The family is a social system and primary reference group made up of two or more persons living together who are related by blood, mariege, or adoption or who are living together by agreement over a period of time.
The family unit is characterized by face-to-face contact, bonds of affection, love, harmony, simultaneous competition and mutual concern, a continuity pf past, present, and future, shared goals and identity, and behaviors and rituals common only to the specific unit. With the family, the person can usually let down his guard and be more himself than other people.
The family may be nuclear (mother, father, child), extended (nuclear plus other relatives of either of both spouses live together), patriarchal (the man has the main authority and decision-making power), matriarchal (the woman has the main authority), or reconstituted (one divorced or widowed adult with all or some of his/her children and a new spouse with all or some of his/her children, so that parents, step-parents, children, and stepchildren live together).
Or the family may be made up of siblings, especially in middle or late life, homosexuals, friends in a commune, or a male and female living together without being married. The family may be symbolically duplicated in the work setting: a woman may be perceived as a grandfather, father, or brother to an employee. The family member who is dead or missing may remain clearly in the other members` memory; they may refer to the person on special occasions. Or the deviant the family-the alcoholic or runaway-may influence other family members to act in an opposite manner.
The family may also be a series of separate but interrelated families. The middle-aged parents are helping the adolescent and young adult offspring to be emancipated from the home while simultaneously they have increasingly dependent parents to care for, and sometimes up to four pairs of grandparents and older aunts and uncles as well. All related family members may not live under the same roof (in fact, they never did in America), but the extended family exists in spirit. Often the responsibility is nearly overwhelming to the middle-agers, who have no time or care for a number of relatives and in-laws can contribute to marital disharmony as well as poor relationships between the generations.
The elderly person sometimes is aware of such a situation and will try to make minimal demands. Often he feels that he deserves the attention and may make extra demands or chastise the middle-aged offspring for not doing more for the elder family members.
The mass media present a picture of family life dissolving in the United States. Although the divorce rate is approximately 40 to 50 percent, most divorced people remarry. Because of the greater life expectancy and the young age of marriage, the young couple of today enter and remain in marriage longer than did their grandparents.
References :
Lidz, Theodore, The Person : His Development Throughout the Life Cycle. New York : Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963.
Messer, Alfred, The Individual in His Family : An Adaptational Study. Springfield, III.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970.
Bell, Robert, Marriage and Family Interaction. Homewood, III.: The Dorsey Press, Inc., 1963.
Murray, RB and Zentner JP., Nursing Concepts for Health Promotion, Second Edtion, Prentice-Hall, Inc, Englewood Cliffs, N.J, 1979.
