Do You Have What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur?

Despite the difficult economy -- and in many ways because of it -- entrepreneurship in America is alive and well. Take a look around you, on Main Street and on the Web. Even when unemployment is high and consumer confidence is low, there are new businesses opening as fast as others are closing. Many of them are being launched by people who lost their jobs and either didn't want to, or could not, find another.

If you're thinking of taking the entrepreneurial plunge, it's important to know to what it takes to be successful before you make what could be the biggest financial and emotional commitment of your life. Here are five ways to know if entrepreneurship may be right for you.

Are You Running Away from a Problem or Running Toward a Vision?

Some people feel they have no choice but to start a business when all they really want is to find a good job. A few of these so-called "forced entrepreneurs" may come up with the next big thing, but many don't have the heart to be in a business for the long run. So do some soul-searching and figure out if you're running toward a defining vision of your future as a business owner, or away from a problem. And if all you really want is a great job, you can learn how to find one much more easily than you can find success as an entrepreneur.

Do You Have Support?

Hillary Clinton was right. It takes a village -- not just to raise a child, but to start a business. Before you start a business, you need to have a strong support network in place. It starts with your family. If your spouse/partner and children aren't fully behind your idea, you have more work to do. If you can't "make the sale" to them, how are you going to convince customers to buy from you, partners to do business with you, a supply chain to give you credit, and a bank to give you financing? Entrepreneurship starts at home.

Do You Have Deep Reserves?

Convention wisdom says you should have 6-12 months of living expenses in the bank to live on until your business becomes cash flow positive. That is not nearly enough. I advocate having five years of capital saved. That sounds like a lot…and it is. But most business failures happen because the owner runs out of cash, just at the time when in another few months they may have seen daylight. So have as much of a bankroll as you can to allow for unforeseen contingencies.

Do You Have Good Entrepreneur Role Models?

When you were a kid playing in Little League, what major leaguer's batting stance did you imitate? Children always look for cues for modeling their behavior. Smart adults do, too. Look around your circle of family and friends for successful entrepreneurs and figure out what makes them tick. Do you have the same stuff? If not, can you get it? If you don't know anyone personally who you can study, hit the library bookshelf and study up on people like Ray Kroc (founder of McDonald's), Donald Trump, Walt Disney, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Mary Kay, Howard Schultz (founder of Starbuck's) and Michael Dell. Read their memoirs and biographies about them and understand the commonalities of all the greats.

Do You Have the Key Skills of Entrepreneurship?

There are hundreds of things you need to know how to do to be a successful entrepreneur, but the most important ones are these:

High Risk Tolerance: You have to be able to stare into the abyss of entrepreneurial uncertainty and not falter.

Excellent Salesmanship: You absolutely have to have at least a little Steve Ballmer in you to be successful as an entrepreneur. You may have the greatest invention in the world, but if you can't communicate its importance to a variety of constituencies (customers, employees, suppliers, lenders), you're not going to succeed.

An Independent Temperament: Entrepreneurs consistently go against the tide. They start companies when others are retrenching; they don't care about being rejected time and time again; and they trust their gut.

Great Negotiating Ability: If you negotiate well for everything from a store lease to contracting services to website design, you'll realize that every dollar saved keeps your business in business through the peaks and valleys of cash flow.

Emotional Intelligence: This is a term coined by behaviorist and author Daniel Goleman. "EI," as it's often referred to, is a set of skills that allows you to understand and influence the behavior of yourself and others. Being able to listen, reason with and persuade is different from being a good negotiator but just as important.

Familipreneurship for Enterprising

Creating new enterprise through Familipreneurship for effective and sustainable poverty reduction and economic development of less or under developed country.

Despite vigorous multidimensional efforts worldwide poverty is still the biggest enemy of man kind. Existence of poverty paves the way for several consequent problems which affect all sphere of life through out the world. In many countries like Bangladesh prevalence of poverty is increasingly alarming. Ensuring poverty reduction will enhance all other development process and eliminate many other problems. Our experience of overall poverty reduction is very depressing. Dream of sending poverty to museum begin to shrink; especially after starting contemporary controversy of microcredit, recognized as most powerful tool to fight against poverty, is deepening this desolation.

Promotion of venture/enterprise is one of the tested and trusted ways for economic growth and development as well as wealth creation for the future generation. Economic empowerment impacts poverty directly. Many countries are doing well adopting this policy in their national economic development agenda. But most of the efforts are towards existing, promising and profitable venture/enterprise, Effort of creating new venture/enterprise is very poor even in the case of sick venture/enterprise same condition. As a result there is no institutionalized system of creating new venture/enterprise. Seemingly finance capital is the key element of creating venture/enterprise but this view does not agree with financial statistics of investment portfolios. Our experience shows that finance capital alone can’t create enterprise, even it is not the most important element for enterprising. Inadequacy of land, labor, capital, technology, knowledge and entrepreneurship are the obstructs for enterprising.

Considering this in mind family (organization of one or more individuals) is more capable rather than an individual to create a new venture/enterprise. Just as individuals have brains and beliefs, families (organizations) have “cognitive systems and memories . . . world views and ideologies” (Hedberg 1981). Family business is not a new practice rather it is our indigenous heritage. Globally family business occupies substantial share of economic and other sector, some are dominating through couple of years. Family business at the international level maintains a dominant role within the most advanced economies. The percentage of enterprises owned or controlled by families around the world is more or less between 65 and 80%. On average the family enterprises around the world, considering the first eight European countries, are equal to 60% of the total of the largest quoted enterprises (Devecchi, Fraquelli 2008).

Family is the oldest, largest in number, longest in existence organization of human history built on Familiness. Families are unique among social systems in the way that they are permanent, based more on obligation than contractual agreement, and membership is often determined by biology. Future generation carry on their ancestors knowledge genetically. Familiness is so powerful, effective and long lasting that family as an organization through out history without any oral or written constitution or standard norms. Richest element of Familiness is its matrix relation among the family members which combines financial, human, physical, social, knowledge, cultural, natural and intangible capital and blended and optimized by interaction of each individual with other and within own family. Because in family enterprise family members are active simultaneously in the family issues and the business affairs, so they significantly influence knowledge generation, integration and transferring processes. In family firms they are the result of the family specific factors generated by idiosyncratic practices that recombine and manipulate knowledge and their peculiar configuration (Le Breton-Miller 2004). Core rigidity of a family makes up physical systems, knowledge and skills, managerial systems and values for organizational survival and growth.

Familipreneurship is the power and capabilities of an individual to combine, transform and utilize personal and family wealth and scattered resources into capitals. Knowledge and skills of Familipreneurship is transferable through generation to generation. Family edutainment may be best choice as an approach of Familipreneurship education. The complexity regarding knowledge management in a family environment may be easier in the generational transfers, where knowledge migration from senior to junior is oriented to the minimization of know-how loss. The promotion and restoration of traditional collective family practices and values through Familipreneurship will create a natural environment of transferring indigenous knowledge, skill and important lesson from their past experience. This courageous collective effort will enable them to be blended together to reach their goal which will accelerate the whole enterprising process as well as economic development.

Family business research draws attention to better understand continuity and succession as well as expansion of existing business, particularly investigates resource shedding and reconfiguration. Entrepreneurship literature has focused on the creation of new venture/enterprises, especially through new endeavor, innovation and renewal within and outside the present organizations. But perspectives, features and forms of entrepreneurship in context of creating new venture/enterprise/venture by family in a growing and less or under or least developed economy where inadequacy of resources is strongly prevalent are not well studied or missed or ignored. Especially in the case of using family enterprise as a tool of poverty reduction is remained untested.

