Defining Family

Definitions of Family

While defining the term family some social scientists have seen the family as a universal institution. Others have used the terms to refer to a distinctive characteristic of the social life. Functionalist perspective defined family in terms of activity and their effect on society. Marxist perspective explains the family as the basic unit of oppression and to envisage its eventual abolition. Some of the major definitions of family are as follows:

The word ‘family’ is derived from Latin Word “Famulus” which means a servant.

1. MacIver and Page defined “family is a group defined by a sex relationship sufficiently precise and enduring to provide for procreation and upbringing of children”

2. Levi Strauss (1971) has described family and its structures and functions in the following manner: ‘social groups that originate in marriage, they consist of husband, wife, and children born of their union (although is some family forms other relatives are included); they bind members with legal, economic, and religious bonds as well as duties and privileges; and they provide a network of sexual privileges and prohibitions, and varying degrees of love, respect, and affection’

3. According to M.F. Nimkoff; “Family is a more or less durable association of Husband and Wife with or without child, or of a man or women alone, with children”.

4. GP Murdock; Family is a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship and one or more children own or adopted of the sexually cohabiting adults.

5. Family is also defined as ‘a group of individuals related to one another by blood ties, marriage or adoption, who form an economic unit, the adult members of which are responsible for the upbringing of children’ (Giddens, 2010)

 6. Kingsley Davis – In his book "Human society" – defines family as – "Family is a group of persons whose relation to one another are based upon cons equinity and who are therefore kin to one another”.

Elements of Family

The above given definitions reveal certain elements of family which are as follows:

1) The family is a basic, definite and enduring group.

2) Family is formed by the relatively durable companionship of husband, wife.

3) Family procreates and bringing up children.

4) The Family can also be large in size in which persons belonging to several generations may live together.

5) The family may be limited to husband, wife or only the father and his children or only the mother and her children.

Characteristics of the Family

According to MacIver and Page the Family has the following features: 

1. Universality - family is found in each stage of society and everywhere. There is no society without family. There is not a single man who does not belong to one or other kind of family". Anderson.

2. Social environment which Influence the Individual’s early life.

3. Affective basis, emotionality

4. Limited size - Gisbert "Husband, wife and children". Family is limited in size in comparison to other groups. Joint family is large whereas nuclear family is small.

5. Central position in social structure

6. Sense of responsibility among the members.

7. Social regulation of behavior

8. Permanent or temporary in nature

Functions of the family

The family as a social institution performs several functions. Different thinkers of the world expressed different opinion regarding the functions of the family.

Kingsley Davis speaks of four main functions of the family: (i) Reproduction (ii) Maintenance, (iii) Placement, and (iv) Socialization

On burn and Nimkoff have mentioned six major functions of the family (i) Affectional (ii) Economic (iii) Recreational (iv) protective, (v) Religious, and (vi)Educational

According to Goode the family has the following functions : (i) procreation, (ii) Socio- economic security to family members (iii) Determination of status of family members (iv) socialization and emotional support (v) social control

The functions identified by Murdock are: (1) sex (socially approved sexual relationship), (2) reproduction, (3) education (enculturation) and (4) subsistence (sexual division of labour).

Primary and secondary functions of Family

The primary functions of family are basic to its continued existence. They are referred to as essential functions by MacIver. They may also be regarded as primary functions of family. They are

1. Stable satisfaction of Sex Need

Sex done is powerful in human beings. Man is susceptible to sexual stimulation throughout his life. The sex need is irresistible also. It motivates man to seek an established basis of its satisfaction. Family regulates the sexual behaviour of man by its agent, the marriage. The Hindu Law gives Manu, and Vatsyayana, the author of Kamasutra, have stated that sexual satisfaction is one of the main aims of family life.

2. Reproduction or Procreation

Reproductive activity is carried on by all lower and higher animals. But it is an activity that needs control or regulation. The result of sexual satisfaction is reproduction. The process of reproduction is institutionalizes in the family. Hence it assumes a regularity and stability that all societies recognize as desirable. By fulfilling its reproductive function family has made it possible to have the propagation of species and the perpetuation of the human race.

3. Production and Rearing of the child

The family gives the individual his life and a chance to survive. We won our life to the family. The human infancy is a prolonged one. The child which is helpless at the time of birth is given the needed protection of the family. Family is an institution; no other institution can as efficiently bring up the child as can the family. This can be referred to as the function of ‘maintenance’ also.

4. Provision of Home

Family provides the home for its members. The desire for home is strongly felt in men and women. Children are born and brought up in Homes only. Even the parents who work outside are dependent on home for comfort, protection and peace. Home remains still the ‘Sweet’ home.

