud was the model and practice until modern times. The age of marriage was set at 18 (Avot 5:24), though some sages encouraged marriage earlier (Kid. 29b). Celibacy was discouraged and rare. Marriages were usually arranged by the parents of both families. The Betrothal (erusin) was considered a formal marriage that could only be dissolved through divorce or death, with Adultery punishable by death. The marriage ceremony (nissu'in) was usually held a year after betrothal for maidens and 30 days after for widows. The period of a year allowed for wedding and domestic preparations to proceed. While polygamy was technically permitted by the Bible, monogamy was formally decreed by R. Gershon Me'or Ha-Golah for Ashkenazi Jews in the year 1000. Sexual life was regulated and great importance was attached to ritual aspects, known as Family Purity (tohorat ha-mishpaḥah).

Divorce was permitted in the Bible (Deut. 24:1-4) but was frowned upon by the sages (Git. 90b). However, they laid down grounds for divorce by the husband and the wife. They required the husband to give the get (bill of divorce) to the wife, but the wife could not divorce her husband. Divorce tended to be rare in Jewish communities and was considered a stigma.

Children were expected to "honor" (Ex. 20:12) and "revere" (Lev. 19:3) their parents, i.e., to obey them. "Honor," according to the Talmud, referred to providing food and drink, clothing, and transportation. "Reverence" required that the child not sit in his parents' seat, nor interrupt them, nor take the side of one or the other in a dispute. Honor implied providing services and reverence implied preserving dignity. The former obtains particularly when the parents become old and require help because of their relative incapacity. Addressed primarily to adult children, though younger children were not exempt, this commandment promises long life to those who minister to their elderly parents. Reverence, however, pertains to children of all ages. Throughout history and up to modern times, children refrained from sitting in their fathers' chairs. The Talmud exalted the honor that children bestow on their parents. "There are three partners in man, the Holy One, blessed be He, the father, and the mother. When a man honors his father and his mother, the Holy One, blessed be He, says, 'I ascribe (merit) to them as though I had dwelt among them and they had honored Me'" (Kid. 30b).

The father is duty bound to circumcise his son, redeem him if he is the firstborn, teach him Torah, marry him off, and teach him a craft. The duties of Circumcision and REDEMPTION OF THE FIRSTBORN require the father to introduce the son to the covenant entered into between Abraham and God and to the Jews' historical memory that began with the Exodus from Egypt. The father is required to serve as a teacher and role model for the transmission of Jewish values and moral behavior to his children.

Parents were expected to help their children become economically self-sufficient by teaching them a trade. Daughters were taught about Judaism and the domestic responsibilities of a Jewish woman at home by their mothers.

Historically, children were viewed as extensions of their parents. Children's joy and pain as well as successes and failures were felt by parents. Children felt the pressure of their parent's expectations; a son was expected to grow up into a scholar.

Domestic harmony was an ideal toward which Jewish families strove. The guidelines were made very explicit. "A man should spend less than his means on food, up to his means on clothes, beyond his means in honoring his wife and children because they are dependent on him" (Ḥul. 84b). Harmony was not only achieved through the give and take of interpersonal relations but also through the experience of ritual and holy events. The rituals of the Jewish year and life-cycle served to unify the family and elevate the mundane to the level of the holy.

The portrait of the traditional Jewish family becomes less idyllic in modern times. Trends in the larger society that have brought changes and breakdown in the family structure in Western society have had a serious impact on the Jewish family. Low fertility, high incidence of divorce, mixed marriage, bachelorhood by choice, homosexuality, alchoholism and drugs, child and wife abuse, homelessness, women in the work force--- these social and demographic trends have put a strain on marriage and family life and have altered the family structure. There is an increasing number of single-parent families headed by women struggling to become economically self-sufficient, children who have been adversely affected by divorce, combined families requiring new modes of relationships among stepchildren and stepparents, nuclear families separated geographically from extended families, religiously mixed families where the children are often not raised as Jews. However, there are counterforces in operation, with the organized Jewish community mobilizing itself to combat the disintegration of the family via educational programs and social services. In non-Orthodox circles, synagogue services have become more family centered, with seating in family pews. Family life has remained especially strong among Jews from Moslem lands. The older generations are accorded great respect and many occasions bring together both immediate and extended families. When members are sick and disabled or stricken by other misfortunes, the family shares responsibility. The Jewish home remains the most vital factor contributing to Jewish survival and the preservation of a Jewish consciousness and Jewish way of life. See also FATHER; HOME; HUSBAND AND WIFE; MOTHER; PARENT AND CHILD.

In urban planning, one or more persons occupying a single living unit.

Myths, misconceptions, and misleading generalizations distort Americans' understanding of the history of the family. Many Americans mistakenly believe that earlier families were more stable and more uniform than modern ones and that divorce, domestic violence, and single parenthood are modern developments. In fact, American family life always has been diverse and vulnerable to disruption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the United States had the highest divorce rate in the Western world; one child in ten lived in a single-parent home; and approximately 100,000 children lived in orphanages, in many cases because their mothers and fathers could not support them.

Among the most potent myths is the notion that the traditional family in American history consisted of a breadwinner husband and a fulltime mother. In fact, it was not until the 1920s that a majority of American families consisted of a breadwinner husband, a homemaker wife, and two or more children attending school.

Despite the romanticized images of family life of the past, family well-being has experienced several advances. These include the decline in the frequency with which families are broken by a member's premature death and the fact that smaller families allow parents to devote more attention and resources to each child. A lack of historical perspective nevertheless has interfered with the acceptance of families that diverge from the dominant norms.

Families in Colonial America

Since the early eighteenth century, families have undergone far-reaching changes in their roles and functions, sizes and compositions, and emotional and power dynamics. Whereas twentieth-century families primarily functioned to raise children and to provide emotional support for their members, colonial families were first and foremost productive units. Colonial families performed a wide range of functions that schools, hospitals, insurance companies, and factories subsequently assumed. Colonial families educated children in basic literacy and the rudiments of religion, transmitted occupational skills, and cared for the elderly and the infirm.

The composition of colonial families was elastic and porous, reflecting both a high mortality rate and households' expanding or contracting labor needs. Even in the most healthful regions, during the seventeenth century three children in ten died before reaching adulthood, and most children had lost at least one parent by the time they married. Consequently, a majority of colonial Americans spent some time in a stepfamily. Most children left their parental homes before puberty to work as servants or as apprentices in other households.

Colonial society attached little value to domestic privacy. Community authorities and neighbors supervised and intervened in family life. In New England selectmen oversaw ten or twelve families, removed children from "unfit" parents, and ensured that fathers exercised proper family government.

In theory, the seventeenth-century family was a hierarchical unit, in which the father held patriarchal authority. He alone sat in an armchair, his symbolic throne, while other household members sat on benches or stools. He taught children to write, led household prayers, and carried on correspondence with other family members. Domestic conduct manuals were addressed to him, not to his wife. Legally he was the primary parent. He received custody of children after divorce or separation, and in colonial New England he was authorized to correct and punish insubordinate wives, disruptive children, and unruly servants. He also was responsible for placing his children in a calling and for consenting to his children's marriages. His control over inheritance kept grown sons dependent upon him for years, while they waited for the landed property needed to establish an independent household.

In practice, gender boundaries were not as rigid as this patriarchal ideology suggests. Colonial women shouldered many duties later monopolized by men. The colonial goodwife engaged in trade and home manufacturing, supervised planting, and sometimes administered estates. Women's productive responsibilities limited the amount of time they devoted to child care, and many child-rearing tasks were delegated to servants or older daughters. Ironically, the decline of patriarchal ideology accompanied the emergence of a much more rigid gender division of labor within the home.

Themes and Variations

Profound differences existed among the family patterns in New England, the middle colonies, and the Chesapeake and southernmost colonies. In New England the patriarchal conception of family life began to break down as early as the 1670s. In the Chesapeake area and the Carolinas a more stable patriarchal structure of relationships did not emerge until the mid-eighteenth century.

Demography partly explains these regional differences. After an initial period of high mortality, life expectancy in New England rose to levels comparable to those of the twentieth century. A healthful environment contributed to a high birthrate (more than half of New England children had nine or more siblings) and the first society in history in which grandparents were common. In the Chesapeake region, in contrast, a high death rate and an unbalanced sex ratio made it impossible to establish the kind of stable, patriarchal families found in New England. In seventeenth-century Virginia, half of all marriages were broken within eight years, and most families consisted of an assortment of stepparents, stepchildren, wards, half brothers, and half sisters. Not until the late eighteenth century could a father expect to pass property directly to his sons.

Religious differences also contributed to divergent family patterns. Not nearly as anxious about infant depravity as Puritan families, Quaker families in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey placed a greater stress on maternal nurture than did their Puritan counterparts. Quakers also emphasized early autonomy for children. They provided daughters with an early dowry and sons with sufficient land to establish a basis for early independence.

The Emergence of the "republican" Family

During the eighteenth century, New England fathers exerted less influence than previously over their children's choices of occupations or marriage partners and over their sexual behavior. By mid-century, sons were moving further away from the parental home, fewer daughters were marrying in birth order, and rates of illegitimacy and pregnancy prior to marriage were rising markedly.

One force for change was ideological. The eighteenth century saw repeated attacks upon patriarchal authority by such popular writers as Samuel Richardson, Oliver Goldsmith, and Henry Fielding, who rejected the idea that a father should dictate a child's career or choice of a marriage partner. Popular literature also asserted that love and affection were superior to physical force in rearing children and that women were more effective than men in inducing children's obedience. Economic shifts further eroded paternal authority. Rapid population growth, which divided inherited family land into plots too small to be farmed viably, weakened paternal control over inheritance. New opportunities for nonagricultural work allowed many children to marry earlier than in the past.

By the early nineteenth century a new kind of urban middle-class family emerged as the workplace moved some distance from the household and as unmarried women working in factories assumed many of the productive tasks of married women. A new pattern of marriage based primarily on companionship and affection arose, as did a new division of domestic roles, which assigned the wife to care full time for her children and to maintain her home. At the same time a new conception of childhood emerged that viewed children as special creatures who needed attention, love, and time to mature. Spouses began to display affection more openly, and parents began to keep their children home longer than in the past. By the mid-nineteenth century a new emphasis on family privacy expelled apprentices from the middle-class home, increased the separation of servants from the family, and spawned family vacations and family-oriented celebrations, such as birthday parties and decorating the Christmas tree.

The new urban middle-class family was based on the strict segregation of sexual spheres, intense mother-child bonds, and the idea that children needed to be protected from the corruptions of the outside world. Even at its inception, however, this new family form was beset by latent tensions. Although a father might think of himself as breadwinner and household head and might consider his wife and children his dependents, in fact his connection to his family was becoming essentially economic. He might serve as disciplinarian of last resort, but his wife was now the primary parent. The courts recognized this fact by developing the "tender years" doctrine that young children should stay with their mothers following a divorce or separation.