Now its the high time to explore the traits of entrepreneurship in context of poverty, family and creating family enterprise through a single lens, and shaping a framework for further study & research on Familipreneurship to better understand its potentialities and effectiveness as well as gaps and loopholes.

History of Family: Where history started.........

The historical study of the family is generally regarded as a subfield of social history whose particular focus is the ways in which families live out histories of their own while participating actively in the larger arenas of national and international history. There is ultimately little historical space that family does not impinge upon. Family history, consequently, takes in such subjects and approaches as demography and household composition; childhood and other life stages; the life course; the family economy; family strategies, traditions and rituals; gender, class, race and generational relations; kinship; sexuality; and the varied forms of domesticity. Any adequate historical understanding of family must acknowledge its central role in social and political as well as personal relationships, in societal as well as biological reproduction. Although regularly classified as a natural or biological unit, the family is also very much a social construction. Despite its seemingly transhistorical elements, its meaning is grounded in specific cultures and their historical objectives.

Borrowing from the social sciences, historians use the term family to describe a kinship and legal unit based on relationships of marriage or biology (parent-child linkages). Household refers to a residential unit, and also to both kin and nonkin who share that residence. The nuclear or conjugal family is composed of a heterosexual marital couple and their dependent children, living in an independent household. Extended families are usually multigenerational, and include kin related by blood as well as by marriage. Even in using such definitions, historians are mindful that most people define family subjectively, according to their own experiences and the historical forces that have shaped them. Social groups also vary in conceptualizing family. Some trace descent through the paternal or maternal line; others give more weight to horizontal ties of kinship, as acquired through marriage, than to these vertical ones. If we tend to refer frequently and without particular reflection to the family, history shows that there are many identifiable forms of family in any culture, in any historical moment.

Given the varied meanings of family, finding ways to approach families historically is a complicated exercise. The development of family sociology did much to prepare the way for family history. By the second half of the nineteenth century, a consciously "scientific" approach to families was taking shape under the auspices of a developing European social science, influenced particularly by the ideas of Frédéric LePlay (1806–82) and the Société d'Economie Sociale de Paris (Howard 1981). LePlay posited that the family was not only the foundation, but the determining element of all social organization. Fuelled by a perceived "crisis in the family" that was seen to result directly from the rapid, intensive sociocultural change occurring in the wake of modernizing forces, European and North American social scientists began to probe the family's role in, and responses to, modernization (Lasch 1977). Early twentieth century attempts to historicize the family were thus produced by sociologists: Arthur W. Calhoun's three-volume History of the American Family (1919), for example, closely aligns familial change with economic change. During the 1920s, University of Chicago sociologists Robert Parks and Ernest Burgess devised a theory of family as process that emphasized a dialectical relationship between family. Their interactionist approach allowed for a range of stable family types, each relating in different ways to the larger society, with the nuclear family found to be most suited to the industrial capitalist order. Reinforcing the connections between familial and structural change, the functionalist model furthered by Chicago's Talcott Parsons during the 1940s and 1950s would dominate sociological ideas about the family for some thirty years (Howard 1981).

Although clearly an important research subject for early twentieth-century sociologists, family history became a distinct and acknowledged field of historical inquiry only during the 1960s, with the continued refinements to the "new social history" that emerged in that decade. Historians dedicated to recovering the experiences of common people invariably hit upon the bedrock of family, so embedded are all other social relations in those of domesticity. Initially, the surest way across the threshold of private homes appeared to be quantitative. French historical demographers such as Louis Henry and the Annales group working out of the Institut National des Etudes Démographiques devised a family reconstitution technique that would provide an enduring basis for family history. In England, the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, established in l964 under the direction of Peter Laslett, used these tools to demonstrate that "the great family of Western nostalgia"—the three-generation household— was never more than a tiny minority in Western Europe since the sixteenth century, and that the nuclear or conjugal unit had actually preceded industrialization. This path-breaking work led to new questions about standard historical periodization and about the wider social impact of industrialization, especially in regard to demographic patterns (Laslett 1965; Wrigley 1966; Henry 1968; Laslett and Wall 1972; Rabb and Rotberg 1973; Katz 1975; Forster and Ranum 1976). Historians of Europe introduced the concept of proto-industrialization to explain how families prepared their members for factory labor through a transitional phase of household production in which they participated as laboring units (Mendels 1972). Reflecting this interdisciplinary exchange, the principal questions of early family history were those that lent themselves to numerical answers and were posed with a view to understanding the impact of structural change on families. The demographic approach has greatly expanded our knowledge about such important trends as declining family size and mortality rates, increasing childhood dependence, and the timing of life stages.

Building on these demographic foundations, a second group of family historians developed a more dynamic, relational approach by studying the life course of families. Life-course historians are concerned with the relationship between the life stages of individual family members and the larger family cycle. Family decisions and actions are viewed as adaptations to the changing ages and roles of members, and also to external social, economic, and political pressures. The community studies of the U.S. historian Tamara Hareven, which examine the intersections of family time and industrial time, identified the family as an active agent of change, and also the continued importance of kinship ties as adaptive strategies (Hareven 1978, 1982, 2000). Frequently used in combination with life-course analysis, the family strategies approach considers how families use their familial and kin resources to deal with their own needs and objectives as well as those imposed upon them by their society and culture. Life-course historians attend to the ways in which family members follow their own paths, but these individual life histories are examined as they converge with larger histories: those of the family itself, as well as those of generations, communities, regions, and nations. By getting a sense of how much or how little the phases of the life course have changed over time, historians can identify such developments as the increasing systematization of the life course itself over the twentieth century (Hareven 1977; Elder 1978; Modell 1989; Bradbury 1993).

Life-course analysis has been especially effective in historical studies on women and gender. Examinations of women's contributions to the family economy revealed the carryover of gender-typed labor from proto-industrial households into the factory and the sociopolitical realm, as demonstrated by Louise Tilly and Joan Wallach Scott in their seminal work in this area (Tilly and Scott 1978; Hudson and Lee 1990; Parr 1990; Zarnowska 1997). If their power was always kept within the sociocultural, economic, legal and political confines established by men, women have historically been the primary agents of familial adaptation to the forces of change (Hall 1992; Rose 1992). The sentiments or emotions approach to family history is perhaps methodologically closer to the history of ideas than to the social sciences (Anderson 1980). Highlighting sociocultural values, expectations, images and roles assigned to the family and its members, its practitioners study such topics as courtship, childrearing, sexual conduct, marriage practices, media and literary representations, social constructs and public discourses. They aim to reconstruct the complex and often contradictory aspects of family life and relations, and to integrate the study of individuals and families with the broader sociocultural phenomena grounding their experiences. Philippe Ariès' seminal work has been criticized for inferring broad patterns from a narrow upper-class source base, but his Centuries of Childhood (1962), which located an overall shift in societal perceptions of children in seventeenth century Europe, inspired an international scholarly interest in private lives and the emotional ties of family (Ariès 1962; Demos 1970; Stone 1977; Shorter and Sutherland 1976; Pollock 1987). Ariès also edited and contributed to the important multi-volume A History of Private Life (Ariès and Duby 1987–91). Once it was recognized that childhood is specific to time and place, age joined the identifying categories of class, gender, and race that historians could no longer overlook in their forays into past societies.

