12-01: Family Studies - Dynamics and Key Terms

  • Census family: A family is a unit consisting of a married couple living with or without never married children or a single parent living with never married children (based on residence)
  • Legal family: It is a unit of emotional and financial dependency, whether it includes single parents with children, gay/lesbian partners, or unmarried couples. Any legal exclusion for this socially/legally sanctioned state violates human dignity
  • Vanier Institute: 2+ people bound together over time by mutual consent, birth, or adoption/placement that practice the following responsibilities - physical care and maintenance of members, reproduction (adding new members), socialization of children, control of members, production/consumption/distribution, affective nurturance/love
  • Family of orientation: family you’re born into
  • Family of procreation: family that you form
  • Zimmerman: 6 basic functions of the family ––– Reproduction - maintaining a stable population and helps society gain a competitive advantage which leads to a wealthier society; Provide physical care - when they can't care for their members, it will be hard unless society is organized to replace the family in this function; Socialize children - teaching the skills, knowledge, values, and attitude of society, role assumption, primary agent of socialization; Controlling behavior of members to retain familial/societal order & offer feedback while evaluating members’ behavior - feedback contributes to socialization; Families maintain morale & motivate societal participation - assume that affective nurturance = love for members of family unit is the motivator which encourages people to meet other members’ emotional needs; Producing and consuming goods - people sell their time and skills w/i the economy & buy goods and services with their income for their families 
  • Nuclear family: 2 parents in children (usually straight and married)
  • Extended family: Parents, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents & blood relatives
  • Blended family: 2 adults now in a relationship from previous relationships where current and past kids live together
  • Childless family: couple without kids
  • Cohabitating family: 2 sexually intimate adults who live together but aren’t married
  • Monogamous marriage: 2 people exclusively married
  • Polygamy: marriage between more than 2 people
  • Polygyny: 1 husband married to many wives
  • Polyandry: 1 wife married to many husbands
  • Marriage: A legally recognized relationship usually involving economic, social, emotional, and sexual bonds
  • Matrilocality: Living with or near the wife’s family
  • Patrilocality: Living with or near the husband’s family
  • Neolocality: Living neither near or with the wife’s or husband’s family
  • Primogeniture: being the firstborn child
  • Exogamy: marriage between people of different social categories
  • Endogamy: marriage between people of the same social categories
  • Kinship: familial connection, doesn’t need to be by blood or marriage
  • Fictive kin: family by choice (not by blood or marriage)
  • Consanguineal: blood ties
  • Affinal: by marriage