Another source of tension in the middle-class family involved the expectation that women should sacrifice their individuality for their husband and children's sakes. During their youth, women received an unprecedented degree of freedom. Increasing numbers attended school and worked, at least temporarily, outside a family unit. After marriage they were to subordinate their needs to those of other family members. This abrupt transition led many women to experience a "marriage trauma" as they decided whether or not to marry. Women's subordinate status was partially cloaked by an ideology of separate spheres, which stressed that women were purer than men and were supreme in matters of the home and religion, but the contradiction with the ideal of equality remained.

Meanwhile, children remained home far longer than in the past, often into their late teens and their twenties. The emerging ideal was a protected childhood, in which children were shielded from knowledge of death, sex, and violence. While in theory families were training children for independence, in reality children received fewer opportunities than in the past to demonstrate their growing maturity. The result was that the transition from childhood and youth to adulthood became increasingly disjunctive and conflict riven.

These contradictions contributed to three striking developments: a sharp fall in the birthrate, a marked rise in the divorce rate, and a heightened cultural awareness of domestic violence. Nineteenth-century women rapidly reduced the birthrate. Instead of giving birth to seven to ten children, middle-class mothers by the century's end gave birth on average to only three. The decline in the birthrate did not depend on new technologies; rather, it involved the concerted use of such older methods as withdrawal and periodic abstinence, supplemented by abortions induced chemically or by trauma to the uterus. No longer were women regarded simply as childbearing chattel or were children regarded as economic assets. The new view was that children required greater parental investments in the form of education and maternal attention.

During the nineteenth century the divorce rate steadily rose, as judicial divorce replaced legislative divorce and many states allowed judges to grant divorce on any grounds they deemed fit. According to a new cultural ideal, marriage rested on mutual affection, and divorce was a safety valve for loveless and abusive marriages. In 1867 the country had 10,000 divorces, and the rate doubled between 1870 and 1900. From 3.1 divorces for every 100 marriages in 1870, the figure climbed to 7.9 in 1900.

The sensitivity toward wife beating and child abuse also grew during the nineteenth century. This sensitivity partly reflected new notions about women's purity and childhood innocence, and it also may have reflected an actual increase in assaults committed against blood relatives. Families became less subject to communal over-sight; traditional assumptions about patriarchal authority were challenged; and an increasingly mobile, market oriented society generated new kinds of stresses. All of these factors turned some families into arenas of tension, conflict, and violence.

Slave Families

No other group faced graver threats to family life than enslaved African Americans. Debt, an owner's death, or the prospects of profit could break up slave families. Between 1790 and 1860 a million slaves were transported from the Upper South to the Lower South, and another 2 million slaves were sold within states. About a third of slave marriages were broken by sale, and half of all slave children were sold away from their parents. Even in the absence of sale, spouses often resided on separate plantations or on separate units of a single plantation. On larger plantations, one husband in three had a different owner than his wife; on smaller plantations and farms the figure was two in three.

Despite the refusal of southern law to legally sanction slave marriages, most slaves married and lived with the same spouse until their deaths. Ties to the immediate family stretched outward to an involved network of extended kin. Whenever children were sold to neighboring plantations, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins took on the functions of parents. When blood relatives were not present, "fictive" kin cared for and protected children. God parenting, ritual co parenting, and informal adoption of orphans were common on slave plantations. To sustain a sense of family identity over time, slaves named children after grandparents and other kin. Slaves also passed down family names, usually the name of an ancestor's owner rather than the current owner's name.

Working-Class and Immigrant Families

While urban middle-class families emphasized a sole male breadwinner, a rigid division of gender roles, and a protected childhood, working-class and immigrant families, who made up a majority of urban families, stressed a cooperative family economy. All family members were expected to contribute to the family's well-being. Many wives performed work, such as taking in laundry or boarders, inside the home. Children were expected to defer marriage, remain at home, and contribute to the family's income.

Two distinctive types of immigrants arrived in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: migrant workers, many of whom left wives and children in their home countries and who planned to return home; and immigrants who arrived in family units, often members of ethnic and religious minorities who were persecuted in their homelands. In each case, immigrants often moved for family reasons—to earn enough money to marry, acquire a home, purchase a farm, or find their family a new home offering freedom from persecution. Kinship also played an important role in helping immigrants adapt to a new environment. Much of the movement of peoples involved a process called "chain migration," in which clusters of individuals from a common kin group or place of origin moved to a common destination. The earlier migrants provided later migrants with aid and information.

It was not until the 1920s that the cooperative family economy gave way to the family wage economy, in which a male breadwinner was expected to support his family on his wages alone. The establishment of seniority systems and compulsory school attendance laws and increased real wages as a result of World War I made this possible. The New Deal further solidified the male breadwinner family by prohibiting child labor, expanding workmen's compensation, and targeting jobs programs at male workers.

Early-Twentieth-Century Families

During the late nineteenth century a moral panic gripped the country over domestic violence, divorce, infant mortality, and declining middle-class birthrates. Eleven states made desertion and nonsupport of families a felony, and three states instituted the whipping post to punish wife beaters with floggings. To combat the decline in middle-class birthrates, the 1873 Comstock Act restricted the interstate distribution of birth control information and contraceptive devices, while new state laws criminalized abortion. In a failed attempt to reduce the divorce rate, many states restricted the grounds for divorce and extended waiting periods before a divorce.

Mounting public anxiety led to increased government involvement in the family and the emergence of specialists offering expert advice about child rearing, pediatrics, and social policy. To combat exploitation and to improve the well-being of children, reformers pressed for compulsory school attendance laws, child labor restrictions, playgrounds, pure milk laws, and "widows" pensions to permit poor children to remain with their mothers. They also made concerted efforts to eliminate male-only forms of recreation, campaigns that achieved some success when red-light districts were outlawed during the 1910s and saloons became illegal following ratification of the Prohibition Amendment in 1918.

During the 1920s, in an effort to strengthen family ties, marriage counselors promoted a new ideal, the companionate family, which held that husbands and wives were to be "friends and lovers" and that parents and children should be "pals." This new ideal stressed the couple relationship and family togetherness as the primary sources of emotional satisfaction and personal happiness. Unlike the nineteenth-century family, which took in boarders, lodgers, or aging and unmarried relatives, the companionate family was envisioned as a more isolated unit.

During the Great Depression, unemployment, lower wages, and the demands of needy relatives tore at the fabric of family life. Many Americans shared living quarters with relatives, delayed marriage, and postponed having children. The divorce rate fell since fewer people could afford one, but desertions soared. By 1940, 1.5 million married couples were living apart. Many families coped by returning to a cooperative family economy. Many children took part-time jobs, and many wives supplemented the family income by taking in sewing or laundry, setting up parlor groceries, or housing lodgers.

World War II also subjected families to severe strain. During the war, families faced a severe shortage of housing, schools, and child-care facilities and prolonged separation from loved ones. Five million "war widows" ran their homes and cared for children alone, while millions of older, married women went to work in war industries. Wartime stresses contributed to an upsurge in the divorce rate. Tens of thousands of young people became latchkey children, and rates of juvenile delinquency, unwed pregnancy, and truancy all rose.

The postwar era witnessed a sharp reaction to the depression and wartime stress. The average age of marriage for women dropped to twenty, divorce rates stabilized, and the birthrate doubled. Circumstances unlikely to be duplicated, including rapidly rising real incomes; the GI Bill, which allowed many young men to purchase single-family track homes in newly built suburbs; and relatively modest expectations for personal fulfillment bred by the Great Depression contributed to the emphasis on family togetherness.

For many Americans the 1950s family represented a cultural ideal. Yet it is important to recognize that the images of family life that appeared on 1950s television were misleading. Only 60 percent of children born during that decade spent their childhoods in a male-breadwinner, female-homemaker household. The most rapid increase in unwed pregnancies took place between 1940 and 1958, not in the libertine 1960s.

The postwar family contained the seeds of its own transformation. Youthful marriages, especially by women who cut short their educations, contributed to a surge in divorces during the 1960s. The compression of childbearing into the first years of marriage meant that many wives were free of the most intense child-rearing responsibilities by their early or middle thirties. Combined with the rising costs of maintaining a middle-class standard of living, this freedom encouraged many married women to enter the workplace. As early as 1960, one-third of married middle-class women worked part or full time. Mean-while, the expansion of schooling combined with growing affluence contributed to the emergence of a youth culture separate and apart from the family.

Late-Twentieth-Century Families

In 1960, 70 percent of American households consisted of a go-to-work dad, a stay-at-home mom, and two or more kids. By the end of the twentieth century less than 10 percent of American households fit that profile. Dual-earner families, in which both husband and wife worked; single-parent families, usually headed by a mother; reconstituted families formed after divorce; and empty nests after children left home became more common. Between 1960 and 1980 the birthrate fell by half; the divorce rate and the proportion of working mothers doubled, as did the number of single-parent homes; and the number of couples cohabitating outside of wedlock quadrupled.

By the end of the century two-thirds of all married women with children worked outside the home, compared to just 16 percent in 1950. Half of all marriages ended in divorce, twice the rate in 1966 and three times the rate in 1950, while three children in ten were born out of wedlock. Over a quarter of all children lived with only one parent, and fewer than half lived with both their biological mothers and fathers.

This "domestic revolution" produced alarm, anxiety, and apprehension. It inspired family values crusaders to condemn careerist mothers, absent fathers, single parents, and unwed parents as the root cause of such social ills as persistent poverty, drug abuse, academic failure, and juvenile crime. Many social conservatives called for enactment of "covenant" marriage laws making it more difficult to obtain divorces.

Historical perspective shows that many fears about the family's future were exaggerated. Despite upheavals in living arrangements, 90 percent of Americans married and had children, and most Americans who divorced eventually married again. In many respects family life became stronger than it was in the past. Fathers became more actively involved in child rearing than ever before; infant and child death rates fell by three-fourths in the last half of the century; and children were more likely to have living grandparents.

Nevertheless, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the family confronted unique stresses. As the proportion of single-parent and dual-earner families increased, working parents found it increasingly difficult to balance the demands of work and family. Because of increasing life spans, many parents cared for their own aging parents as well as for their children. In an attempt to deal with this "crisis of care giving," the U.S. Congress adopted the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, entitling eligible employees to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave in a twelve-month period for specified family and medical reasons. Despite widespread rhetoric about promoting family values, the welfare and immigration reforms of 1996 weakened social supports for families.

Bibliography

Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

———. The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Coontz, Stephanie, Maya Parson, and Gabrielle Raley, eds. American Families: A Multicultural Reader. New York: Rout-ledge, 1998.

Degler, Carl N. At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Demos, John. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

———. Past, Present, and Personal: The Family and the Life Course in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Gordon, Linda. Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence. New York: Penguin, 1989.

Greven, Philip J., Jr. Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970.

Grossberg, Michael. Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985.

Hareven, Tamara K. Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Hawes, Joseph M., and Elizabeth I. Nybakken, eds. American Families: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Mintz, Steven, and Susan Kellogg. Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press, 1988.

Ryan, Mary P. Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Schwartz, Marie Jenkins. Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Stevenson, Brenda E. Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

—Steven Mintz

Family is usually defined as a group of persons related by marriage or blood ties, or even by adoption—and also by the family bond.