Social reproduction and state formation are related issues that have recently interested family historians. The family is not only the main location of biologically and legally defined relationships between men and women, adults and children, but also where private and public spheres intersect. Families replicate values and belief systems, forging the links between personal identity and social role, individuals and society, home and nation. During the twentieth century, the state has increasingly regulated and supervised their efforts toward these ends. The French social theorist Jacques Donzelot's The Policing of Families (1979) is a landmark study in this regard. Inspired by the theories of Michel Foucault on the increasing moral regulation of modern society, Donzelot situated the nineteenth-century European family within an international context of shifting sociopolitical relations (Donzelot 1979). Other historians interested in the state's growing role in social reproduction have looked to models derived from materialist and feminist theories (Coontz 1988; Skocpol 1992; Seccombe 1993).

As the twentieth century closed, historical analysis reflected the growing importance of post-structuralist concepts and tools of analysis, notably Derridian deconstructive reading, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Foucault's emphasis on the discourses of power. Foucault's influence has been paramount. Placing power at the center of social relations, he emphasized its compulsory, disciplinary, and exclusionary elements through public discourses. By making language an active element in "constructing" reality, discourse analysis encourages interrogation of concepts long presumed to be timeless, universal, and definitive. Since the family is a multidimensional symbol system, the insights permitted by poststructuralist approaches have been valuable in its historical understanding, especially in regard to the impact on family and familial relations of such identifying marks as those inscribed by class, "race," ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and culture. Just as they differentiate both individual and family experiences, they serve to distinguish the norm. Examinations of the social construction of gender have demonstrated how motherhood developed as a self-conscious vocation within the context of changing feminine roles and prescribed ideals, while work on masculinity has led to critical reappraisals of how masculine roles fit with larger patriarchal structures and the public status ascribed to "breadwinning." "Race" as a social construct is also increasingly significant to studies of the historic relations of family, state, and society (Bederman 1995; Sonbol 1996).

Having contributed much to the wider field of social history by examining private lives in relation to the larger processes of social change—even leading to a critical rethinking of the timing and impact of those processes—family history was healthy and vibrant as the twenty-first century opened. Two major scholarly journals in the English language—Journal of Family History and History of the Family—and an expanding and welcome contribution by historians outside the dominant North American/Western European purview, testify to its continued dynamism (Lardinois 1996; Potthast-Jutkeit 1997; Romero 1997; Wang 2000). While interest in family reconstitution remains strong (Bouchard 1996; Wrigley, Davies, Oeppen, and Schofield 1997), interdisciplinary approaches derived from cultural anthropology have made memory, family "stories," and ritual important keys to family history (Sutherland 1997; Gillis 1997). As Hareven remarked, the field's evolution over the past thirty years has effectively laid the basis for cross-cultural research that promises to bring historians closer to grasping the local, cultural foundations of historic changes and continuities as manifested in "the family" (Hareven 2000; Hareven, Wall, Ehmer, and Cerman 2001).

Bibliography

Anderson, M. (1980). Approaches to the History of the Western Family, 1500–1914. London: Macmillan.

Ariès, P. (1962). Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. R. Baldick. New York: Knopf.

Ariès, P. and G. Duby, eds. (1987–91). A History of Private Life, 5 vols, trans. A. Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Bederman, Gail. (1995). Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bouchard, G. (1996). Quelques arpents d'Amérique: Population, économie, famille au Saguenay, 1838–1971. Montréal: Boréal.

Bradbury, B. (1993). Working Families: Age, Gender and Daily Survival in Industrializing Montreal. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Coontz, S. (1988). The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600–1900. New York: Verso.

Demos, J. (1970). A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. New York: Oxford University Press.

Donzelot, J. (1979). The Policing of Families, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon.

Elder, G. (1978). "Family History and the Life Course." In Transitions: The Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective, ed. T. Hareven. New York: Academic Press.

Forster, R. and O. Ranum. eds. (1976). Family and Society: Selections from the Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations, trans. E. Forster and P. M. Ranum. Baltimore, MD.: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Foucault, M. (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon.

Gillis, J. (1997). A World of Their Own Making: A History of Myth and Ritual in Family Life. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hall, C. (1992). White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History. London: Routledge.

Hareven, T. ed. (1977). Family and Kin in American Urban Communities, 1780–1940. New York: Franklin and Watts.

Hareven, T. (1982). Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship Between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hareven, T. (2000). Families, History and Social Change. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Hareven, T.; Wall, R.; Ehmer, J.; and Cerman, M., eds. (2001). Family History Revisited: Comparative Perspectives. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press.

Henry, L. (1968). "Historical Demography." Daedalus 97:385–396.

Howard, R. L. (1981). A Social History of American Family Sociology, 1865–1940. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Hudson, P., and Lee, W. (1990). Women's Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press.

Katz, M. (1975). The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth Century City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lardinois, R. (1996). "Histoire de la Famille en Inde a L'Epoque Moderne" (History of the Family in Modern India). Historiens et Geographes [France] 87(353):177–188.

Lasch, C. (1977). Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged. New York: Basic Books.

Laslett, P. (1965). The World We Have Lost. London: Methuen.

Laslett, P., and Wall, R., eds. (1973). Household and Family in Past Times. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mendels, F. (1972). "Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process." Journal of Economic History 32:241–261.

Modell, J. (1989). Into One's Own: From Youth to Adulthood in the United States, 1920–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Parr, J. (1990). The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880–1950. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Potthast-Jutkeit, B. (1997). "The History of Family and Colonialism: Examples from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean." History of the Family 2(2):115–121.

Rabb, T. K., and Rotberg, R. I., eds. (1973). The Family in History: Interdisciplinary Essays. New York: Harper and Row.

Romero, P. W. (1997). Lamu: History, Society, and Family in an East African Port City. New York: Markus Wiener.

Rose, S. (1992). Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Seccombe, W. (1993). Weathering the Storm: Working- Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline. New York: Verso.

Shorter, E. (1975). The Making of the Modern Family. New York: Basic Books.

Skocpol, T. (1992). Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Sonbol, A. El Azhary, ed. (1996). Women, the Family, and Divorce Laws in Islamic History. Syracus, NY: Syracuse University Press.

Stone, L. (1977). The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800. New York: Harper and Row.

Sutherland, N. (1976). Children in English Canadian Society, 1880–1920: Framing the Twentieth-Century Consensus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Sutherland, N. (1997). Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Tilly, L., and Wallach Scott, J. (1978). Women, Work, and Family. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Wang, Y. (2000). "Zhongguo Jiating Shi Yanjiu Chuy" (Opinions on historical studies of the Chinese family). Lishi Yanjiu [China](3):165–172.

Wrigley, E. (1966). "Family Reconstitution." In An Introduction to English Historical Demography, ed. P. Laslett, et.al. New York: Basic Books.

Wrigley, E. A.; Davies, R. S.; Oeppen, J. E.; and Schofield R. S. (1997). English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580-1837. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wrigley, E., and Schofield, R. (1981). The Population History of England, 1541–1871. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Zarnowska, A. (1997). "Social Change, Women and the Family in the Era of Industrialization: Recent Polish Research." Journal of Family History 22(2):191–203.

Family: Our first identity

A family is a domestic group of people, or a number of domestic groups, typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships including adoption. There are a number of variations in the basic family structure. The nuclear family consists of husband and wife and their children, while the extended family includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Other family patterns include polygamous (usually patriarchal) and single-parent families (usually headed by a female).

Throughout history, families have been central to human society; a key indicator of a society's well-being is the health of its families. For this reason, as stated in Article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, "The [family is the] natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State." The family is the basic social unit for the expression of love between man and woman and the creation and raising of children. The family tames the wilder impulses of men to the responsibilities of fatherhood, enables young women to blossom as mothers, and cultivates morality in children. Moral virtues, empathy, and good human relationships are learned in the family.

