Extended definition about family Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Extended definition about family - Essay Example There are different types of families, and they are in many settings. The functions and meanings of families depend on their connection to other societal institutions. A common family is a nuclear family, which also refers to conjugal families in the North America and Europe. To sociologists, there is a difference between the nuclear family and the conjugal family. According to them, conjugal families are relatively independent of the relatives of parents and of other families, while the nuclear families are the ones, which maintain a quite close relationship with their relatives.Extended family is also another family, which can mean people who are related by blood, and can refer to people who are related, and their relationships extend beyond the domestic group and do not fit into the conjugal family. These families refer to the normative structure, which is found in a society.All societies show some differences in the composition and outset of families. Sociologists, historians, an d anthropologists dedicate themselves to the understanding of variations, and changes in the family that result after some time. There is also another type of family called the bourgeois and is a family structure, which arises out of the sixteenth and seventeenth century from the European households. This family is formed from the marriage between a man and a woman under strictly defined gender roles. In this type of family, father is given the responsibly of looking income, while a woman has to take care of family matters.... This family is formed from the marriage between a man and a woman under strictly defined gender-roles. In this type of family, father is given the responsibly of looking income, while a woman has to take care of family matters. The huge transformation that led to current marriage in Western democracies was due to the religio-cultural value system provided by Judaism, early Christianity, Roman Catholic laws, and the Protestant Reformation. In some societies, there exist families, which are headed by the same sex. Although there is increasingly acceptance of the families headed by the same sex in the western societies, the heterosexual families are still the norm against which the same sex families are compared to. The rules of heterosexual marriage, which has encouraged same-sex partnerships to think critically about familial relationships, egalitarian strategies of family practices, and to invent creative family forms (Haviland, Prins & Walrath 242). There are also families, which ar e called blended families or stepfamily. These are families, which have mixed parents, whereby, one or both parents have remarried, and have children of the previous family in the present family. The affiliate of the couple to whom the child is not naturally linked is the stepparents. If the stepparents legally adopt the partners’ children, they become their legal parents. In this case, they may stop using the terms stepparent. However, some emotional issues that are common to stepfamilies may continue to be a problem. Family members should bond with their stepfamilies as with the biological families. Additionally, there are traditional and non-traditional families. The traditional families are those