Psychoanalysis contains an implicit concept of family. It emphasizes the functions of each family member and the prescriptions and prohibitions governing the relationships between them, which influence conflicts, fantasies, and the psychic agencies. The family is a unit that consists of something more than a series of individuals; it is a group to which they belong and that provides support with its rules, which are as obscure and powerful as those of the unconscious and that thus ensure the family's coherence and cohesion. The family has many purposes: providing for its members' material and psychic needs and conceiving and developing the child until his accession as a subject. Each parent transmits a legacy that the child will have to negotiate in connection with its wishes. The family also has a function in terms of play, creating the space and time for leisure and reverie.

Before Freud, doctors took little interest in the family. The patient was studied in the present, without reference to childhood history, to the context in which he had developed, or to his father or mother, except to identify any hereditary predispositions that would reinforce the prevailing hypothesis concerning degeneration in mental patients. Freud raised the family to a preeminent position. However, after he quickly abandoned the seduction theory, the family headed by a seducer changed its status from a real entity to a theoretical fantasy. Freud still addressed the family as a real entity in the form of the primal horde (1912-1913a), with the authoritarian father put to death by his sons who were excluded from sharing the women. Freud subsequently returned to this hypothesis as to the origin of culture. For example, his group psychology (1921c) helped to explain family psychology. It may even be that he envisaged the functioning of the group and the crowd as an archaic family dominated by a leader (father) at whom his subjects direct their (ego) ideal cathexes. This model bears a curious resemblance to the family of ancient Rome, in which the father was the uncontested leader around whom the life of the household revolved. There are some revealing exceptions to this lack of interest in the real family, for instance, the account that the child's father gives to Freud in the analysis of "Little Hans" (1909b). It was not unusual at the time for a single analyst to treat different members of the same family.

As the real family receded from the picture, the representations of the parents gained ground, particularly through the increased interest in object relations. The shifting importance of the family relates to developments in the theory of trauma. However, the real problem is discovering not whether the original theory of trauma was definitively abandoned by Freud but whether it was given anything other than a factual status. It would then not simply be the presence of the object or the primary maternal care that contributed to introjections but the parent's subjectivity, desires, fantasies, and affects—in other words, the force of his unconscious desire, which orients the child's ideals by proposing an ideal that reinforces his self-esteem when he experiences it as an important part of himself and which awakens the life of the drives by seducing him.

The analytic theory of the family is based on this model. It addresses the way in which the reciprocal cathexes between its members are managed and mobilized. Donald Winnicott explained this unconscious functioning as a productive network of interrelated fantasies giving rise to a generative illusion on the part of the mother and her child, whose attuned psyches are connected by primary narcissistic identifications. This generates the concept of the bond: An object relationship would be inconceivable without its counterpart, in other words, without the cathexis that the external object creates of the former and applies to him (Eiguer, 1987).

Furthermore, the concept of the bond is complicated by the dual nature of filiation. The family romance (Freud, 1909c [1908]) is a fantasy in which the child gives himself another origin by imagining himself to be adopted or illegitimate. While assuaging his oedipal anxieties, he seeks, by inventing better or prestigious parents for himself, to preserve the previous idealization of his own parents. However, in giving himself other parents (or one other) than his own, he acknowledges an essential dimension of filiation: The parental roles are not equivalent to the procreative functions—they can even be independent of these. In matrilineal cultures in particular, the father's role of strict educator reverts to an uncle who is related to the mother. Although Freud's discovery relates to a set of fantasies, this nevertheless accords with the idea of an underlying imago-based structure. The transgenerational figure of the ancestor ultimately evokes this spiritual fatherhood in the other of the father, the fourth family member.

Bibliography

Eiguer, Alberto. (1987). La Parenté fantasmatique. Paris: Dunod.

Freud, Sigmund. (1909b). Analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy. SE, 10: 1-149.

——. (1909c [1908]) Family romances. SE, 9: 235-241.

——. (1912-1913a). Totem and taboo. SE, 13: 1-161.

——. (1921c). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. SE, 18: 65-143.

Laforgue, René. (1936). La névrose familiale (IXe Conférence des psychanalystes de langue française). Revue française c de psychanalyse, 9 (4), 327-359.

Winnicott, Donald W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

—ALBERTO EIGUER

There is no natural form of family, just as there has never been historical agreement about the meaning of the word itself. Throughout most of the early modern period "family" usually referred to all the members of one's household, including nonrelatives, such as servants and lodgers. At the same time some authors of the time clearly conceived of "family" in the sense of an extended kinship network. By the beginning of the nineteenth century both of these meanings had been largely supplanted by the modern sense of a cohabiting nuclear group of parents and children, although neither of the older meanings died out completely. Just as importantly there was no common family and household living arrangement during the early modern era and accordingly no clear transition from "traditional" to "modern" families but rather a plurality of household forms that continued to occur well into the nineteenth century.

Kinship and the Household Before the Early Modern Era

The early modern household represented the basic unit of residence, production, and reproduction in the city and country alike. Its common interchangeability with "family" throughout the period had deep and ancient roots. Almost all modern European languages trace their words for "family" back to the Latin famulus, 'slave', thus signifying the dependence of relatives and servants on the paterfamilias or head of the household. Government officials from antiquity through the early modern period shared this patriarchal view of all authority and accordingly considered the hearth, or household, the key unit in census and tax calculations. Thus for practical as well as ideological reasons, the premodern household was the family.

This residential sense of family, however, coexisted with a broader definition as an extended group of kin or all of the people related by blood. Ancient Greeks and Romans tended to stress the unilineal agnatic kinship group (Latin gens, plural gentes), tracing blood relations only through the father's ancestry, but still recognized the importance of relations through the mother's side (known as cognates). Latin, for instance, had one word for a paternal uncle (patruus) and another for a maternal uncle (avunculus). During the early and High Middle Ages the Germanic understanding of kinship as bilateral, involving blood relations from both parents' families, dominated. The marriage of two individuals from different clans (German Sippe; French race; Spanish raza; Italian razione) thus had repercussions far beyond the couple itself. Now each had new parents, siblings, and cousins who were to be treated as blood relations, even after the death of one of the spouses, at least according to canon or church law. Until at least the twelfth century this type of broadly defined family by extended kinship constituted the strongest social, economic, and political bond throughout Europe.

About this time many aristocrats, knights, and wealthy merchants returned to the ancient practice of a patrilineal definition of kinship, inventing permanent family surnames and coats of arms that were passed down from fathers to sons. By the end of the Middle Ages the patrilineal movement had spread throughout Europe. Admittedly some members of the lower orders did not adopt the practice of a first and a last name until governments compelled them to do so at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but these were rare exceptions to the rule. In most cases the family surname was inherited from the father though some islands of bilateral lineage survived, such as Castile, where men often took their aristocratic wives' surnames. Sometimes, as in parts of France, a surname went with an estate and thus could potentially come from a nonrelative.

The success of the patrilineal form of genealogy, however, did not eliminate the importance of all maternal as well as paternal relatives in matters of inheritance, guardianship, and of course affection. Canon law also made no distinctions between the two branches of family in its restriction of marriage to those individuals outside the fourth degree of kinship. Thus family in both its broadest definition of kinship and the narrower sense of household survived into the early modern era.

The Household Viewed from the Outside: Formation and Composition

The great diversity of marriage and inheritance practices in early modern Europe make generalizations about the formation and composition of the household extremely difficult if not impossible. There are, however, some notable characteristics, a few of them quite distinctive in history. In 1965 the historical demographer John Hajnal famously identified what he called "the European marriage pattern" of the early modern era. This apparently unique phenomenon, which he later revised to "the northwestern European pattern," originally described marriage practices in all the lands west of an imaginary line drawn between Saint Petersburg and Trieste. The two most striking aspects of this model were relatively late marriage (late twenties for men, early to midtwenties for women) and a high percentage (10 to 25 percent) of never married or widowed individuals. Hajnal theorized that various economic factors—such as extended journeyman status in a craft and a population surplus of marriageable girls and women—as well as religious factors (notably the Catholic celibate ideal) contributed to this pattern, which showed no signs of change before the nineteenth century.

The implications for household formation were significant. First, there was the size of the household itself. Late marriage tended to reduce the number of pregnancies and live births, the latter to about five to seven per woman by the age of forty. Given the high infant and child mortality rates, this meant a nuclear family under five per household most of the time—considerably smaller than was commonly assumed. At the same time the common practice of sending boys and girls by age twelve to apprentice-ships or domestic service meant that many youths would be considered part of a household other than their parents' for at least five and as much as fifteen years, depending on their securing permanent employment, property, or in the case of young women, a suitable dowry. Finally, the large number of single young people and widowed old people resulted in an unusually high proportion (by premodern standards) of lodgers or single households, especially in cities.

During the last forty years of the twentieth century, Hajnal's thesis underwent testing and considerable refinement. Reconstituting families by examining marriage contracts, wills, baptismal registers, tax records, and other legal documents, many historians have confirmed the frequency of late marriage and single households during the era, but they have also made clear that there was no one marriage pattern or household type among the diverse peoples of early modern Europe, east or west. Rather, certain ideal models tend to appear more in certain places and times, but even so there is a risk of distorting the variability of these household forms and their larger social implications in practice.

It is widely accepted that the most common type of household was the nuclear family, with evidence pointing well back to the Middle Ages, at least in England. Composed only of a married couple with or without children and possibly a servant, the nuclear family appears everywhere and at all times during the early modern era. If a son remained at home with his parents into adulthood and postponed setting up his own household, the nuclear unit became what is known as a stem family, also an apparently frequent model throughout Europe. When three generations of a family lived together or when any relatives other than the nuclear unit cohabited, the household became an extended family. This type of household, typically including one elderly grandparent, was most common in southern France and parts of German-speaking Europe, especially in the countryside. Households without a conjugal unit at the center, known as nonfamily households, were more common in cities. Households composed of several conjugal units—known to demographers as joint, multiple, or complex households and to early modern contemporaries as fraternas (Italian) or frérèches (French)—were most common in southern and eastern Europe. Again though, these geographical generalizations are merely crude approximations that are particularly difficult to support in the so-called transition zones of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, western Poland, and Estonia.

The erroneous presumption that most early modern families were large appears to have originated in the nineteenth century primarily as a reaction against the perceived dangers to the family (by then meaning the nuclear family) from industrialization and other modern developments. Numerous subsequent studies have instead confirmed Hajnal's conjecture that large or multiple households predominated only in eastern Europe, while small households remained the norm in the west. In Russia, for instance, three-quarters of all serf households through the eighteenth century were multiple, while in Scandinavia, England, and northern Germany the majority of households were nuclear, with only 2 percent of English households containing more than twelve people. In fact except for serfs or sharecroppers, whose landlords structurally encouraged large households, the poorer the family, the smaller the household.