All religions recognize the importance of the family and have moral teachings that support it. Some religions regard the family as an institution created by God for people to perfect themselves, become like God and experience oneness with God.

The significance of the family

The family is universally formed to protect and nurture children. Although the term "dysfunctional" has often been applied to the family in modern times, in fact, the vast majorities of families produce viable, peaceable, and productive citizens. Children in average families outperform children in institutional settings according to numerous developmental measures, most importantly impulse control and pro-social behavior. ^[1] The three- or four-generation extended family, including grandparents in addition to parents and children, provides a rich network for human relationships and great support for the raising of children and continuation of the lineage.

Fostering the human need for love and intimacy is an important purpose of the family. The family is generally viewed as a haven from the world, supplying "intimacy, love and trust where individuals may escape the competition of dehumanizing forces in modern society."^[2] The family protects individuals from the rough and tumble of the industrialized world. The family is where warmth, tenderness, and understanding can be expected from a loving mother and protection from the world can be expected from the father. These purposes have declined as income levels allow for economic security independent of family support and as individuals enjoy increased civil rights and opportunities to pursue happiness outside the family setting.

Nevertheless, the family remains irreplaceable as the primary locus of love and personal fulfillment. Martin Luther termed the family "the school of love." It is in the family that people can realize love in all its dimensions: children's love for parents, love among siblings, conjugal love, and parental love. As people's hearts are cultivated through their family relationships, they can find fulfillment in their lives beyond what they could attain as unattached individuals.

The family is also the primary school of virtue, where children learn manners, obedience to their parents, helpfulness to their siblings, care for their younger siblings, and so on. More lessons are learned in the school of marriage and still more in the school of parenthood. Anthropologist James Q. Wilson has called the family "a continuing locus of moral instruction…we learn to cope with the people of the world because we learn to cope with members of our family."^[3] The family provides the socialization and character education required of good citizens, who practice these same virtues in the larger contexts of society.

However, family life can also magnify people's shortcomings. Family dysfunction can cause such emotional damage that people will risk everything to escape their families. Some lose confidence in family life and choose the option of remaining single. Indeed, there has never been an ideal human family. Christianity explains that this ideal—represented by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—was lost at the Fall of Man. Marxism holds that the family is a structure of human domination. Nevertheless, utopian attempts to replace the family with collective social structures, viz the Kibbutz, have not had long-term success.

For better or worse, human beings seem to be programmed to live in families. Research indicates that most Americans (71 percent) still idealize the traditional family even as they grow more accepting of divorce (78 percent), cohabitation (49 percent), and single-parent families.^[4] Margaret Mead, based on her anthropological research, affirmed the centrality of the family in human society:

As far back as our knowledge takes us, human beings have lived in families. We know of no period where this was not so. We know of no people who have succeeded for long in dissolving the family or displacing it.… Again and again, in spite of proposals for change and actual experiments, human societies have reaffirmed their dependence on the family as the basic unit of human living—the family of father, mother and children.^[5]

Family relationships and personal growth

The family is the primary means through which most people cultivate their character and learn about love. The family of origin is the context for a child's lessons about love and virtue, as he or she relates to parents and siblings. The challenges of marriage and parenting bring further lessons. Precisely because of this crucial role in character development, family dysfunction is the origin of some of the deepest emotional and psychological scars. Experiences of childhood sexual abuse, parents' divorce, and so forth lead to serious problems later in life.

The family structure provides the basic context for human development, as its members take on successive roles as children, siblings, spouses, parents, and grandparents. As educator Gabriel Moran put it, "The family teaches by its form."^[6] These different roles in the family describe a developmental sequence, the later roles building upon the earlier ones. Each role provides opportunities to develop a particular type of love, and carries with it specific norms and duties.

Childhood development

The heart of a son or daughter develops from that of a very young child and matures through a lifetime—from the toddler who clings trustingly to his or her parents’ hand to the adult child who nurses his or her elderly parents in their last years of life. Yet the essence of the child's love for parents remains the same: a heart of attachment, veneration, appreciation, and love that deepens and becomes more conscious and responsible over time.

In the East, a child’s devotion toward his or her parents is called filial piety and is considered the root of all goodness and morality. Confucius taught that responsiveness to one’s parents is the root or fountainhead of rén (仁), empathy for human beings in general.

Attachment theory says that children form "inner working models" for all future relationships from the interactions they have with their first caretakers—usually their mothers. Empathy is learned from following and imitating the expressions and levels of emotions expressed by mothers as they play with their child, soothe their child, and respond to the infant's needs. The first developmental "crisis" of trust versus mistrust, as Erik Erikson put it, is resolved positively by a parent's caring responses to her child. This crisis can also have a negative outcome—leading to a lifetime of mistrust—when parents fail to care adequately, either because they are preoccupied with their own personal issues or are just plain self-centered.^[7]

As the child grows, he or she internalizes the parents' values. Out of love for them and desire for their approval, the child learns obedience, self-control, cleanliness, diligence in doing schoolwork, and respectful behavior towards people and property. The child's developing attitude towards his or her parents will profoundly influence later attitudes toward authority figures in society, and also, for believers, the mental image of God. Studies of altruism following World War II showed that there was but one common factor among the people in Europe who risked themselves to save Jews from Nazi horrors: each rescuer had a warm, strong bond with one or more parent.^[8]

Conversely, children who are neglected or abandoned by their parents suffer from general moral impairment. Studies of children who were raised for the early years of their lives in institutions found them to be inordinately cruel to one another and to animals and severely lacking in impulse control, especially of aggressive impulses.^[9] They were often "unable in later years to bind themselves to other people, to love deeply."^[10]

In average families there is ambivalence in the love between a child and his or her parents, especially as it develops into the adolescent years. Children are quick to pick up on any hypocrisy in their parents. Hence, there is need for parents to be exemplary in loving their children and demonstrating in their own lives the ideals that they would wish to pass on to them.

Child's love reaches a new stage of maturity when he or she becomes an adult. New comprehension and sympathy for the parents may come as the son or daughter becomes a spouse, a breadwinner, a parent, a middle-aged caretaker of others, and a responsible community member. The child recognizes his or her debt to the parents and begins to repay it with gratitude. Mature children's love may also involve taking up the parents' unfinished tasks and unrealized dreams, desiring to make the parents proud of them and leave them a legacy.

Siblings

The dynamic of a family changes when a sibling arrives on the scene. The older child in a family is challenged to shed layers of self-centeredness to respond to and keep the approbation of the most significant others—the parents. His areas of self-love are further impinged upon by the presence of another on the scene. He must learn many of the most important lessons of sibling’s love—to share, to give, and to forgive. These lessons will be of major importance in later life, especially in marriage.

Parents can help an older child become more other-centered in the early days of having a sibling by including the older child in the baby’s care, thus activating altruism and its rewards in the child’s heart. Benjamin Spock explains, “One of the ways in which a young child tries to get over the pain of having a younger rival is to act as if he himself were no longer a child, competing in the same league as the baby, but as if he were a third parent." By encouraging the older child in this, "the parents can help a child to actually transform resentful feelings into cooperativeness and genuine altruism."^[11]

The natural inequalities and differences between siblings—of age, ability, and positions in a family—can be sources of friction or contexts for growth. The older sibling has had a head start on garnering the attention of the parents and has greater command of things in the home. Now he or she must learn to give a portion of these advantages to the younger one. A younger sibling, on the other hand, is born sharing. He or she necessarily becomes other-focused in order to form an affiliation with the more powerful older sibling(s). Siblings must learn to cope with disputes over the use of possessions, taking turns, physical and verbal aggression, and other moral issues.

