FAMILY

Meaning of Family

Meaning of Family

Unique and Important Characteristics of the Family

The family in the sense of a group comprising parents and offspring is universal (Hill, 1949). Such groups exist even at the subhuman level and are often associated with stability, faithfulness, and sacrifice for offspring which commands respect in terms of human values. Interwoven with hordes, bands, tribes, and communities, the nuclear family, consisting of parents and their own offspring, is a basic fact in human association. Even complicated nonmonogamous family structures may be plausibly analyzed to support this claim to universality. The family provides the outstanding example of a primary group (Goldscheider & Waite, 1991). Family interaction is perhaps the ultimate in face-to-face intimacy and meaningfulness (Williams, Sawyer & Wahlstrom, 2005). It is primary in its early effect on the individual, in its simplicity of structure, and in its importance as affecting personality. Simple and primary though it is, as compared with, say, the United Nations, it can be regarded as a miniature society in which a wide range of human motives and social processes are to be found.

The family is unique in providing continuity of social life. This continuity has a dual aspect. Predominantly in the family situation there is a meeting of strains of germ plasm which organically projects the older generation into the younger. It is largely in the family setting that chromosomes and genes carry on their mysterious processes which create children more or less in the biological image of their parents. There is also a cultural aspect to the continuity provided by family relationships. Speech, customs, beliefs, and other aspects of the social heritage are still transmitted powerfully in the early years of parent-child contact. The more recent and diversified cultural accumulations are transmitted in the schools, but parents give to children the basic heritage of the past which prepares them to receive a still fuller heritage. The family, then, is a meeting ground of the generations, a segment of an ongoing biosocial process. Any family is subject to the influence of ancestors long since dead, and family roles are played with reference to children as yet unborn. (Hill, 1949)

The influence of the family upon larger social groups is very great although the interrelationships between family and society are highly complicated. It is generally agreed that the family trains for social participation. We accept Hill's dictum that the family as a primary group is a nursery of human nature (Hill, 1949). It is assumed that good families make good citizens. Citizenship involves control and conscience. Parents are expected to implant in children the type of conscience that is sensitive to the moral standards of the group. Parents are informally appointed as policemen to use or abuse the power conferred upon them by society.

Family experience is the source of many basic human motivations which play an important part in the larger social life (Williams, Sawyer & Wahlstrom, 2005). The prototype of altruism and humanitarianism may be found in the sympathetic and self-sacrificing role of ...