The painstaking work of David Herlihy and Christine Klapisch-Zuber on a fifteenth-century Florentine tax census found that only one out of ten households had more than ten people and that most averaged four to five persons. Significantly those few large households in Florence, England, and elsewhere tended to be proportionate to personal wealth. Royal courts, for example, could encompass hundreds of retainers, and even the household of a seventeenth-century English lord might contain forty or more people (and many aristocrats maintained more than one residence). An ordinary English gentleman, by comparison, might have eight people in his "family," while the average household in the kingdom contained four to five individuals. Even among those households with more than three children, the relatively long span between births in many families combined with the early age of leaving for work often meant than no more than three children might be resident at a given time.

In addition to the various types of blood relatives included in different household models, three types of nonkin might also be in residence and therefore considered members of the family. The most common were domestic servants. In cities these tended to be girls from the country, sometimes relatives but usually strangers contracted for three or more years. The objective for the girls, typically starting work at age twelve or thirteen, was to earn enough money for a decent dowry with which they hoped to secure a good marriage. Salaries were one-half to one-third of what the maids could make in the fields, so there was great mobility during harvest time despite the obligations of their contracts and laws threatening punishment. The one exception to the preference for female domestics was the wealthy household, where many male retainers reflected on the social status and virility of the paterfamilias. Domestic servitude as a life phase was extremely common in early modern Europe, so at least one-third of households at any given time included servants. This also held for apprentices, under contract for up to seven years in the hope of learning a craft. In practice apprentices, who were usually teenage boys, ended up doing many odd jobs and other work not related to a craft and were in that sense on the same level as servants.

The third type of nonrelative who might be considered part of the household was lodgers. These individuals tended to be single young men, often journeymen, who stayed for as little as a few weeks or as long as several years. Unable to set up their own households yet, they were forced to rent and often travel, staying mostly in cities and providing a welcome source of income for many families. Often they worked on the family farm or in some kind of cottage industry.

The Household Viewed from the Inside: Affections and Material Interests

Another modern myth about the premodern family has its origins in the work of the sociologist Philippe Ariès more than forty years ago. Though later scholars have somewhat caricaturized his argument, their criticism has nonetheless thoroughly demolished Ariès's most controversial assertion regarding the family, namely that the sentimental affections seen as normal between parents and their children were alien to Europeans before the eighteenth century. During the 1970s some historians, such as Lawrence Stone and Jean-Louis Flandrin, attempted to modify the thesis with their own theories of an early modern transition, but by the late 1980s the scholarly consensus had clearly swung in favor of greater continuity on the question of familial and parental love and affection. Obviously such matters are highly subjective and thus impervious to quantification. The sources available for an overwhelmingly illiterate society are extremely limited as well. Still one need go no further than the sensationalist press's accounts of infanticide and parricide or the plays of Shakespeare, Molière, or Richard Sheridan to grasp the extreme sensitivity of early modern Europeans to the unnatural treatment of blood relations, particularly acts of betrayal and murder among parents, children, siblings, and other close relatives. There was clearly something special about the relationship between parents and children that went beyond mutual duties and obligations, something that occasionally led to great extremes of passions and above all something that deeply affected one's own sense of identity.

This does not mean that early modern families were immune to material interests or the tensions that property often caused. The common source of such conflicts was of course the question of inheritance, and here early modern Europe possessed as bewildering a set of local variations as can be imagined. Some historians have attempted to tie type of inheritance practice to household type, yet while there is some rough correlation between impartibility and multiple households or between partibility and nuclear households, there are far too many regional exceptions to support any such generalization. Broadly speaking the two most basic distinctions were those between partible and impartible inheritance. In partible inheritance the patrimony, or total estate, was evenly divided among children, usually the sons. Occasionally daughters would inherit (especially if there were no sons), but their property would be administered by their husbands or male relatives. Though intended to minimize conflicts among siblings over inheritance, partibility often had the opposite effect, since the heirs had to inventory anything they received at any time. Dividing up the patrimony every generation could also lead to impoverishment, hence a gradual move toward impartibility developed by the beginning of the early modern era.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries partibility began to be replaced in some parts of central and southern Europe by impartibility, which had already established a foothold in much of southern France and Spain. In most versions of impartibility, one heir (usually the oldest son, a practice known as primogeniture) inherited the entire patrimony, thus acting as a steward to the family property and preserving its integrity. The new practice was especially popular among royal dynasties, large landowners, and other wealthy families. In most places noninheriting brothers and sisters were to receive a "portion," that is, a cash settlement, and in many cases went on to work for the older brother. Among nobles on the Continent, the designated heir was often expected to provide an annual stipend for each of his brothers and a dowry to each of his unmarried sisters. English aristocrats, by contrast, were rarely required to make any such concession and only did so voluntarily.

Despite such counterbalances, many early modern people, especially among the Protestant clergy, considered impartibility inherently unfair and even unchristian. Moreover the multitude of diverse customs throughout Europe could make the rights and prerogatives bestowed upon the head of the household appear quite arbitrary. Within the kingdom of France, for instance, a father in Provence had absolute power over the choice of his heir, an exclusionary tactic that led to the designation of the fortunate beneficiary as l'enfant, 'child' (implying that his excluded siblings were not even children in a real sense). Meanwhile a father in Brittany had no power whatsoever to discriminate among his children. Occasionally a father might attempt to circumvent the local legal tradition and put an entailment in his will (known as a substitution in France; mayorazgo in Spain; majorat in Denmark; fideicommissum in Italy, Germany, Sweden, and Poland; and strict settlement in Britain) that prohibited sale, gift, or division of the land for several generations, but this was not always possible.

The question of inheritance could play a key role in relations within the family, including degrees of affection. Even small amounts of property could trigger bitter rivalries among designated heirs and their brothers and sisters, particularly in the case of children from two different marriages, where each individual or group of siblings attempted to exclude the other from inheritance. Many fathers clearly agonized over their attempts to preserve the patrimony and also provide for all of their children. The results could vary considerably. Impartibility tended to encourage emigration, early marriage, and nuclear households among noninheriting children, especially as travel to the New World became cheaper and more frequent, but many also remained near home. It also usually resulted in an extended family household for the adult heir and parent(s), though this too could vary, depending on the nature of the inheritance, local custom, and preferences of the father. Partibility carried its own set of conflicts and survived in many areas (for example, much of central and western Germany) well into the nineteenth century.

The head of the household's control over the family's patrimony obviously gave him a great deal of authority over his children's lives, particularly over the choice of spouses and the timing of marriages. As a rule the more property involved, the greater the involvement of fathers or male guardians in such matters, although forced marriages remained unusual and in most places illegal. Instead, fathers and children often sought a convergence of economic interests and personal attraction, apparently succeeding a good deal of the time. The prerogatives of inheritance also usually ensured that fathers or mothers would be provided for in old age, either in an extended household or with guaranteed income after passing the family property on. Heads of poor households, on the other hand, especially landless laborers, exercised no such economic authority over their grown children and thus enjoyed much less financial security in old age. Well into the twentieth century small households of single or married people over sixty were the poorest anywhere in Europe or North America, surpassed in that distinction possibly only by female-headed households with children.

The nonrelatives of an early modern household usually had no stake in inheritance strategies but played essential roles in family dynamics nevertheless. Writers of the era were fond of portraying servants and apprentices as scheming enemies of the master and the mistress of the house: lying, stealing, lecherous, and above all lazy. Indeed by the eighteenth century words such as "varlet" and "knave" had taken on almost exclusively derogatory meanings in the English language. Legal and other records convey a more nuanced and complicated tangle of relationships between servants and the relatives of the house. Some servants were treated like surrogate children, while others were clearly neglected or abused, receiving worse or less food, mean accommodations, and no affection. Even that common source of illegitimate babies, the illicit affair between the paterfamilias and a young maid, defies easy generalization. Every case had its own mixture of coercion (even rape) and willingness, of naïveté and cynical manipulation, of secrecy and flagrancy. The authority of the paterfamilias over servants and apprentices moreover was never absolute, though it did generally enjoy the legal benefit of the doubt. Religious authorities held the paterfamilias responsible for the spiritual instruction of the entire household, and immoral acts by children and servants alike reflected directly on his reputation. Protestant consistories and other church bodies frequently censored a father or widow for "bad housekeeping," though secular authorities rarely followed up with any punishments of their own.

The Household As an Economic Unit

Before the wide-scale industrialization of the nineteenth century, the household was the key unit of production in European economies. Urban workshops and rural farms alike relied on the labor of household members, including parents, children, servants, apprentices, and sometimes wage-earning lodgers. The degree to which this "whole house" (das ganze Haus) economic model successfully functioned remains a matter of some dispute among family historians. The key for the early modern paterfamilias lay in meeting his family's immediate and future needs while minimizing the number of mouths he had to feed. In this respect rural households west of the Hajnal line showed much greater flexibility, largely because of the high availability of servants and lodgers to balance the size of the household with the size of the holding. The size of eastern European households, usually complex in structure, was less flexible and therefore fixed the amount of labor available, regardless of the size of the property to be worked. Over all, many factors—type and quantity of product, local agrarian system, interregional and international markets, kin and other social networks, property laws, demographics, and so forth—helped determine which labor strategy a head of household adopted.

The division of labor in the early modern household had not always been gender and age specific. During the Middle Ages wives apparently often shared in their husbands' craftwork, even into widowhood. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, this type of labor was increasingly restricted for women, who nevertheless often continued to bring in income through sewing or spinning work (which came to be defined as part of "housekeeping" and thus not really "work"). The division of labor along gender lines was long familiar in rural settings, where men were assigned to tasks requiring greater physical strength, such as plowing and planting, while women (and children) worked on food preparation, cleaning and mending of clothing, housecleaning, water carrying, and so forth. During harvest all members of the household played various parts in getting crops from field to market.

Two major economic events during the early modern era had especially significant consequences for the household economy. The first was the rise of wage labor following the late fifteenth century. At the very time when new impartible inheritance laws were sweeping across Europe, an increasing number of wage-earning jobs in the West provided noninheriting children with an alternative basis for setting up their own households. This loss of labor forced some farmers to hire their own help, further increasing the number of wage earners in the economy and nonrelatives in the household.

The second development began in the mid–seventeenth century and likewise fed the growth of a wage economy in many parts of western Europe. Proto-industrialization, particularly in the textile industry, had the greatest impact on small landholders, whose members (women, children, and sometimes men) increasingly turned to some phase of cloth production for their households' incomes. Unlike the traditional guild system, in which all phases of production were under the direct supervision of a master in the craft, the "putting-out system" (German Verlagssystem) assigned an intermediate task to an outsider, who was paid at an agreed-upon piece rate. The growth of these so-called cottage industries was gradual and came as a consequence of changes in agrarian markets as well as higher demands and therefore increased production. Before the mechanization and factories of the industrial revolution, for instance, it took four to ten spinners to produce the amount of yarn woven by a single weaver in one day. Like large landowners who had increasingly enclosed and converted their farmland to sheep-grazing fields, these cottagers found income from the cloth industry both more profitable and more reliable than farming.