Parents have a central role in ameliorating sibling rivalries by affirming each child’s value in a manner consistent with the naturally unequal positions of elder and younger. Yet, it may be challenging for parents to show equal regard for siblings of widely differing abilities or moral qualities.

In cultures that practice primogeniture, codifying the distinction between elder and younger siblings into the norms of family life, the eldest son receives more privileges, but he is also expected to bear greater responsibility for the family's welfare. Younger children are expected to show deference to their elder siblings, but they can expect guidance, care, and leadership from them. When there is a fight between elder and younger, the father will scold the younger, "Respect your elders!" but then in private he will punish the elder sibling, whom he holds most responsible for the incident.

A certain amount of sibling rivalry is to be expected, but whether it is channeled into constructive competition or destructive jealousy depends on how they are raised by their parents. When parents are negligent, a festering sibling rivalry can even result in fratricide, as in the Bible's story of Cain and Abel. Another biblical story, the parable of the Prodigal Son, contains a moment of parental intervention to diffuse a sibling rivalry when the father affirms his equal love for both sons, the faithful and the prodigal (Luke 15:25–32).

Sibling relationships are training for living in a world of diversity. Though born of the same parents, siblings often differ from one another widely in temperament, personality, tastes, preferences, talents, and even political leanings. Living amidst a large or extended family provides training in tolerance, charity, and acceptance of differences. It helps ingrain the lesson that although people differ, they are fundamentally related and may still treat one another with respect, appreciation, and love based on their common bonds.

Husband and wife

Marriage encourages and requires a high degree of other-centered love. No relationship prior to marriage has the same potential for human oneness, and thus no other relationship entails the same demands for surrender of the self. In this way, marriage promotes true love, which is to live for the sake of others.

The passion of romantic love in the early years of marriage is meant to foster the habit of self-surrender and care for one's spouse. Yet few marriages survive for long on passion alone. Commitment and effort by each partner are required to make a marriage last. Marital expert Judith Wallerstein said, “A marriage that commands loyalty…requires each partner to relinquish self-centeredness.”^[12] Catholic psychologist Marshall Fightlin asserts that it is the daily task of a husband to “mortify” the impulses to act like a single man and to concern himself with his other—his wife.^[13] Thus, marriage requires renunciation of all other romantic or sexual relationships in favor of the spouse; it also means renunciation of many aspects of one’s own habits and attitudes that interfere with a life shared with someone who is physically, emotionally, and mentally "other"—a member of the opposite sex.

Paradoxically, renunciation of the self in favor of the other enriches and enhances the self. Joy and excitement are increased. Theologian Karl Barth taught, “It is always in relationship to their opposite that man and woman are what they are in themselves.”^[14]

It stands to reason that virtue or good character is the bedrock of a happy marriage. This finding is backed up by research. According to Wallerstein, "Happiness in marriage meant feeling respected and cherished…based on integrity. A partner was admired and loved for his or her honesty, compassion, generosity of spirit, decency, loyalty to the family, and fairness…. The value these couples place on the partner’s moral qualities…helps explain why many divorcing people speak so vehemently of losing respect for their former partners."^[15] Marital therapist Blaine Fowers says, "As I have observed many different couples, I have become convinced that strong marriages are built on the virtues or character strengths of the spouses. In other words, the best way to have a good marriage is to be a good person."^[16]

Religious teachings hold that marriage also brings a couple closer to God. The rabbis taught that the union of a man and a woman into one person or one flesh is the only full representation of the image of God. Karl Barth discerned a theology of marriage in the Trinity: God exists in a community of three persons, so a solitary, isolated human being without a counterpart is necessarily incomplete. Many religious teachings advise couples to put God at the center of their marriage, to provide them the strength to persevere through the vicissitudes of life together. At times when one's spouse may seem like one’s worst enemy, faith can provide couples with the emotional resources to be patient and forgiving, and to continue steadfast throughout the years.

Parenting

Parenthood makes sacrifice an ordinary part of life. A father takes an extra job to afford a house with a yard or save up for his child's college education; a mother who formerly spent hours on makeup and stylish dresses sits happily with tousled hair and a stained shirt while her toddlers clamber around a messy house. Parents sacrifice their interests, plans, and dreams to attend to their children's needs. As one child psychologist said, "If it is to be done well, childrearing requires, more than most activities of life, a good deal of de-centering from one’s own needs and perspectives."^[17]

Being a good parent requires patience and forbearance, as when answering their child's 50th question in a row while trying to prepare dinner. It requires firmness and fortitude, as when their defiant 15-year-old demands to know why he or she is not allowed to stay out late when all of his or her friends are doing it. The responsibility of caring for children bring out latent moral qualities in parents, presenting "opportunities to love when I would rather be alone, to be gentle when I would rather be efficient, and to surrender when I would rather be in control."^[18] The experience spurs on the parents' growth in heart.

Becoming a parent is a life-altering transition. Being totally accountable for the welfare of one's children gives parents a different outlook on life. Eldridge Cleaver, a former Black Panther who was trained as a communist in the former Soviet Union, experienced such a transformation when his daughter was born. Surely, he thought, this beautiful child, and the love he felt for her, were not products of economic forces. It reawakened Cleaver's belief in God. Parenthood likewise affects attitudes on social issues, which now must take into account how those matters will affect the lives of the next generation. One survey found that the most marked differences of attitudes on cultural issues are between those who have children and those who do not. These differences transcend economic, political, racial, and other demographic factors.^[19]

Good parenting requires harmony between husband and wife. A harmonious partnership allows the parents to integrate the complementary dimensions of parental love—the warm supportiveness of a mother's love and the firm and challenging qualities of a father's love. Research has shown that a balanced approach to parental authority pairs high levels of compassion and care with an equally high degree of firmness. Psychologist Diane Baumrind calls this “authoritative parenting.” She found that children of authoritative parents are the most well adjusted and well behaved.^[20]

Parental love is a definition of unconditional love. Parents give and give and forget what they have given, compelled by their love to give more. Parental love is fraught with risk, for there is always the possibility of loss. Fathers and mothers cannot anticipate how their children will turn out—as children have free will. In spite of it all, parents' continual caring is the surest lifeline for even the most incorrigible child.

Grandparents

Grandparents are an invaluable source of rootedness for a child. Children who have relationships with their grandparents are more trusting, calmer, and quieter than those who do not. Grandparents are the link to all that has gone before and they give a sense of continuity and reassurance. Grandparents help children to know what life was like long before they were born—where they have come from and the kind of people they have sprung from. They are the family's link to the chain of history.

Grandparents can provide a safe haven when their children and grandchildren are experiencing turbulence in their relationships. Certain of who they are, grandparents stand for verities of the human experience that go beyond current fashions.

The heart of grandparents has an innate need to give from their lifetime storehouse of knowledge and experience to nurture and enrich the younger generations. Erik Erikson and his colleagues have characterized the primary challenge in old age as one of "integrity versus despair," with the possibility of culminating in a profound awareness or higher sense of self.^[21] By giving to their grandchildren, they can experience their personhood as that which "transcends time-bound identities."^[22] Those who do not have grandchildren will often seek surrogates for the same reason. By sharing their stories, insights, and values with the young generation, grandparents receive affirmation and comfort that their legacy will live on.