5. Family an Instrument of Culture Transmission and An Agent of Socialization.

The family guarantees not only the biological continuity of the human race but also the cultural continuity of the society of which it is a part. It transmits ideas and ideologies, folkways and mores, customs and traditions, beliefs and values from one generation to the next. The family is an agent of socialisation also. Socialisation is its service to the individual. The family indoctrinates the child with the values, the morals, beliefs and ideals of society. It prepares its children for participation in larger world and acquaints them with a large culture. It is a chief agency which prepares the new generation for life in community. It emotionally conditions the child. It lays down the basic plan of personality. Indeed, it shapes the personality of the child. Family is a mechanism for disciplining the child in terms of cultural goals. In short, it transforms the infant barbarian into the civilized adult.

6. Status ascribing function

The family also performs a pair of function. (i) Status ascription for the individual and (ii) Societal identification for the individual. Statuses are divided in to “ Ascribed and Achieved’’. The family provides the ascribed statuses. Two of these, age and sex are biological ascriptions. Others, however, are social ascriptions. It is the family that serves almost exclusively as the conferring agency or institution. People recognize us by our names, and our names are given to us by our family. Here, the family is the source of our social identification. Various statuses are initially ascribed by our families. Our ethnic status, our nationality status, our religious status or residential status, or class status sometimes our political status and our educational statuses are all conferred upon us by our families. Of course, these may be changed later. Wherever statuses are inherited it is the family that serves as the controlling mechanism. Status ascription and social identification are two faces of the same process. The importance of family in this regard can hardly be exaggerated.

7. Affectional Function

Man has his physical, as well as mental needs. He requires the fulfillment of both of these needs. Family is an institution which provides the mental or emotional satisfaction and security to its individual members. It is the family which provides the most intimate and the dearest relationship for all its members. The individual first experiences affection in his parental family as parents and siblings offer him love, sympathy and affection. Lack of affection actually damages an infant’s ability to thrive. A person who has never been loved is seldom happy.

Secondary Functions of Family

In addition to the above described essential or Primary Functions the family performs some secondary or non-essential functions in some way or the other. Of these, the following may be noted (1) Economic Functions (2) Educational Functions (3) Religious Functions (4) The Re-creational functions

1. Economic Function

The family fulfils the economic needs of its members. This has been the traditional function of family. Previously, the family was an economic unit. Goods were produced in the family. Men used to work in family or in farms for the production of goods. Family members used to work together for this purpose. It was to a great extent self-sufficient. But today the situation has changed. The family members do not work together at home. They are engaged in different economic activities outside the same. They are no longer held together by division of labour. The economic role of modern family is considerably modified. The process of industrialization has affected family. The centre of production has moved from home to thef actory. The factory job is given only to the individual worker and not to the entire family. The factory is producing goods which are consumed with in the family. Thus, family has become more a consuming unit than a producing one. Its members are busy with “earning wages” rather than with “making a living”. Family is thus slowly transferring its economic functions to the external agencies. Still, the institution of property is embedded with the family.

2. Educational Functions

The family provides the basis for the child’s formal learning. In spite of great changes, the family still gives the child his basic training in the social attitudes and habits important to adult participation in social life. When the child grows up, he learns to manage situations outside the home and family. He extends his interests to other groups. With all this his intelligence, his emotions and his social habits develop until he wears himself from the original dependence on the mother, father and other family members

3. Religious functions

The family is a centre for the religious training of the children. The children learn from their parents various religious virtues. Previously, the home was also centers of religious quest. The family used to teach the children the religious values, moral precepts, way to worshipping God, etc. The family meets the spiritual needs of its members. It is through the family that the religious inheritance is passed on to the next generation.

4. The Recreational Functions

At one time, recreation was largely family based. It fostered a close solidarity. Reading aloud, Hoisting relatives, family reunions, church socials, singing, dancing, playing indoor games etc., brought together the entire family. Elders would orgnise social gathering among themselves in each other’s homes. Children would organise their own recreations among themselves or together with other children. Often parents and children would join together in the same recreational activities. The effect of this on the cohesion of the family was considerable. Recreation is now increasingly orgnaized out side the family. Modern recreation is not designed for family - wide participation.

Families, Households and Domestic Groups

 A family can be defined as the smallest group of individuals who see themselves as connected to one another. They are usually part of larger kinship groups, but with whom they may not interact on a daily basis. Families tend to reside together and share economic opportunities and other rights and responsibilities. Family rights and responsibilities are a significant part of understanding families and how they work. In the United States, for example, minor children have a right to be supported materially by their parents or other legal guardians. Parents have a responsibility to support and nurture their children. Spouses have a right to mutual support from each other and property acquired during a marriage is considered “common property” in many U.S. states unless specified otherwise by a pre-nuptial agreement. Some family responsibilities are cultural and not legal. Many such responsibilities are reinforced by religious or other ideological notions.

