Sociology Now, Census Update

The Family Tree

Unlike most animals, human beings are born helpless. For the first few years of their

lives, they require round-the-clock care, and for the first decade, they require nearly

constant supervision, or they won’t survive to adulthood. But even after they learn

basic survival skills, humans are still not qualified to make their own way in the

world—an adult has to provide for all of their needs for 10 or 15 years or more. You

are born into a group—and your survival depends on it. This is, of course, the family.

Families as Kinship Systems

Every human society has divided the adults into cooperative groups who take charge

of the care and feeding of the children. This is the origin of the family,defined as “the

basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents rearing their children” but

also “any of various social units differing from but regarded as equivalent to the tra-

ditional family”—such as single parents with children, spouses without children, and

several generations living together. Families also refer to those related to you through

blood or marriage, extended back through generations.

Families provide us with a sense of history, both as individuals and as members

of a particular culture. Families themselves are part of kinship systems,cultural forms

that locate individuals in the culture by reference to their families. Kinship systems

are groupings that include all your relatives, mapped as a network from closest

(mother, father, siblings) to a little more distant (cousins, aunts, uncles) to increas-

ingly distant (your great-uncle twice removed). Your kinship system can be imagined

382 CHAPTER 12THE FAMILY

have to take you in.” We believe both statements—in part, sociologists understand, because

both are true. The family has never been more popular in part becauseit is in crisis—and all

the cultural media, from TV to movies to pop songs, are trying to reassert its predominance

in an increasingly individualized and global world. And the family is in crisis in part because

of those institutional forces, like the global marketplace and its ideology of individualism,

which constitute the dominant ideology around the world.

One thing is certain: The family is hardly a separate realm from the rest of society. It is

a political football, tossed around by both liberals and conservatives, who appeal to it

abstractly and develop policies that shape and mold it concretely. It is the foundation of

the economy. And it is the basic building block of society. Always has been. Probably always

will be.

What is the family? Where did it come from? Is it still necessary? How do sociologists

understand the forces the hold it together and the forces that pull it apart?