Benefits of family life

Despite controversies over what the "family" is, there is considerable evidence about what the consequences of family life are for individuals.

Satisfaction for adults

Men and women who are in their first marriages, on average, enjoy significantly higher levels of physical and mental health than those who are either single, divorced, or living together.^[23] Social scientist James Q. Wilson explains:

Married people are happier than unmarried ones of the same age, not only in the United States, but in at least seventeen other countries where similar inquiries have been made. And there seems to be good reasons for that happiness. People who are married not only have higher incomes and enjoy greater emotional support, they tend to be healthier. Married people live longer than unmarried ones, not only in the United States but abroad.^[24]

Married people, whether men or women, enjoy higher levels of sexual pleasure and fulfillment than do single people.^[25] Among the various life spheres Americans report as being sources of a "great deal of satisfaction," studies consistently show family life as the most important. Three-fourths of Americans interviewed claimed that family life was their most important value, in surveys by Yankelovich between 1973 and 1981.^[26]

Benefits for children

All things being equal, children with married parents consistently do better in every measure of well-being than their peers who have single, cohabiting, divorced, or step-parents. Being raised by a father and mother is a stronger indicator of well-being than race, economic, or educational status, or neighborhood.^[27] According to the Center for Law and Social Policy, a child advocacy organization, "Most researchers now agree…studies support the notion that, on average, children do best when raised by their two married biological parents."^[28] Evidence points out that:

   Children from biological two-parent families have higher test scores and grade-point averages, they miss fewer school days, and have greater expectations of attending college than children living with one parent.^[29]

   Children from divorced homes are 70 percent more likely than those living with biological parents to be expelled or suspended from school. Those living with never-married mothers are twice as likely to be expelled or suspended.^[30]

   Children raised in divorced or single-parent families are far more likely to commit crimes. Family structure is a much stronger predictor of criminality than race or income level.^[31]

   Adolescents not living with a biological mother or father are 50 to 150 percent more likely to abuse illicit drugs and require drug abuse treatment compared to their peers living with both biological parents. This holds true regardless of gender, age, family income, race, or ethnicity.^[32] * Teens living with only one biological parent, including those in stepfamilies, typically become sexually active at younger ages.^[33] Girls who grow up in single-parent homes are 111 percent more likely to bear children as teenagers, 164 percent more likely to have a child out of marriage, and—if they do marry—their marriages are 92 percent more likely to dissolve compared to their counterparts with married parents; this holds for whites and blacks alike.^[34]

   Girls are seven times more likely to be molested by a stepfather than a biological father.^[35] Numerous studies concur that children living with unrelated adults are far more likely to suffer from sexual abuse and more likely to die from beatings by an abusive male.

   A stable, two-parent family is an American child’s best protection against poverty. Former Clinton domestic policy advisor Bill Galston explains that avoiding poverty requires three things: 1) finish high-school, 2) marry before having children, and 3) marry after the age of 20. Only 8 percent of families who do this are poor, while 79 percent of those who fail to do this are poor. Children from married homes are more likely to do all three of these things.^[36]

Health benefits

Marriage and family life have been shown in numerous studies to have a variety of health benefits for both adults and children:

  According to a CDC study, married adults are less likely than other adults to be in fair or poor health, and are less likely to suffer from chronic ailments such as headaches and serious psychological distress. Married adults are less likely be limited in various activities, including work and other activities of daily living; they are less likely to smoke, drink heavily, or be physically inactive. However, married men are more likely to be overweight or obese than other men.^[37]

  A married man with heart disease can be expected to live, on average, 1,400 days longer (nearly four years) than an unmarried man with a healthy heart. This longer life expectancy is even greater for a married man who has cancer or is 20 pounds overweight compared to his healthy, but unmarried, counterpart. The advantages for women are similar.^[38]

  A married man who smokes more than a pack a day can be expected to live as long as a divorced man who does not smoke.^[39]

  Married people are more likely to survive cancer, according to an analysis of 25,000 cases listed in the New Mexico Tumor Registry.^[40]

  Marriage is associated with lower rates of alcoholism. 70 percent of chronic problem drinkers were either divorced or separated, and only 15 percent were married. Single men are more than three times as likely to die of cirrhosis of the liver.^[41]

  Married women are significantly less likely to be victims of any kind of violence, either by the spouse or by a stranger.^[42]

  In Lewis Terman's famous longitudinal study of 521 gifted children in California, begun in 1921 with follow-ups every 5 or 10 years, it was found that those whose parents divorced faced a 33 percent greater risk of an earlier death (average age at death of 76 years) than those whose parents remained married until the children reached age 21 (average age at death of 80). There was no such mortality effect for children for whom one or both parents had died.^[43]

Economic benefits

In traditional societies, the family was the primary economic unit. This persists for rural families, where every family member has a role in agricultural production. This role has diminished in modern industrialized societies; nevertheless it persists. Among immigrant families, the mom-and-pop business offers economies of labor. The contemporary trend towards dual-earner households, necessitated by the decline in real wages in the United States, reinforces the importance of the family for wealth creation.

Married people are wealthier than their unmarried peers. They earn more money and are more likely to invest some of what they earn. They make more reliable employees, and so get promoted to better positions.^[44]

Religion and the family

Strong families have long been grounded in religious values, for religion provides many buttresses to strengthen family bonds. In his letter to the Ephesians (5:25), Saint Paul likened the virtues of love in a Christian marriage to the love of Christ for the church. It is, first and foremost, a giving love, a sacrificial love that resembles the love of Jesus. Christian marital love has been characterized as “a love that seeks to give way to the other whenever possible.”^[45] Thus religion, by cultivating character virtues such as steadfastness, responsibility, and modesty, and by promoting the ethics of sacrifice, humility, and charity, provides valuable support for family members as they seek to maintain lasting love amidst the demands of family life.

The family's efficacy for personal growth is such that some religious traditions equate honorable and loving relationships in the family with a template for a person’s right relationship with God. In the Talmud, for instance, it is written, "When a man honors his father and mother, God says, 'I regard it as though I had dwelt among them and they had honored me'" (Kiddushin 30b).^[46] Confucius said, “Surely proper behavior toward parents and elder brothers is the trunk of goodness” (Analects 1.2).^[47] Jesus encouraged his disciples to relate to God as a loving father, calling him "Abba."

Furthermore, traditional religious teachings lift up the expectation that marriage should last a lifetime. They decry divorce as a moral failure. "I hate divorce," declares God through the prophet Malachi (2:16). When Muhammad was asked about divorce, he said it was "the lawful thing that God hates most" (Hadith of Abu Dawud). When Jesus was asked about divorce, he said that God only allowed it because of people’s hardness of heart, and that it was not His way "from the beginning," adding "What God has joined together, let no man separate" (Matthew 19:5–8). Religions likewise condemn sex outside the context of marriage and family, teaching that it violates the sanctity of marriage and creates difficult entanglements of soul and spirit that can interfere with a person's eventual marriage.

