Just Some Great Stuff About Family Theory

Ideas about human families can come from many sources, including scientific disciplines concerned with the study of entities that are not families, as well as personal experiences with our own families. No potential source should be dismissed, although we should be aware that those sources selected likely will affect key features of the theory that emerges. Most of the family theories that exist today draw on ideas from external sources. Family theories are not insulated sets of ideas, and family theorists do not merely talk to each other about family ideas. For a theory to be about families, there must be at least one family concept in the theory. We cannot decide what a family concept is, however, unless we first decide what a family is. Let us, therefore, begin by thinking of a family as a social group. We need to identify the distinguishing features of this group. Following are some of the major ways that families differ from such groups as associations of coworkers and networks of close friends.

1. Families last for a considerably longer period of time than do most other social groups.

Of course, some relationships in families are not enduring. Marriages can be broken by divorce or death fairly soon after they are formed. Yet we normally think of our own families as lasting throughout our lifetimes. We actually are born into a family that already exists. Our parents remain parents even after we become adults. We add members to the family when we marry and become parents. Our siblings remain siblings throughout our lifetimes. Although it is possible for coworkers and close friends to maintain relationships for long periods of time, families are the only groups that virtually require lifetime membership, even though some members are added and subtracted along the way. Belonging to a family is involuntary in the sense that we do not choose which parents are going to give birth to us. Other groups tend to be much more voluntary, in that we have some choice about joining them in the first place.

2. Families are intergenerational.

Through the act of giving birth, families include people who are related as parents and children. If elders live long enough, we have ties to grandparents, and maybe even to great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. At some point, we ordinarily have living members of both older and younger generations, and we may eventually become grandparents or great-grandparents ourselves. Other kinds of groups may include people with fairly large age differences, but families are the only groups that virtually guarantee this.

The fact that the human infant at birth is a helpless creature and cannot approach self-sufficiency for almost 20 years means that the intergenerational bond is particularly crucial to human survival. Every child needs some sort of caretaker and caregiver, whether it is a biological parent, an adoptive or foster parent, or somebody else who takes the responsibility for providing nurturance during the early years of life. It is no accident that our image of family includes an intergenerational component.

3. Families contain both biological and affinal (e.g., legal, common law) relationships between members.

It is the biological act of birth that creates the fundamental family tie. This act also means that we share at least some inherited characteristics or proclivities with family members that are directly or indirectly related to us by birth. At least until humans perfect the cloning of adults, and perhaps even then, the process of becoming a person will be based to some degree on biology. Families are in the business of producing and sustaining persons and personhood. Even though work groups or friendship groups may sometimes contain biologically related members, such groups tend to have other purposes.

There is also a social side to this process of creating persons. No society leaves the biological act of birth or the rearing of children to chance. Personhood is achieved through a process of socialization. That socialization is subject to secular and religious rules about how the process should be carried out. Pursuant to these rules, family members have rights and obligations, which tend to be codified in both laws and informal agreements.

Aside from adoption, the major legal provision about families concerns marriage. We may not think of a marriage in itself as constituting a family, but we recognize marital relationships as part of families. Some families are conjugal, in that they contain one or more marriages. It might even be argued that if humans didn’t have families they wouldn’t need marriages, although families may often function well without marriage. In any case, marriage itself involves rights and obligations under the law, and it also creates family ties in law. Some of our family members join and leave the group either because of our own marriages and divorces or because of the marriages and divorces of other family members.

Other kinds of groups are subject to regulation by laws (e.g., contracts) and informal agreements, of course. Such regulations may exclude as well as include people in work and friendship groups, and they govern proper conduct within such groups. What such groups do not have, however, are relationships anything quite like, for example, cousins or aunts and nephews, which arise because our mother’s sister is married.

4. The biological (and affinal) aspect of families links them to a larger kinship organization.

It follows from what we already have said that families are not just small groups of closely related individuals who live together or interact on a frequent basis. Families extend outward to include anybody sufficiently related to us by blood, marriage, or adoption. This kinship group may have the identifiable boundaries of a clan, or it may be loosely organized and diffuse. Everybody stops counting distant relatives as family members at some point along the periphery. Nevertheless, the ties of kinship create the potential for lineages and collateral (i.e., within generation) family relationships that can become quite extensive. Through kinship, families are tied to history, tradition, and multiple generations of group members. In some societies, these kinship groups are major features of the social, cultural, political, and economic landscape. Work and friendship groups tend to be much more temporally and spatially encapsulated.