The immediate impact of increased wage labor and proto-industrialization on household forms was not always clear-cut. Clearly wage labor tended to encourage earlier marriage and more nuclear households. No longer forced to wait for inheritance, noninheriting children had little reason to remain part of an extended or complex household rather than start their own. Yet many such individuals, for reasons of security or family solidarity, did stay on well into adulthood despite the conditions. Similarly proto-industrialization sometimes encouraged more nuclear households and other times had the opposite effect. The formation of new households depended on many factors, including the skills required for production (an important limitation in such industries as arms manufacture in Belgium), the initial outlay of capital required for equipment (for example, expensive looms), and the size of the household.

Ideas About the Household and Family

Since antiquity family and household have served as powerful metaphors as well as social realities. Aristotle considered the household (Greek oikos) the chief building block of society as well as the model for a successful state. "It was out of the association formed by men with . . . women and slaves," he wrote in his Politics, "that the household was formed. . . . The next step is the village. . . . The final association, formed of several villages, is the city or state." Aristotle considered both the household and the state "naturally" hierarchical and patriarchal, with the head of the household and head of state each possessing certain duties as well as prerogatives. Their paternal authority demanded filial obedience but also obliged household heads to display loving concern. Later the Roman paterfamilias and emperor enjoyed expanded rights, often to a shockingly autocratic degree by modern standards. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries European writers revived the classical tradition of the household as metaphor for the state, arguing for a strengthening of the patriarchal leader of each. In Germany a number of popular Protestant pamphlets, the so-called Hausvaterliteratur, lamented that the authority of the head of household, or Hausvater, was under assault from an unholy alliance of shrewish wives, wild children, papist agitators, and a variety of devils bent on destruction of the family. A father should be as a king in his own household, they argued, providing biblical, classical, and anecdotal evidence in support. Publications elsewhere in Europe similarly invoked the sovereignty of the paterfamilias, whom Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) likened to the head of a small monarchy.

The other side of the patriarchal metaphor consisted of a paternalization of political authority. This imagery too was ancient and continued to inspire many medieval paeans to fatherly kings, such as Saint Louis (Louis IX; ruled 1226–1270) of France. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though, proponents of a stronger "absolutist" monarchy, such as Jean Bodin (1530–1596), applied paternal claims of sovereignty to argue for greater political authority for their kings. Only a father's strong hand, Bodin maintained in his Six Books of a Commonwealth (1576), could prevent the anarchy that had overtaken France during its religious wars.

The comparison of a kingdom to a household probably reached its zenith with the writings of the Englishman Robert Filmer (c. 1588–1653). Beginning in the 1630s Filmer published several tracts that made an argument similar to Bodin's but with even more extensive use of patriarchal imagery. Unlike the proposed absolute monarch of Thomas Hobbes, Filmer's ruler—like a true father—ruled more by moral suasion and education than by force. His ultimate authority, however, was beyond dispute, dating back to Adam and later the dispersion of Babel: "The Nations were distinct Families, which had Fathers for Rulers over them; . . . God was careful to preserve the Fatherly Authority, by distributing the Diversity of Languages, according to the Diversity of Families." After the English Civil War and Commonwealth, Filmer's writings received new attention, culminating in the printing of his previously unpublished masterwork, Patriarcha (The natural power of kings) in 1680. By then patriarchal political imagery and language were so pervasive that even John Locke (1632–1704), who dismissed Filmer's absolutist arguments as "glib nonsense," was forced to acknowledge the paternal nature of government.

The patriarchal revival also had its religious dimension. Both kings and fathers, as Filmer noted, received their authority directly from God, most explicitly in the fourth commandment to love and obey one's parents. This "divine right" to rule became closely identified with the absolutist monarchies of England's Charles I (ruled 1625–1649) and France's Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), but the sentiment, if not the political implications, was widespread in early modern Europe. At the same time both fathers and political authorities had clearcut responsibilities for the religious welfare of their respective "families." Martin Luther (1483–1546) even referred to both figures as bishops expected to lead by example and discipline every member of their respective realms. This highly idealized patriarchal hierarchy was best expressed by German authors, who wrote of a Hausvater (head of household) subject to a Landesvater (prince or "father of his country"), with both overseen by the Gottesvater (God the father) himself.

Throughout the early modern period many religious sects and political groups also employed the language and imagery of family. All of the Reformation's leaders spoke to their congregations as "families," and some groups, notably the Anabaptists and their successors, called each other "brother" and "sister." Later movements, such as the Society of Friends (that is, Quakers) and Moravian Brethren, similarly turned to the language of family for coherence and identity. Finally, secular political groups from the Masons to the Jacobins of the French Revolution openly proclaimed brotherhood (French fraternité) as one of their foundational tenets.

Birth of the Modern Family?

Just as no single "traditional" family model ever existed, no single modern family model succeeded it. Nuclear households admittedly became more common during the nineteenth century, but complex and alternate household forms continued to thrive in some places, particularly southern and eastern Europe. "Modernization," in the guise of either industrialization or increased individualism, also did not spell the end of the importance of kinship; some historians argue that family relations became even more important as a result of such larger social transformations. On the other hand, the household itself did experience some significant changes. Most notably, historians detect a discernible increase after the sixteenth century in the desire for privacy, resulting in somewhat larger and more compartmentalized residences among the middle and upper classes. The idea of "home" itself took on a form of separation from society, a haven in a tumultuous world. By the eighteenth century a new "cult of domesticity" was growing, and by the following century it spread to lower-middle-class and working-class cultures. Like the patriarchal model that preceded it, the new idealization of the household often remained a common point of reference rather than a social reality. Still it corresponded nicely with the continuing rise of nuclear households, a convergence one might call the congealment of the modern family if not its birth.

Bibliography

Anderson, Michael. Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 1500–1914. 2nd expanded ed. New York, 1995.

Ariès, Philippe, and Georges Duby, eds. A History of Private Life. Vol. 3: Passions of the Renaissance, edited by Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Mass., 1989.

Burguière, André, et al., eds. A History of the Family. Vol. 2, The Impact of Modernity. Cambridge, Mass., 1996.

Flandrin, Jean-Louis. Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household, and Sexuality. Translated by Richard Southern. Cambridge, U.K., 1979.

Goody, Jack. The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1983.

Hajnal, John. "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective." In Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, edited by D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, pp. 101–138. London, 1965.

Herlihy, David, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber. Tuscans and Their Families: A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven, 1985.

Houlbrooke, Ralph A. The English Family, 1450–1700. London, 1984.

Hunt, Lynn. The Family Romance of the French Revolution. Berkeley, 1992.

Kertzer, David I., and Marzio Barbagli, eds. The History of the European Family. Vol. 1: Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789. New Haven, 2001.

Laslett, Peter. Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations. Cambridge, U.K., 1977.

Medick, Hans, and David Warren Sabean, eds. Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship. Cambridge, U.K., 1984.

Mitterauer, Michael, and Reinhard Sieder. The European Family: Patriarchy to Partnership from the Middle Ages to the Present. Translated by Karla Oosterveen and Manfred Hörzinger. Oxford, 1982.

Ozment, Steven. When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe. Cambridge, Mass., 1983.

Plakans, Andrejs. Kinship in the Past: An Anthropology of European Family Life, 1500–1900. Oxford, 1984.

Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford, 1989.

Sabean, David Warren. Property, Production, and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.

Stone, Lawrence. The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. London, 1977.

Traer, James F. Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca, N.Y., 1980.

Wall, Richard, Jean Robin, and Peter Laslett, eds. Family Forms in Historic Europe. Cambridge, U.K., 1983.

—JOEL F. HARRINGTON

A group of plants above the category of genus, defined by characteristics of flowers and fruits. Important examples are the grass, lily, mint, and daisy families (respectively, Gramineae, Liliaceae, Labiatae, and Compositae).

Quotes:

"People who have good relationships at home are more effective in the marketplace." - Zig Ziglar

"I have known more men destroyed by the desire to have wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots." - William Butler Yeats

"I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves." - Oscar Wilde

"Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die." - Oscar Wilde

"Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds; they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material." - Source Unknown

"Women's liberationists spread the word that the only peaceful family is one in which either the wife is enslaved or the husband is androgynous." - R. Emmett Tyell

See more famous quotes about Family

In biology, the classification lower than an order and higher than a genus. Lions, tigers, cheetahs, and house cats belong to the same biological family. Human beings belong to the biological family of hominids. (See Linnean classification.)

1. (in taxonomy) a taxonomic category of related organisms ranking below the order and above the genus.
2. (in chemistry and biochemistry) an imprecise term for a group of substances closely related structurally. See also superfamily.
3. (in molecular biology) see protein family.

1. a group of animals related by blood or their inheritance.
2. a taxonomic category below an order and above a genus.

• f. farm — traditional basis of agriculture being gradually overcome in developed countries by amalgamation into larger farms dedicated to business efficiency.
• f. selection — selection of individuals to be used in a breeding program based on the merits of sibs or half sibs.

1. a body of persons who live in one house and under one head; a father, a mother, and a child or some children; a husband and wife living together. 2. a group of people related by heredity, such as parents, children, and siblings. The term is sometimes broadened to include related by marriage or those living in the same household, who are emotionally attached, interact regularly, and share concerns for the growth and development of the group and its individual members. 3. a group of persons who have a common surname, such as the Anderson family. 4. a category of animals or plants situated on a taxonomic scale between order and genus. 5. the legal definition varies, depending on the jurisdiction and purpose for which the term is defined.

• Taxonomy - family: category of organisms ranking below order and above genus (as: Hominidae)
• Kinship and Ancestry - family: persons of common ancestry or stock; persons related by birth or marriage; parents and their children by birth or adoption
• Kinship, Marriage, and Other Customs - family: group of persons related by blood, esp. parents and children, forming basic biosocial unit
• Criminals - family: Slang. Mafia

For other uses, see Family (disambiguation).

Relationships
Types Family · Kinship Siblings · Cousin Marriage Husband · Wife Friendship (romantic) Significant other Boyfriend · Girlfriend Casual · Cohabitation Same-sex relationship Sexual partner Monogamy · Non-monogamy Open marriage · Polyamory Polyfidelity · Polygamy Cicisbeo · Concubinage Courtesan · Mistress
Activities Bonding · Courtship Dating · Mating Meet market · Romance Singles event · Wedding
Ending of Breakup · Divorce Separation · Widowhood
Emotions Affinity · Attachment Compersion · Intimacy Jealousy · Limerence Love · Passion Platonic love Unconditional love
Human practices Bride price (Dower · Dowry) Hypergamy · Infidelity Sexual activity · Transgression Repression
Abuse Child · Dating Domestic · Elderly
v t e

In human context, a family (from Latin: familia) is a group of people affiliated by consanguinity, affinity, or co-residence. In most societies it is the principal institution for the socialization of children. Anthropologists most generally classify family organization as matrilocal (a mother and her children); conjugal (a wife, husband, and children, also called nuclear family); and consanguinal (also called an extended family) in which parents and children co-reside with other members of one parent's family.

There are also concepts of family that break with tradition within particular societies, or those that are transplanted via migration to flourish or else cease within their new societies. As a unit of socialization the family is the object of analysis for sociologists of the family. Genealogy is a field which aims to trace family lineages through history. In science, the term "family" has come to be used as a means to classify groups of objects as being closely and exclusively related. In the study of animals it has been found that many species form groups that have similarities to human "family"—often called "packs." Sexual relations among family members are regulated by rules concerning incest such as the incest taboo.