These normative teachings provide both resources and sanctions that predispose traditional believers to maintain and make the best of even a difficult marriage. Not surprisingly, religion and family tend to go hand in hand. A 2004 survey by the National Marriage Project (Rutgers University) found that married men are more religiously active than unmarried men. Nearly half of married men say that they go to religious services several times a month, versus less than a quarter of unmarried men. Compared to unmarried men, married men are also significantly more likely (75 percent versus 59 percent) to agree that "children should be raised in a religion." Also, unmarried men who attend religious services several times per month or more are more disposed to marry.^[48]

Nevertheless, it is not the case that religious belief is the main factor in maintaining strong families. Believing does not always translate into the morality of daily life. Religious affiliation ranks fourth among the factors that reduce the risk of divorce, as shown in the following U.S. statistics (the norm without any of these factors is a 50 percent divorce rate):

Percent decrease in the risk of divorce or separation during the first ten years of marriage[49]
Annual income over $50,000 (vs. under $25,000)	-30%
Having a baby seven months or more after marriage (vs. before marriage)	-24%
Marrying over 25 years of age (vs. under 18)	-24%
Own family of origin intact (vs. divorced parents)	-14%
Religious affiliation (vs. none)	-14%
Some college (vs. high-school dropout)	-13%

Studies in the psychology of religion suggest that how one practices religion, or "what kind of religion," is more significant for the quality of family relationships than how strongly one believes in a religion, or "how much religion." Participants with rigid, literalistic or guilt-driven approaches to religion reported an increased emphasis on control, difficulties in communication, and lower levels of marital satisfaction. In contrast, participants who identified with and maintained an open approach to religious sentiment and tended to promote independence in their children, were more likely to have affectionate and warm relationships with their children, and experience increased marital satisfaction.^[50]

While religious faith leads some people to be less accepting of alternative family patterns, it can also promote compassion for people struggling in less than ideal family situations. In every faith, God offers forgiveness to sinners, especially those who sincerely wish to mend past mistakes. There is recognition that the ideal of the God-centered family runs up against the corruption of the human heart due to the Fall of Man, which caused widespread difficulties between men and women, parents and children ever since. Almost all the families in the Bible seem to be dysfunctional to one degree or another, and the protagonist is sometimes challenged to overcome a festering family problem—Jacob and Joseph are two notable examples. Therefore, the centering of marriage upon God and striving to practice true love—divine love—within marriage can be viewed as a redemptive act that opens the way to divine healing and personal growth.^[51] For believers who practice a life of faith, marriage and family can be a blessing, a restorative relationship to heal the most primal of human wounds and open the way to future hope.

Anthropology looks at family structures

According to sociology and anthropology, the primary function of the family is to reproduce society, biologically and socially. For children, the family plays a major role in their socialization. From the point of view of the parent(s), the family's purpose is to produce and socialize children within a culture. However, producing children is not the only function of the family. In societies with a sexual division of labor, marriage and the resulting relationship between a husband and wife is necessary for the formation of an economically productive household. In modern societies, marriage entails particular rights and privilege that encourage the formation of new families even when there is no intention of having children.

The structure of families can be classified into four major types: consanguineal, conjugal, patrifocal, and matrifocal. (Note: these are ideal types. In all societies there are acceptable deviations from the norm, owing either to incidental circumstances such as the death of a family member, infertility, or personal preferences.)

  A consanguineal or extended family consists of a husband and wife, their children, and other members of either the husband's and/or wife's family. This kind of family is common in cultures where property is inherited. In patriarchal societies where important property is owned by men, extended families commonly consist of a husband and wife, their children, the husband's parents, and other members of the husband's family. In societies where fathers are absent and mothers do not have the resources to rear their children on their own, the consanguineal family may consist of a mother and her children, and members of the mother's family.

  A conjugal or nuclear family consists of a father, mother, and their children. This kind of family is common where families are relatively mobile, as in modern industrialized societies. Usually there is a division of labor requiring the participation of both men and women. Nuclear families vary in the degree to which they are independent or maintain close ties to the kindreds of the parents and to other families in general.

  A patrifocal family consists of a father and his children and is found in societies where men take multiple wives (polygamy or polygyny) and/or remain involved with each for a relatively short time. This type of family is rare from a worldwide perspective, but occurs in Islamic states with considerable frequency. The laws of some Arab nations encourage this structure by allowing a maximum of four wives per man at any given time, and automatic deflection of custody rights to the father in the case of a divorce. In these societies, a man will often take a wife and may conceive a child with her, but after a relatively short time put her out of his harem so he can take another woman without exceeding the quota of four. The man then keeps his child and thus a patrifocal structure emerges. Even without the expulsion of the mother, the structure may be patrifocal because the children (often as infants) are removed from the harem structure and placed into the father's family.

  A matrifocal family consists of a mother and her children. Generally, these children are her biological offspring, although adoption of children is a practice in nearly every society. This kind of family is common where women have the resources to rear their children by themselves, or where men are more mobile than women. Today's single-parent families can be classed in this category.

There are other typologies of family structure. One important distinction is the extent to which marriage is exogamous or endogamous.

  Exogamy is the custom of marrying outside a specified group of people to which a person belongs. In addition to blood relatives, marriage to members of a specific clan(s) or other group(s) may be forbidden.

  Endogamy is the practice of marrying within a social group which may include close relatives such as cousins.

The family as the basis of society

French sociologists Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882) and Emmanuel Todd have studied the connection between family type and social values. Le Play developed a four-fold typology of the family, each which inculcated a certain set of values. These values are passed on as each generation unconsciously absorbs the values of their parents. Todd added some additional types and went on to demonstrate that a country's adoption of a particular political ideology—liberal democracy or communism or fascism—correlated with its family system; and he even hypothesized "the ideological system is everywhere the intellectual embodiment of family structure."^[52]

Thus, a people's love of liberty or acceptance of authority is determined by the relationship between fathers and sons in the family. If a grown child continues to live with his parents after marriage, forming a vertical relationship within the extended family, such a family is regarded as 'authoritarian'. Within the family and within the society respect for authority has a high premium. On the other hand if a grown child leaves his family, marries and sets up an independent household, this family model is regarded as 'liberal' as it, and the society composed of such families, puts a high premium on individual independence.

Furthermore, the relationship between brothers inculcates the ideal of equality or acceptance of inequality as the natural order of things. If inheritance is by custom the equal division of the parent's property among the sons, they form egalitarian relationships. If the inheritance is by custom weighted towards the eldest son, so that brothers naturally accept the inequality among them, the values of the society include an acceptance of inequality.

Todd found a surprising correspondence between Le Play's typology of family structures with the country or region's dominant social and political values and institutions:

1.   Liberal and inegalitarian—these values characterize the absolute nuclear family, the family type most prevalent in Anglo-Saxon countries such as England, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and also in Holland. In these countries adult children do not live at home and parents have little authority over them. Parents divide up their inheritance in any way they choose. In such countries individual freedom is highly prized and social inequality is accepted as normal. These societies have been politically very stable and easily adapted to industrialization and modernity. The normal system of government is liberal democracy, while fascist and communist parties and ideas have never been popular as their values did not resonate with the values passed on through the family. On the other hand these countries have recently seen a high degree of family breakdown and social disintegration as the love of freedom has degenerated into selfish individualism.

2.   Liberal and egalitarian—these values characterize the egalitarian nuclear family, the family type most prevalent in northern France, Latin America, northern Italy, Greece, Poland, Romania Ethiopia and much of Spain and Portugal. In these countries married children do not live with their parents but the equality of brothers is laid down by rules of inheritance. The societies are often unstable as they are based on the contradictory values of liberty and equality. The political systems of these countries are unstable and seem to oscillate between phases of liberalism and dictatorship. It is noteworthy that the European country that led the overthrow of communism was Poland.