 Family members who reside together are called households. A household may include larger kinship groups who think of themselves as separate but related families. Households may also include non-family or kin members, or could even consist exclusively of non-related people who think of themselves as family. Many studies of families cross-culturally have focused on household groups because it is households that are the location for many of the day-to-day activities of a society. Households are important social units in any community Sometimes families or households are spread across several residential units but think of themselves as a single group for many purposes. In Croatia, because of urban housing constraints, some extended family households operate across one or more residential spaces. An older couple and their married children might live in apartments near each other and cooperate on childcare and cooking as a single household unit. Domestic group is another term that can be used to describe a household.

Domestic groups can describe any group of people who reside together and share activities pertaining to domestic life including but not limited to childcare, elder care, cooking and economic support, even if they might not describe themselves as “family.” Households may include nuclear families, extended families, joint extended families, or even combinations of families that share a residence and other property as well as rights and responsibilities. In certain regions of Croatia large agricultural households were incredibly numerous. In a region known as Slavonia, which from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries was was near the border of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Families in portions of this region were referred to as zadruzi (plural) or a zadruga (singular). They sometimes numbered up to 100 members, all related through blood and marriage. But these households were much more than a nuclear or even a joint extended family. They were more like small towns with specialists within the household group who did things such as shoe horses or sew. These very large households supported a military culture where men between sixteen and sixty years old had to be ready for military service. A Croatian anthropologist in the 1800s reported that one family was so large that an elderly woman died and this was not noticed for three days! The local government in this case forced the family to divide, separating their property and residing in smaller numbers.

The Developmental cycle; Meyer Fortes

We can set up a paradigm distinguishing three main stages or phases in the developmental cycle of the domestic group. First there is a phase of expansion that lasts from the marriage of two people until the completion of their family of procreation. The biological limiting factor here is the duration of the wife’s (or wives’) fertility. In structural terms it corresponds to the period during which all the offspring of the parents are economically, affectively and jurally dependent on them. Secondly, and often overlapping the first phase in time (hence my preference for the term ‘phase’ instead of ‘ stage’), there is the phase of dispersion or fission. This begins with the marriage of the oldest child and continues until all the children are married. Where the custom by which the youngest child remains to take over the family estate is found, this commonly marks the beginning of the final phase. This is the phase of replacement, which ends with the death of the parents and the replacement in the social structure of the family they founded by the families of their children, more specifically, by the family of the father’s heir amongst the children.

Mutatis mutandis this paradigm can be applied to all social systems. The birth of a couple’s first child, so frequently picked out by special ritual observances, which initiates the phase of expansion, and the marriage of their oldest child, which precipitates the eventual dissolution and replacement of their domestic group, are always critical episodes in the developmental cycle. But they are not, of course, the only critical turning points. The initiation, retirement, or death of a member of the group may be equally important. In short, by the structural and cultural variables involved in the developmental cycle I mean all the forces generated by the social structure, and all the customs and institutions through which these forces and the values they reflect are manifested. Biological laws ensure that children inexorably grow up if they are not cut off by death. Growing up requires a minimum time span, at least fifteen years for the attainment of physiological maturity, and often rather longer for the attainment of social maturity. The complex and fundamental tasks of child-rearing imposed on the domestic group by this fact generates critical forces for its cycle of development.

A comparison of the Iban situation with that of the Fulani or LoDagaba shows this very clearly. A Fulani wife has no choice. Before she becomes a mother she is under her father’s jural authority and resides in his camp; when she becomes a mother she comes wholly under her husband’s authority and consequently moves to reside permanently with him. Among the Iban there is ostensibly more choice. One could say that post-marital residence is either virilocal or uxorilocal at will. What in fact happens is that marriage precipitates fission, and its concomitant economic partition, in the natal domestic group of one of the spouses, and this spouse moves out of the group. Which of the spouses moves depends on the stage in the developmental cycle reached by the domestic group at the time of the marriage. If the domestic group consists of parents and two or more children and the one who marries is the oldest of the siblings, he or she will normally move out irrespective of sex. But if the marrying one is the last child remaining in the family after the others have married and hived off, he or she stays on as prospective heir to the parents and is joined in his or her natal home by the spouse. Whether a married couple reside ‘virilocally’ or ‘uxorilocally’ is, therefore, not an arbitrary choice but depends upon which of them is seceding from his or her natal bilek. This is correlated with. the developmental stage of the bilek, but to see why this is so we must understand the forces behind bilek fission. What they come down to is the jural principles and economic requirements which give the conjugal bond precedence over the sibling bond in the social structure and vest authority and power over productive and reproductive resources in the married partners.

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