Extended from the human "family unit" by affinity and consanguinity are concepts of family that are physical and metaphorical, or that grow increasingly inclusive extending to community, village, city, region, nationhood, global village and humanism.

Contents 1 Procreation 2 History of the family 3 Kinship terminology 3.1 Western kinship 4 Family in the West 4.1 Family types 5 Less-known family types 5.1 Sociological views 5.2 Oedipal family model and fascism 6 Size 7 See also 8 Balance of role strain within family system 9 Notes 10 References 11 Further reading 12 External links

Procreation

Main article: Family planning

One of the primary functions of the family is to produce and reproduce persons, biologically and socially. This can occur through the sharing of material substances (such as semen, and food); jural ties of rights and obligations; and moral and sentimental ties.^[1][2] 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.^[3] 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.^[4] It is important to know for children to know the differences in families. As long as you have people to take care of you, that is what a family is about (^[5]). 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.^[6][7][8]

A "conjugal" family includes only the husband, the wife, and unmarried children who are not of age. The most common form of this family is regularly referred to in sociology as a nuclear family.^[9] A "consanguineal" family consists of a parent and his or her children, and other people. Although the concept of consanguinity originally referred to relations by "blood," cultural anthropologists^[who?] have argued that one must understand the idea of "blood" metaphorically and that many societies understand family through other concepts rather than through genetic distance.Genes give a background of behavioral types that can be passed on to the child. In most aspects, genetics are important, but do not make a family a loving family. Genetics is helpful for diseases or problems you may see with your child.^[10] A "matrilocal" 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.

History of the family

Main article: History of the family

A group portrait of a mother, son and daughter on glass, Ancient Rome, c. 250 AD.

The diverse data coming from ethnography, history, law and social statistics, establish that the human family is an institution and not a biological fact founded on the natural relationship of consanguinity.^[11][12]

Early scholars of family history applied Darwin's biological theory of evolution in their theory of evolution of family systems.^[13] American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan published Ancient Society in 1877 based on his theory of the three stages of human progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization.^[14] Morgan's book was the "inspiration for Friedrich Engels' book" The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State published in 1884.^[15]

Engels expanded Morgan's hypothesis that economical factors caused the transformation of primitive community into a class-divided society.^[16] Engels' theory of resource control, and later that of Karl Marx, was used to explain the cause and effect of change in family structure and function. The popularity of this theory was largely unmatched until the 1980s, when other sociological theories, most notably structural functionalism, gained acceptance.

Kinship terminology

Family tree showing the relationship of each person to the orange person. Cousins are colored green. The genetic kinship degree of relationship is marked in red boxes by percentage (%).

Family chart. Note that not all relatives are shown in the chart (specially at step-relatives).

Main article: Kinship terminology

Anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) performed the first survey of kinship terminologies in use around the world. Although much of his work is now considered dated, he argued that kinship terminologies reflect different sets of distinctions. For example, most kinship terminologies distinguish between sexes (the difference between a brother and a sister) and between generations (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").

Morgan made a distinction between kinship systems that use classificatory terminology and those that use descriptive terminology. Classificatory systems are generally and erroneously understood to be those that "class together" with a single term relatives who actually do not have the same type of relationship to ego. (What defines "same type of relationship" under such definitions seems to be genealogical relationship. This is problematic given that any genealogical description, no matter how standardized, employs words originating in a folk understanding of kinship.) What Morgan's terminology actually differentiates are those (classificatory) kinship systems that do not distinguish lineal and collateral relationships and those (descriptive) kinship systems that do. Morgan, a lawyer, came to make this distinction in an effort to understand Seneca inheritance practices. A Seneca man's effects were inherited by his sisters' children rather than by his own children.^[17] Morgan identified six basic patterns of kinship terminologies:

• Hawaiian: only distinguishes relatives based upon sex and generation.
• Sudanese: no two relatives share the same term.
• Eskimo: in addition to distinguishing relatives based upon sex and generation, also distinguishes between lineal relatives and collateral relatives.
• Iroquois: in addition to sex and generation, also distinguishes between siblings of opposite sexes in the parental generation.
• Crow: a matrilineal system with some features of an Iroquois system, but with a "skewing" feature in which generation is "frozen" for some relatives.
• Omaha: like a Crow system but patrilineal.

Western kinship

See also: Cousin chart

Georgian family of writer Vazha-Pshavela (in the middle, sitting)

A Chilean family from Población, Chile, in 1987.

Most Western societies employ Eskimo kinship terminology. This kinship terminology commonly occurs in societies based on conjugal (or nuclear) families, where nuclear families have a degree of relative mobility. Members of the nuclear use descriptive kinship terms:

• Mother: a female parent
• Father: a male parent
• Son: a male child of the parent(s)
• Daughter: a female child of the parent(s)
• Brother: a male child of the same parent(s)
• Sister: a female child of the same parent(s)
• Grandfather: father of a father or mother
• Grandmother: mother of a mother or father
• Cousins: two people that share the same grandparent(s)

An infant, his mother, his maternal grandmother, and his great-grandmother.

Such systems generally assume that the mother's husband has also served as the biological father. In some families, a woman may have children with more than one man or a man may have children with more than one woman. The system refers to a child who shares only one parent with another child as a "half-brother" or "half-sister." For children who do not share biological or adoptive parents in common, English-speakers use the term "stepbrother" or "stepsister" 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 "stepparent" 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). However, in the western society the single parent family has been growing more accepted and has begun to truly make an impact on culture. The majority of single parent families are more commonly single mother families than single father. These families face many difficult issues besides the fact that they have to rear their children on their own, but also have to deal with issues related to low income. Many single parents struggle with low incomes and must cope with other issues, including rent, child care, and other necessities required in maintaining a healthy and safe home. 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, mother's brother, father's sister's husband, mother's sister's husband
• Aunt: father's sister, mother's sister, father's brother's wife, mother's brother's wife
• Nephew: sister's son, brother's son, wife's brother's son, wife's sister's son, husband's brother's son, husband's sister's son
• Niece: sister's daughter, brother's daughter, wife's brother's daughter, wife's sister's daughter, husband's brother's daughter, husband's sister'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 prefixes "great-" or "grand-" modifies these terms. Also, 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; the children of aunts or uncles. One can further distinguish cousins by degrees of collaterality and by generation. Two persons of the same generation who share a grandparent count as "first cousins" (one degree of collaterality); if they share a great-grandparent they count as "second cousins" (two degrees of collaterality) and so on. If two persons share an ancestor, one as a grandchild and the other as a great-grandchild of that individual, then the two descendants class as "first cousins once removed" (removed by one generation); if they shared ancestor figures as the grandparent of one individual and the great-great-grandparent of the other, the individuals class as "first cousins twice removed" (removed by two generations), and so on. Similarly, if they shared ancestor figures as the great-grandparent of one person and the great-great-grandparent of the other, the individuals class as "second cousins once removed". Hence one can refer to a "third cousin once removed upwards."

Cousins of an older generation (in other words, one's parents' first cousins), although technically first cousins once removed, 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," using the practice of fictive kinship. English-speakers mark relationships by marriage (except for wife/husband) with the tag "-in-law." The mother and father of one's spouse become one's mother-in-law and father-in-law; the female spouse of one's child becomes one's daughter-in-law and the male spouse of one's child becomes one's son-in-law. The term "sister-in-law" refers to three essentially different relationships, either the wife of one's sibling, or the sister of one's spouse, or, in some uses, the wife of one's spouse's sibling. "Brother-in-law" expresses a similar ambiguity. The terms "half-brother" and "half-sister" indicate siblings who share only one biological or adoptive parent.

Family in the West

Family types

Family arrangements in the United States have become more diverse with no particular household arrangement representing half of the United States population.^[18]

The different types of families occur in a wide variety of settings, and their specific functions and meanings depend largely on their relationship to other social institutions. Sociologists have a special interest in the function and status of these forms in stratified (especially capitalist) societies. The term "nuclear family" is commonly used, especially in North America and Europe, to refer to conjugal families. Sociologists distinguish between conjugal families (relatively independent of the kindred of the parents and of other families in general) and nuclear families (which maintain relatively close ties with their kindred). The term "extended family" is also common, especially in North America and Europe. This term has two distinct meanings. First, it serves as a synonym of "consanguinal family" (consanguine means "of the same blood"). 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. Any society will exhibit some variation in the actual composition and conception of families. Much sociological, historical and anthropological research dedicates itself to the understanding of this variation, and of changes in the family that form over time. Times have changed; it is more acceptable and encouraged for mothers to work and fathers to spend more time at home with the children. The way roles are balanced between the parents will help children grow and learn valuable life lessons. Their is great importance of communication and equality in families, in order to avoid role strain. ^[19]

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".^[20]

Less-known family types

In contemporary Europe and North America, people in academic, political and civil sectors have called attention to single-father-headed households, and families headed by same-sex couples,^{[citation needed]} although academics point out that these forms exist in other societies. Also the term blended family or stepfamily describes families with mixed parents: one or both parents remarried, bringing children of the former family into the new family.^[21] Also in sociology, particularly in the works of social psychologist Michael Lamb,^[22] traditional family refers to "a middleclass family with a bread-winning father and a stay-at-home mother, married to each other and raising their biological children," and nontraditional to exceptions from this rule. Most of the US households are now non-traditional under this definition.^[23]

In terms of communication patterns in families, there are a certain set of beliefs within the family that reflect how its members should communicate and interact. These family communication patterns arise from two underlying sets of beliefs. One being conversation orientation (the degree to which the importance of communication is valued) and two, conformity orientation (the degree to which families should emphasize similarities or differences regarding attitudes, beliefs, and values).^[24]

Family members

Sociological views

Contemporary society generally views the family as a haven from the world, supplying absolute fulfilment.^{[citation needed]} Zinn and Eitzen discuss the image of the "family as haven [...] a place of intimacy, love and trust where individuals may escape the competition of dehumanizing forces in modern society".^[25] During industrialization, "[t]he family as a repository of warmth and tenderness (embodied by the mother) stands in opposition to the competitive and aggressive world of commerce (embodied by the father). The family's task was to protect against the outside world."^[26] However, Zinn and Eizen note, "The protective image of the family has waned in recent years as the ideals of family fulfillment have taken shape. Today, the family is more compensatory than protective. It supplies what is vitally needed but missing in other social arrangements."^[27]

"The popular wisdom", according to Zinn and Eitzen, sees the family structures of the past as superior to those today, and families as more stable and happier at a time when they did not have to contend with problems such as illegitimate children and divorce. They respond to this, saying, "there is no golden age of the family gleaming at us in the far back historical past."^[28] "Desertion by spouses, illegitimate children, and other conditions that are considered characteristics of modern times existed in the past as well."^[29]

Others argue that whether or not one views the family as "declining" depends on one's definition of "family". The high rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births indicate a decline in the institution of the family^{[citation needed]}. Married couples have dropped below half of all American households. This drop is shocking from traditional forms of the family system. Only a fifth of households were following traditional ways of having married couples raising a family together. ^[30]No longer are marriages arranged for political or economic gain, and children are not expected to contribute to family income. Instead, people choose mates based on love. This increased role of love indicates a societal shift toward favoring emotional fulfilment and relationships within a family, and this shift necessarily weakens the institution of the family.^[31]

Margaret Mead considers the family as a main safeguard to continuing human progress. Observing, "Human beings have learned, laboriously, to be human", she adds: "we hold our present form of humanity on trust, [and] it is possible to lose it" ... "It is not without significance that the most successful large-scale abrogations of the family have occurred not among simple savages, living close to the subsistence edge, but among great nations and strong empires, the resources of which were ample, the populations huge, and the power almost unlimited"^[32]

As an agent of socialization, family is the primary source of influence behind the formation of personality and the growth of a child^[33], due to its influence on the basics of personality and its role providing gender identity. This impact is large as the family confers its social position onto the child when it is brought into the world.