3.   Authoritarian and inegalitarian—these values characterize the patriarchal three-generation family, the family type most prevalent in Germany, Austria, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Scotland, Japan, and Korea. This group also includes traditional Jews, Basques, Catalans, Walloons and Gypsies. In these countries rules of inheritance decree an unbroken patrimony to one son, usually the eldest. Often the married heir lives together with his parents. Parents have a lot of authority over their children even after they have grown up. At the same time the children are treated unequally and are raised to know their place in the pecking order. These countries have tended to be resistant to universalism and are often involved in ethnic conflicts to assert their independence and particularism. They may regard themselves as superior to others. They have a tendency to slide into authoritarian government such as fascism.

4.   Authoritarian and egalitarian—these values characterize the exogamous community family, the family type most prevalent in Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, China, Vietnam, Cuba, central Italy and north India. Married sons live together with their parents and the inheritance is divided up equally. Such families are quite unstable as it is difficult to maintain peace and harmony when all the children live together with an authoritarian father. Hence the tendency for the brothers, who are all equal, to gang up on their father. All the old world countries that produced spontaneous communist revolutions were all of this family type. This is because the values of communism - equality and authority - resonated with the family type of these countries. Communism in practice though has led to changes in family structure so that it destroyed its own anthropological base.

5.   Islamic family—the endogamous community family (an additional family type described by Todd) which is characterized by equality between brothers, cohabitation of married sons with their parents and frequently marriage between cousins (endogamy). This family type is found in the Arab world, North Africa, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia. All these countries are Muslim. The countries which historically resisted Islam - Armenia, Ethiopia and northern Spain had different family types. The Qur'an unlike the Bible does not outlaw the marriage of cousins. This makes this community family more stable than the exogamous community family where sons marry women who are not relatives and thus bring their own traditions into the family causing instability.

6.   African family—traditional African households are polygamous and unstable. To maintain demographic balance there is frequent remarriage as well as the inheritance of wives. In the African polygamous family the woman has her own hut with her children while the father is often absent. This results in a dilution of paternal authority. The strongest relationships are between brothers. The dominant political force in most African countries is the army, which replicates the family based on brothers.

These findings from anthropology seem to support the view that the family is the foundation of society and its values. Todd theorized that social and political arrangements such as are found in liberal democracies or in socialist states are, "a transposition into social relations of the fundamental values which govern elementary human relations" in the family.

Is there an ideal family structure?

Family arrangements in the United States have become more diverse with no particular household arrangement representing half of the U.S. population.^[53]

Today, many people tend to idealize the two-parent nuclear family as the ideal family structure. The man typically is responsible for income and support, the woman for home and family matters. Social conservatives often express concern over a purported decay of the family and see this as a sign of the crumbling of contemporary society. They look with alarm at the dramatic increase in households headed by single mothers and by same-sex couples. Yet anthropologists point out that these are merely variations on family types that have existed in other societies.

Even when people bypass the traditional configuration of father, mother, and their biological children, they tend to follow its patterns anyway, showing the fundamental need they feel for its structure. Couples live together and raise children, even children from previous relationships. Same-sex couples assume masculine and feminine roles and demand legal recognition of their unions; many seek to adopt children. Homeless children tend to congregate in gangs that serve as surrogate families. On the other hand, as families universally are built around the marriage bond and the responsibilities for raising children, there would seem to be some rationality to giving preference to the two-parent nuclear family—particularly over family structures headed by only one parent. As James Q. Wilson has stated:

In virtually every society in which historians or anthropologists have inquired, one finds people living together on the basis of kinship ties and having responsibility for raising children. The kinship ties invariably imply restrictions on who has sexual access to whom; the child-care responsibilities invariably imply both economic and non-economic obligations. And in virtually every society, the family is defined by marriage; that is, by a publicly announced contract that makes legitimate the sexual union of a man and a woman.^[54]

In other words, while single-parent and matrifocal families form a recognizable type, they are not the first choice where there is the possibility of forming stable two-parent families. However, where men are not strongly bound to the family unit, i.e., where a culture does not support lasting marriage or where economic hardships cause men to be apart from their wives for long periods of time, this family type becomes prevalent.

By the same token, societies where patrifocal families are the norm are vulnerable to movements for women's rights and human rights that attack marriage arrangements that do not give wives equal status with their husbands. This may lead, in the long run, to the decline of polygamy.

In many cultures, the need to be self-supporting is hard to meet, particularly where rents and property values are very high, and the foundation of a new household can be an obstacle to nuclear family formation. In these cases, extended families form. People remain single and live with their parents for a long period of time. Generally, the trend to shift from extended to nuclear family structures has been supported by increasing mobility and modernization.

Still, some argue that the extended family, or at least the three-generational family including grandparents, provides a broader and deeper foundation for raising children as well as support for the new parents. In particular, the role of grandparents has been recognized as an important aspect of the family dynamic. Having experienced the challenges of creating a family themselves, they offer wisdom and encouragement to the young parents and become a reassuring presence in the lives of their grandchildren. Abraham Maslow described the love of grandparents as "the purest love for the being of the other."^[55]

The emotional pull of these intergenerational encounters remains strong even for those who have split off to form nuclear families. Individuals who leave the village and their extended families for the economic benefits of life in the city may feel a sense of isolation and a longing for the thick relationships and warm love of the extended family of their origin. This suggests that, economic issues aside, people are happiest living in extended families, or in nuclear families that treasure close bonds with their kinfolk.

Conclusion

A strong nuclear or extended family provides a haven of love and intimacy. It offers maximum opportunities for personal growth through its matrix of relationships—with spouse, parents, grandparents, siblings, and children. A strong family provides a social support network that its members are able to rely on in times of stress. The rise of single-parent households due to the absence of husbands represents reversion to a different family structure, one that is prone to isolation and provides weaker social support.

The two-parent family is important in the development of children and beneficial to their mental and emotional health. A strong conjugal bond between the parents provides the child security and a model for conjugal love to which he or she can aspire. The father's steady and responsible provision for the family provides a positive male role model for boys and a model of an ideal husband for young girls. Thus from an early age, children gain a positive sense of self-worth, sexual identity, and confidence about their future. Divorce or the chronic absence of one parent teaches the opposite lesson: that life is insecure, that the child is not lovable, that the child cannot hope for a successful marriage, that men are irresponsible and unsuitable as marriage partners, and so on. Statistically, children of single-parent families have a higher incidence of criminality, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and depression.

The extended family provides a superior alternative to the nuclear family in many cultures, expanding the family dynamic intergenerationally. Grandparents offer a unique form of support to the family, both to the parents and to the children. When a newly married couple moves far away from their parents, establishing their own nuclear family, isolation from their extended family may prove stressful. Families in which three generations interact in close harmony provide the greatest support for successfully raising children, connecting them to their family traditions and giving value to their lineage.

Notes

1.   ↑ Selma H. Fraiberg, The Magic Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

2.   ↑ M. Zinn and D. Stanley Eitzen, Diversity in American Families (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).

3.   ↑ James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), 162–163.

4.   ↑ Faith and Family in America Survey, Poll: Americans Idealize Traditional Family, Even as Nontraditional Families Are More Accepted, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, October 19, 2005. Retrieved July 11, 2007.

5.   ↑ Margaret Mead and Ken Heyman, Family (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 77–78.

6.   ↑ Gabriel Moran, Religious Education Development: Images for the Future (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1983), 169.

7.   ↑ Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (W. W. Norton, 1993).

8.   ↑ Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: Free Press, 1988).

9.   ↑ William Goldfarb, "Psychological Privation in Infancy and Subsequent Adjustment," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (1945): 15.

10. ↑ Selma H. Fraiberg, The Magic Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 293.

11. ↑ Benjamin Spock, Baby and Child Care (New York: Pocket Books, 1987), 411.

12. ