When we are born, many of us are welcomed by parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other kin. Being fed and held, and gazing into our carer’s eyes, stimulates hormones that help us build strong biological and social bonds, especially in the earliest days of life. We experience love and learn about trust. The caring people fall in love with us too, and they recognize each other in us. Their shared love for us strengthens their bonds with each other and inspires them to work together to protect and provide for us and each other. These strong social bonds can be eroded by trauma, absence, illness, or abuse. Even then, we often go to great lengths to preserve these family bonds. For those who are unable to preserve them, the absence of these strong connections can be devastating.

If we lose the first people who care for us, we need to be welcomed, loved, and protected by other kin and caregivers. As we grow, we may cultivate new loves. Our kin will welcome our most dearly beloved, and their kin will welcome us, and we may welcome children of our own. The love, care, and commitment that flows between children, parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and other kin is embodied in culturally specific ways of being and doing that connect us to the memory of our ancestors and the hope of future descendants. We call this dynamic social system of love and kinship a family.

It is important to keep in mind that the historic legacy of settler colonialism and enslavement continues to undermine the traditional family structures of indigenous and immigrant, as well as under-resourced, communities. It is also important that human services workers understand the harm that is possible when we project our biases about what counts as family onto the people we work with.

Keep in mind the difference between a household and a family. Some human services workers, such as supportive housing case managers, work with household units, often a parent and children. In these situations, it is helpful to remember that a household may be part of a larger family unit that includes grandparents, siblings who reside elsewhere, and elder relatives.

Structures

Families can be understood as social units that consist of people who are biologically, socially, and/or legally connected to each other. It is a universal fact that every human comes from a family, but beyond this fact, it is hard to define the structure of families in universal terms. For example, many definitions of family also include shared residence, but parents and children don’t stop being family when kids move out or parents divorce, and many family members share intimate familial bonds without ever living together. Many definitions, like the introduction above, center the care of children as a defining characteristic of families, but some families are childless.

It is hard to definitively describe family structure because family is a social construction. A social construction is a mutual understanding and accepted reality created by members of a society, something that is not determined by biology or the natural world (Pearce, 2024). Social constructions are determined by their social context, while biologically determined phenomena are constant.

The fact that families exist everywhere indicates that some things about families are constant. For example, pair bonding, reproduction, aging, and death are biological processes. The universal helplessness of human babies, the physical vulnerability of elderly people, and the human need for connection are also fixed in our biology. The diverse ways groups of people have organized themselves in families in response to these bio-social needs and processes are dynamic adaptations to their specific historical, political, and geographical contexts.

The nuclear family is dominant in the imagination of contemporary society and is sometimes idealized as “traditional.” It is actually a relatively new family structure when compared with authentically traditional family structures in indigenous, non-Western, and pre-industrial European societies. For a quick rundown on traditional family structures, check out the video in figure 8.2.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T6v3DhGhTc

Many social science textbooks classify family structures by comparing them to a nuclear family, which has been incorrectly standardized as a normative family structure. This idealized self-sufficient family unit usually consists of two parents and one or more children. Contemporary variations on nuclear families have been expanded to include same-sex parents and children who may not be biologically related to one or both of their parents. Contemporary “blended” families can be understood as remixed nuclear families. Multigenerational extended families, in which a nuclear family expands to include elder relatives and adult children, are becoming more common and resemble more traditional family structures.

We must consider that families look and sound many different ways, depending on social constructs. They can evolve, so allowing flexibility to be part of the narrative we have with family understanding is critical. A children’s book that can be helpful in understanding a wide representation of what different families can look like is And That’s Their Family! (Coleman & Malone, 2023). The book goes into giving visual examples of polyamorous families, multigenerational families, and single-parent households that have siblings raising siblings, which for many is a common practice not seen in many mainstream conversations.

It is also common for people to live together and start families without officially getting married. In 2018, 9% of people ages 18 to 24 lived with an unmarried partner, compared to 7% percent who lived with a spouse. About 22% of young parents in the US live with a spouse, while 30% live in an unmarried partnership. Additionally, 6% of couples over age 65 who live together are not married (Gurrentz, 2019; Valerio, 2021). The birthrate in the United States dropped after COVID, according to the PEW Research Center, though it had been dropping since 2018. “Some 44% of non-parents ages 18 to 49 say it is not too or not at all likely that they will have children someday, an increase of 7 percentage points from the 37% who said the same in a 2018 survey. Meanwhile, 74% of adults younger than 50 who are already parents say they are unlikely to have more kids, virtually unchanged since 2018” (Brown, 2021, para. 2).