Oedipal family model and fascism

The model, common in the western societies, of the family triangle, husband-wife-children isolated from the outside, is also called the oedipal model of the family, and it is a form of patriarchal family. Many philosophers and psychiatrists analyzed such a model. In the family, they argue, the young develop in a perverse relationship, wherein they learn to love the same person who beats and oppresses them. Young children grow up and develop loving the person that is oppressing them physically or mentally. These children are taught differently than the appropriate way of raising affectionate children.^[34]The family therefore constitutes the first cell of the fascist society, as they will carry this attitude of love for oppressive figures in their adult life.^[35][36] Fathers torment their sons.^[37][38] Deleuze and Guattari, in their analysis of the dynamics at work within a family, "track down all varieties of fascism, from the enormous ones that surround and crush us to the petty ones that constitute the tyrannical bitterness of our everyday lives".^[35]

As it has been explained by Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, as well as other philosophers and psychiatrists such as Laing and Reich, the patriarchal-family conceived in the West tradition serves the purpose of perpetuating a propertarian and authoritarian society.^[39] The child grows according to the oedipal model, which is typical of the structure of capitalist societies,^[11][12] and he becomes in turn owner of submissive children and protector of the woman.^{[38][40][41][42][43]}

As the young undergoes physical and psychological repression from someone for whom they develop love, they develop a loving attitude towards authority figures. They will bring such attitude in their adult life, when they will desire social repression and will form docile subjects for society.^[39] Michel Foucault, in his systematic study of sexuality, argued that rather than being merely repressed, the desires of the individual are efficiently mobilized and used,^[35] to control the individual, alter interpersonal relationships and control the masses. Foucault believed organized religion, through moral prohibitions, and economic powers, through advertising, make use of unconscious sex drives. Dominating desire, they dominate individuals.^[44] According to the analysis of Michel Foucault, in the west:

the [conjugal] family organization, precisely to the extent that it was insular and heteromorphous with respect to the other power mechanisms, was used to support the great "maneuvers" employed for the Malthusian control of the birthrate, for the populationist incitements, for the medicalization of sex and the psychiatrization of its nongenital forms.

—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol I, chap. IV, sect. Method, rule 3, p. 99

Size

Natalism is the belief that human reproduction is the basis for individual existence, and therefore promotes having large families. Many religions, e.g., Islam, Christianity and Judaism,^[45] encourage their followers to procreate and have many children, however many of them also propound stewardship and responsibility to care for the environment and society. In recent times, however, there has been an increasing amount of family planning and a following decrease in the total fertility rate in many parts of the world, in part due to improvements in health care, concerns of overpopulation, decreasing need for manual labor and increasing cost of raising a child as workers need to be more skilled. Many countries with population decline offer incentives for people to have large families as a means of national efforts to reverse declining populations.

See also

• Childlessness
• Childfree

Balance of role strain within family system

Notes

1. ^ Schneider, David 1984 A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. p. 182
2. ^ Deleuze-Guattari (1972). Part 2, ch. 3, p. 80
3. ^ Russon, John, (2003) Human Experience: Philosophy, Neurosis, and the Elements of Everyday Life, Albany: State University of New York Press. pp. 61–68.
4. ^ George Peter Murdoch Social Structure p. 13
5. ^ Northey, William F. Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, October 2009, Vol. 33 Issue 4, p531-532, Database: Education Full Text (H.W. Wilson)
6. ^ Wolf, Eric. 1982 Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley: University of California Press. 92
7. ^ Harner, Michael 1975 "Scarcity, the Factors of Production, and Social Evolution," in Population. Ecology, and Social Evolution, Steven Polgar, ed. Mouton Publishers: the Hague.
8. ^ Rivière, Peter 1987 "Of Women, Men, and Manioc", Etnologiska Studien (38).
9. ^ Oregonstate.edu, Nuclear family – "A family group consisting of wife, husband (or one of these) and dependent children." – Definitions of Anthropological Terms – Anthropological Resources – (Court Smith) Department of Anthropology, Oregon State University
10. ^ “Family: An Institution Of Culture And Part Of Human.” Institute for Age Studies. Published Apr 19, 2008. http://www.insticeagestudies.com/library/family-an-institution-of-culture-and-part-of-human.shtml
11. ^ ^{a b} Lacan 1938–2001, pp. 24–25, 56
12. ^ ^{a b} Fugier Pascal, 2007, p.226-8
13. ^ "Sociology/Founding the discipline". Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/551887/sociology/222961/Founding-the-discipline#ref=ref748622. Retrieved 2009-07-26. 
14. ^ Morgan 1877
15. ^ "Cultural Anthropology". Encyclopædia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/146165/cultural-anthropology/38786/Marxism-and-the-collectors#ref=ref423234. Retrieved 2009-07-22. 
16. ^ "The Marxists Internet Archive". http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-17. 
17. ^ Tooker, Elisabeth. "Another View of Morgan on Kinship." Current Anthropology 20, no. 1 (March 1979): 131–134.
18. ^ Williams, Brian; Stacey C. Sawyer, Carl M. Wahlstrom (2005). Marriages, Families & Intinamte Relationships. Boston, MA: Pearson. 0-205-36674-0. 
19. ^ Levitan, Sara. 2010. What Happens to Family Life? http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1981/09/art4full.pdf
20. ^ "The Collapse of Marriage by Don Browning – The Christian Century". Religion-online.org. February 7, 2006. pp. 24–28. http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=3322. Retrieved 2007-07-10. 
21. ^ Blended and Blessed – Encouraging Step-Families, blendedandblessed.com^{[dead link]}
22. ^ "Department of Social and Developmental Psychology: PPSIS Faculty, Academic Profile". Sdp.cam.ac.uk. http://www.sdp.cam.ac.uk/contacts/staff/profiles/mlamb.html. Retrieved 2011-03-26. 
23. ^ [1] paragraph 17
24. ^ McCornack, Steven (2010). Reflect & Relate an introduction to interpersonal communication. Boston/NY: Bedford/St. Martin's. pp. 369–370. 
25. ^ Zinn, Maxine Baca; D. Stanley Eitzen (2002). Diversity in families (6 ed.). Allyn and Bacon. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-205-33522-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=PertAAAAMAAJ. Retrieved 2012-01-06. "This 'family as haven' image of a refuge from an impersonal world characterizes the family as a place of intimacy, love, and trust in which individuals may escape the competition of dehumanizing forces in modern society. Christopher Lasch (1977:8) has named this image a 'haven in a heartless world' and described it as a glorification of private life made necessary by the deprivations experienced in the public world." 
26. ^ Zinn and Eitzen (1987) Diversity in American families, p. 3
27. ^ Zinn and Eitzen (1987) Diversity in American families, p. 3
28. ^ Zinn and Eitzen (1987) Diversity in American families, p. 8
29. ^ Zinn and Eitzen (1987) Diversity in American families, p. 8
30. ^ Tavernise, Sabrina. (2011). Married Couples Are No Longer a Majority, Census Finds. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/us/26marry.html?_r=1#
31. ^ Coontz, Stephanie. 2005. Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking/Penguin Books.
32. ^ Male and Female, New York, 1949. pp. 193-194
33. ^ Macionis, John J. "Sociology: 7th Canadian Edition". (Toronto: Pearson, 2011), 112
34. ^ “About Family.” Word Press. Published 31 March 2012. http://kirkomrik.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/more-notes-about-family/
35. ^ ^{a b c} Foucault (1984) Preface to the American edition of Anti-Œdipus pp. xiii–xvi).
36. ^ Wilhelm Reich (1933) The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Chapter V, The Sex-Economic Presuppositions of the Authoritarian Family
37. ^ John Phillips Structural Linguistics and Anthropology, courses.nus.edu.sg
38. ^ ^{a b} Wilhelm Reich [1936] The Sexual Revolution, Chapter V, The compulsive family as educational apparatus, pp. 71–77
39. ^ ^{a b} Deleuze-Guattari (1972). Part 2, ch. 7, pp. 129–31
40. ^ (Italian) Gianni Vattimo Tutto in famiglia (article appeared on Il Manifesto October 15, 2004), feltrinelli.it (Italian)
41. ^ (Italian) Luttazzi, Daniele Bollito misto con mostarda (2005) p. 262, books.google.com
42. ^ Theodor W. Adorno and Stephen Crook Adorno ISBN 0-415-27099-5, p. 9-10, books.google.com
43. ^ E. James Anthony, The Family and the Psychoanalytic Process in Children (1980). Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 35:3–34, pep-web.org
44. ^ Foucault, The History of Sexuality
45. ^ Joys of A Large Family, by Rebbetzin Faige Twerski. angelfire.com

References

• American Kinship, David M. Schneider
• A Natural History of Families, Scott Forbes, Princeton University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-691-09482-9
• Foucault, Michel (1978). The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction. New York Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-679-72469-8
• More Than Kin and Less Than Kind, Douglas W. Mock, Belknap Press, 2004, ISBN 0-674-01285-2
• Denis Chevallier, « Famille et parenté: une bibliographie », Terrain, Numéro 4 – Famille et parenté (mars 1985), mis en ligne le 17 juillet 2005. Consulté le 15 juin 2007, terrain.revues.org (French)
• Paul Gilroy (2000) [Identity Belonging and the Critique of Pure Sameness] in Gilroy, Paul (2000) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Ch. I.3, pp. 97–133
• Jack Goody (1983) The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge University Press); translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese.

