People who live together as a unit through marriage, blood or adaptation bonds form a family. A family consisting of an adult couple and their children is called a nuclear family or a nuclear family. A nuclear family system is a family structure consisting of a couple living with their children. This is very different from an extended family system where the household may include other family members such as grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, etc. A nuclear family is a family in which both parents are present, unlike a single-parent family in which only one parent is present. It`s also against a larger, extended family that includes grandparents. .
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- The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family - Nuclear Family Emotional Process
- The Royal Society Publishing - The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences
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Alternate titles: elementary family, two-parent family
By The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Article History
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nuclear family, also called elementary family, in sociology and anthropology, a group of people who are united by ties of partnership and parenthood and consisting of a pair of adults and their socially recognized children. Typically, but not always, the adults in a nuclear family are married. Although such couples are most often a man and a woman, the definition of the nuclear family has expanded with the advent of same-sex marriage. Children in a nuclear family may be the couple’s biological or adopted offspring.
Thus defined, the nuclear family was once widely held to be the most basic and universal form of social organization. Anthropological research, however, has illuminated so much variability of this form that it is safer to assume that what is universal is a “nuclear family complex” in which the roles of husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister are embodied by people whose biological relationships do not necessarily conform to the Western definitions of these terms. In matrilineal societies, for example, a child may be the responsibility not of his biological genitor but of his mother’s brother, who fulfills the roles typical of Western fatherhood.
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family law: The two-parent familyClosely related in form to the predominant nuclear-family unit are the conjugal family and the consanguineal family. As its name implies, the conjugal family is knit together primarily by the marriage tie and consists of mother, father, their children, and some close relatives. The consanguineal family, on the other hand, typically groups itself around a unilineal descent group known as a lineage, a form that reckons kinship through either the father’s or the mother’s line but not both. Whether a culture is patrilineal or matrilineal, a consanguineal family comprises lineage relatives and consists of parents, their children, and their children’s children. Rules regarding lineage exogamy, or out-marriage, are common in these groups; within a given community, marriages thus create cross-cutting social and political ties between lineages.
The stability of the conjugal family depends on the quality of the marriage of the husband and wife, a relationship that is more emphasized in the kinds of industrialized, highly mobile societies that frequently demand that people reside away from their kin groups. The consanguineal family derives its stability from its corporate nature and its permanence, as its relationships emphasize the perpetuation of the line.