Functions

While there can be great diversity in how families are structured, the functions of families and the essential contributions that families make to society are generally consistent. Whatever their structure, families function to stabilize a society. They are a primary source for emotional connection and social identity for their members. They also help socialize children to the norms of their society. Because families operate in alignment with a society’s existing power dynamics, they can either reproduce or interrupt social inequality present in their society. Families also help regulate sexual activity and reproduction within their society. Most importantly, families provide the context for children’s social and emotional development.

We function at our best when our basic psychological need for connection is well supported (Deci & Ryan, 1985). Social identity theory describes how the social groups we belong to are foundational to who we understand ourselves to be, our sense of self. We identify with and favor people within our social groups, and we tend to “other” those who are not in our social groups. As the first social group where we experience belonging, our family profoundly influences our sense of who we are.

However, this experience of feeling like we belong to our families is unfortunately not universal. At times, this first interaction with families can impact clients so deeply that it can be the reason they reach out to human service providers. This is when we must consider our own bias when working with clients and what clients’ needs may be as they move towards their socialization needs. What is our experience with feeling like we belong? How do we look at the word family? What structure does family have for us? What function does it serve?

Socialization

Socialization is the process through which we learn the culture of the social groups that we belong to. If social identity helps us understand who we are, socialization is the way we learn how to be. Families are primary agents of socialization and social control. On a biological level, socialization is integral to cognitive development. It includes learning about language, symbols, values, beliefs, norms, folkways, taboos, and culture. Power structures, which are embedded in culture, are also reproduced and sustained through socialization.

In monocultural societies, where family groups share an ethnicity, race, religion, and/or politics, families reproduce the norms and practices that define and sustain the dominant culture through socialization. This process assures continuity for the society as a whole. In multicultural societies, socialization can include both culturally specific learning to reproduce traditional life-ways and social learning related to the larger multicultural society, including how we navigate cultural differences and respond to people who are “not like us.”

Socialization in families also reinforces the power structures of a society as we learn about our own social location. Social location includes our gender, class, race, and other indicators of social difference to which social power attaches. Internalized oppression, which can include ideas about identity-based inferiority and superiority, is a term that describes socially learned systems of social dominance.

Through direct and indirect instruction, play, and observation, we learn gender norms. We are socialized to class by the food and aesthetics we learn to like, the kinds of work we are prepared for, and our attitudes toward material resources. Our families are also where we first learn about race. In contemporary American society, socialization around gender, class, and race often includes overt messages of tolerance and equality that coexist with deeply internalized, though sometimes unconscious, attitudes that uphold and perpetuate classism, sexism, and racism. Cognitive dissonance is a term that describes the phenomenon of learning and holding conflicting beliefs and ideas.

Sexual socialization in families teaches and enforces culturally specific social norms about when sex is okay, what kinds of sex are okay (as in figure 8.3), and how unsanctioned sex and reproduction are tolerated or disciplined. In addition to being a primary agent of sexual socialization, the family as a unit functions to control and regulate sexual activity within a society.

Children are not an essential component of family, but for families with children, a primary function of families is to support optimal child development. However, as we know, child development may be essential but not the only part of socialization that happens within families.

As mentioned above, families are not just related by blood. For many communities the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” is meant literally. The teachings of language, food, music, how one cares for loved ones, the responsibilities we have to the land, spiritual practices, coming of age rituals, and the views of life and death and how we are interdependent on one another: all are taught as part of how we function as a family and that translates to how we function in society.

Licenses and Attributions

Open Content, Original

“Families” by Nora Karena is licensed under CC BY 4.0. Revised by Martha Ochoa-Leyva.

Open Content, Shared Previously

Figure 8.1. Photo by Tyler Nix is licensed under the Unsplash license.

Figure 8.2. “Where does the Nuclear Family Come From?” by PBS Origins is licensed under the Standard YouTube License.

Figure 8.3. DC Gay Pride 2011 by Tim Evanston is licensed under CC BY SA 2.0