The Definition of Family, Essay Example

The family is two or more people that are considered to be related by blood, marriage, or adoption.  There are two types of family that include the nuclear family – the parents, siblings, or spouse – and the extended family – the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.  The role of the family is to provide many different kinds of support and development for the individuals within the family, especially the children, as well as the overall development of society.  This support can be in the form of financial, health care, producing socialized individuals, being involved in recreation, and reproducing children.  The family is supposed to reproduce children and teach them how to be upstanding members of society.  The parents are also in charge of providing financial economic development and production into society by working a job and paying taxes on their services provided, services received, and the house or car that they own.

The definition of family is different for each individual ethnicity.  For instance, Hispanics are very family-oriented.  They believe in a close, tight-nit family where each member takes care of one another, and typically the family members live with one another for most of their lives, or at least live within the same area so that they can visit frequently.  This is also very similar to many Asian families.  People of Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese backgrounds are also very closely grounded to their families.  They live with one another for most of their lives, and very seldom do members of the family move away from their parents.  As society continues to evolve, this view has changed a little because now, more than ever, children are leaving the home to go away to college.  Still, it is usually the case that the children will return after earning their degrees and come back home to live with the family and help support them.  In Asian cultures it is not rare to see the nuclear and extended family members living under the same household.  Typically, Hispanic families live near their extended family members, but the nuclear family is all that lives under the same roof.  The view of marriage has changed in today’s society because of the economic and social changes associated with the view of the roles of men and women.  For instance, women can now hold jobs and can even be the breadwinner in the family, while the man is a stay-at-home dad.  Equality has led to reversed roles and unclear role definitions in a marriage.  Also, this trend has forced people to become more independent and career or goal-oriented than ever before.  More efforts are spent on trying to achieve alone than with a family.  This does not even take into consideration that many people feel that homosexuals should be allowed to be married.  These different societal changes have caused a change in the way we view marriage in recent years.

There are many different threats to the common view of family in our society today.  The first major threat is divorce where parents legally destruct the marriage and re-enter separate, single lives from one another.  This puts a lot of stress on the child because they are able to see failure in their parents, where they may not have seen it before.  Children tend to blame themselves for divorce.  Divorce can cause many different types of psychological and physiological damage within the family.  Today, over 50% of marriages are likely to end up in divorce in the United States.  It used to be very difficult to receive a divorce, until the late 1970s with the passage of laws various laws in states like California that allowed for an easier way of divorcing a spouse.  Today, adultery is the number one cause of divorce.

Violence is also another major threat to the family structure, and it can come in all different forms including domestic abuse, spouse abuse, and child abuse.  Abuse can also come in the form of physical abuse, sexual abuse, or emotional abuse that can alter a person’s opinion of themselves or self-image.  Each of these forms of violence tends to cause a very large divide between children and their parents or a divide between the two spouses themselves.  Abuse can cause many psychological and physical problems for the victim.  There are many laws on the books against domestic violence, which are in place to help protect children and spouses that cannot protect themselves.  Sexual abuse and sodomy are also very serious emotional and physical forms of abuse that are also against the law in many states such as Connecticut.