Further reading

• Mattox, William R., Jr., "America's family time famine", Children Today, Nov–Dec, 1990

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Family

For a list of words relating to family, see the en:Family category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Family database, OECD,
• Family Research Laboratory, unh.edu
• Family evolution and contemporary social transformations, seres.fcs.ucr.ac.cr (Estación de Economía Política)
• Family Facts: Social Science Research on Family, Society & Religion (a Heritage Foundation site). familyfacts.org
• Families Australia – independent peak not-for-profit organisation. familiesaustralia.org.au
• FAMILYPLATFORM - A consortium of 12 organisations providing input into the European Union's Socio-Economic and Humanities Research Agenda on Family Research and Family Policies.
• Unitedfamilies.org, International organisation
• UN.org, Families and Development
• Family, marriage and "de facto" unions, Vatican.va

v t e Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights   General principles Article 1: Freedom, Egalitarianism, Dignity and Brotherhood Article 2: Universality of rights   International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Articles 1 and 2: Right to freedom from discrimination Article 3: Right to life, liberty and security of person Article 4: Freedom from slavery Article 5: Freedom from torture or cruel and unusual punishment Article 6: Right to personhood Article 7: Equality before the law Article 8: Right to effective remedy from the law Article 9: Freedom from arbitrary arrest, detention or exile Article 10: Right to a fair trial Article 11.1: Presumption of innocence Article 11.2: Prohibition of retrospective law Article 12: Right to privacy Article 13.1: Freedom of movement Article 13.2: Right of return Article 14: Right of asylum Article 15: Right to a nationality Article 16: Right to marriage and family life Article 17: Right to property Article 18: Freedom of thought, conscience and religion Article 19: Freedom of opinion and expression and information Article 20.1: Freedom of assembly Article 20.2: Freedom of association Article 21.1: Right to participation in government Article 21.2: Right of equal access to public office Article 21.3: Right to universal suffrage   International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Article 22: Right to social security Article 23.1: Right to work Article 23.2: Right to equal pay for equal work Article 23.3: Right to just remuneration Article 23.4: Right to join a trade union Article 24: Right to rest and leisure Article 25.1: Right to an adequate standard of living Article 25.2: Right to special care and assistance for mothers and children Article 26.1: Right to education Article 26.2: Human rights education Article 26.3: Right to choice of education Article 27: Right to science and culture   Context, limitations and duties Article 28: Social order Article 29.1: Social responsibility Article 29.2: Limitations of human rights Article 29.3: The supremacy of the purposes and principles of the United Nations Article 30: Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein. Human rights category · Human rights portal

v t e Family Household · Nuclear family · Extended family · Conjugal family · Stepfamily · Dysfunctional family · Immediate family Spouse (Husband · Wife) · Parent (Father · Mother) · Child (Son · Daughter) · Sibling Extended family Grandparent · Aunt · Uncle · Cousin · Nephew · Niece · Common ancestor Family-in-law Father-in-law · Mother-in-law · Brother-in-law · Sister-in-law Kinship Adoption · Affinity · Consanguinity · Disownment · Divorce · Fictive kinship · Marriage Lineage Bilateral descent · Family name · Family tree · Genealogy · Heirloom · Heredity · Inheritance · Matrilineality · Patrilineality · Pedigree chart Relationships Agape (parental love) · Eros (marital love) · Filial piety · Philia (friendly love) · Storge (familial love) · Veneration

v t e Family rights Elements Fetal rights Children's rights Youth rights Reproductive rights Rights movements Children's Fathers' Mothers' rights Parents' Matrimonial rights See also Family law Parental responsibility Parental liability

v t e Parenting See also: School Family Types Adoptive Alloparenting Complex family Coparenting Foster care LGBT Noncustodial Nuclear family Orphaned Shared Single parent Stepfamily Surrogacy In loco parentis Theories/Areas Attachment theory Applied Behavior Analysis Behaviorism Child development Cognitive development Developmental psychology Human development Love Maternal bond Nature versus nurture Parental investment Paternal bond Pediatrics Social psychology Styles Attachment parenting Concerted cultivation Gatekeeper parent Helicopter parent Nurturant parenting Slow parenting Soccer mom Strict father model Taking Children Seriously Work at home parent Techniques After-school activity Allowance Bedtime Childcare Co-sleeping Homeschooling Latchkey kid Play (date) Role model Spoiled child Television Toy (educational) Discipline Blanket training Corporal punishment in the home Curfew Grounding Tactical ignoring Time-out Abuse Child abandonment Child abuse Child labour Child neglect Cinderella effect Incest Narcissistic parents Parental abuse by children Legal / social aspects Child support Cost of raising a child Marriage Parental responsibility (Deadbeat parent) Paternity Disownment Experts Tanya Byron Rudolf Dreikurs David Elkind Jo Frost Haim Ginott Thomas Gordon Annette Lareau Penelope Leach Madeline Levine William Sears B.F. Skinner Benjamin Spock

v t e Substantive human rights Note: What is considered a human right is controversial and not all the topics listed are universally accepted as human rights. Civil and political Equality before the law Freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention Freedom from cruel and unusual punishment Freedom from discrimination Freedom from exile Freedom from slavery Freedom from torture Freedom of assembly Freedom of association Freedom of information Freedom of movement Freedom of religion Freedom of speech Freedom of thought Liberty Marriage Family LGBT rights Nationality Personhood Presumption of innocence Privacy Right of asylum Right to a fair trial Right to die Right to keep and bear arms Right to life Right to protest Security of person Universal suffrage Economic, social and cultural Equal pay for equal work Fair remuneration Labor rights Right to an adequate standard of living Right to development Right to education Right to food Right to health Right to housing Right to clothing Right to Internet access Right to property Right to public participation Right of return Right to science and culture Right to social security Right to water Right to work Trade union membership Reproductive Abortion Family planning Freedom from involuntary female genital mutilation Reproductive health War and conflict Civilian Combatant Freedom from genocide Prisoner of war War rape

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)

Dansk (Danish)
n. - familie, slægt, børn, husstand, system
adj. - familie-, slægts-, hus-

idioms:

• be in the family way    vente barn
• family circle    familiens kreds
• family credit    social ydelse til lavindkomstfamilie
• family doctor    familielæge
• family jewels    arvegods, familiesmykker
• family man    hjemmemenneske, familiemenneske
• family name    efternavn, slægtsnavn
• family planning    familieplanlægning
• family tree    stamtræ
• member of the family    medlem af familien
• run in the family    det ligger til familien

Nederlands (Dutch)
familie, gezin, huisgezin, geslacht, broederschap, staf van hoge functionaris, groep (scheikunde/ taalkunde etc.), familie-, gezins-

Français (French)
n. - famille, (Biol) famille (de plantes, etc)
adj. - familial

idioms:

• family circle    cercle familial
• family credit    crédit familial
• family doctor    médecin de famille
• family jewels    bijoux de famille
• family man    père de famille, homme attaché à sa famille
• family name    nom de famille
• family planning    planning familial
• family tree    arbre généalogique
• in the family way    enceinte
• member of the family    membre de la famille
• run in the family    cela tient de famille

Deutsch (German)
n. - Familie, Geschlecht
adj. - familiär, Familien-

idioms:

• family circle    Familienkreis
• family credit    (GB) Zahlung an einkommensschwache Familien
• family doctor    Hausarzt
• family jewels    Familienjuwelen
• family man    Familienvater, häuslich veranlagter Mann
• family name    Familienname, Nachname
• family planning    Familienplanung
• family tree    Stammbaum
• in the family way    schwanger
• member of the family    Verwandter, Angehöriger
• run in the family    in der Familie liegen

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - οικογένεια (κν. φαμίλια), οικογένεια (τυπογραφικών στοιχείων)
adj. - οικογενειακός

idioms:

• be in the family way    είμαι έγκυος
• family circle    οικογενειακός κύκλος
• family credit    (οικον.) οικογενειακή πίστη
• family doctor    οικογενειακός γιατρός
• family jewels    οικογενειακά κοσμήματα
• family man    νοικοκύρης, άνθρωπος της οικογένειας
• family name    οικογενειακό όνομα, επώνυμο
• family planning    οικογενειακός/πληθυσμιακός προγραμματισμός, προγραμματισμός γεννητικότητας
• family tree    οικογενειακό/γενεαλογικό δένδρο
• member of the family    μέλος της οικογένειας
• run in the family    είναι οικογενειακό

Italiano (Italian)
famiglia, parentela, di famiglia

idioms:

• family credit    credito familiare
• family doctor    medico di famiglia
• family jewels    gioielli di famiglia
• family man    uomo di famiglia
• family name    cognome
• family planning    pianificazione familiare
• family tree    albero genealogico
• in the family way    incinta
• member of the family    parente

Português (Portuguese)
n. - família (f)
adj. - de família

idioms:

• be in the family way    em estado interessante, estar gravida
• family circle    círculo familiar
• family credit    crédito familiar
• family doctor    médico de família
• family jewels    jóias de família
• family man    pai de família
• family name    sobrenome
• family planning    planejamento familiar
• family tree    árvore genealógica
• member of the family    membro de uma família
• run in the family    comum em uma determinada família

Русский (Russian)
семья, семейство, род, племя, группа

idioms:

• be in the family way    находиться в состоянии беременности
• family circle    семейный круг
• family credit    дотация для неимущих семей
• family doctor    семейный врач, терапевт
• family jewels    яйца
• family man    семейный человек
• family name    фамилия
• family planning    планирование рождаемости
• family tree    генеалогическое древо
• member of the family    член семьи, приближенный
• run in the family    являться фамильной чертой

Español (Spanish)
n. - familia, parientes, deudos, familiares, estirpe, linaje, de la familia
adj. - familiar, casero, de la familia

idioms:

• family circle    círculo familiar, (teatro) galería
• family credit    prestación de familia, subsidio familiar
• family doctor    médico de cabecera
• family jewels    joyas de familia, huevos, testículos
• family man    hombre hogareño, padre de familia
• family name    apellido
• family planning    planificación familiar
• family tree    árbol genealógico
• in the family way    embarazada, en estado interesante
• member of the family    pariente, familiar, miembro de la familia
• run in the family    es de familia, viene de familia

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - familj, släkt, stam
adj. - familje-, släkt-

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
家, 家庭, 家族, 家人, 子女, 家庭的, 家族的

idioms:

• be in the family way    怀孕
• family circle    家庭圈子
• family credit    政府定期为低收入家庭提供的家庭补助, 家庭津贴
• family doctor    家庭医生
• family jewels    睾丸
• family man    有家室的人
• family name    姓
• family planning    家庭计划
• family tree    家谱, 系统
• member of the family    家庭成员
• run in the family    世代相传

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 家, 家庭, 家族, 家人, 子女
adj. - 家庭的, 家族的

idioms:

• be in the family way    懷孕
• family circle    全體家人
• family credit    政府定期為低收入家庭提供的家庭補助, 家庭津貼
• family doctor    家庭醫生
• family jewels    睾丸
• family man    有家室的人
• family name    姓
• family planning    家庭計劃
• family tree    家譜, 系統
• member of the family    家庭成員
• run in the family    世代相傳

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 가족(자녀), 가문, 민족
adj. - 가족의, 일가의

idioms:

• be in the family way    임신하여
• run in the family    운영하다

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 家族, 世帯, 子供たち, 家柄, 一族, 科, 語族, 名門

idioms:

• be in the family way    妊娠して
• family circle    内輪, 一家, 家族席
• family coat of arms    家紋
• family credit    家族の信用
• family doctor    主治医
• family jewels    精巣
• family man    所帯持ち, 家庭を大切にする男
• family name    姓, 名字
• family planning    家族計画
• family tree    家系図
• one-parent family    母子/父子家庭
• run in the family    遺伝する

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) عائله (صفه) عائلي‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮משפחה‬
adj. - ‮של משפחה, מאפיין משפחה‬

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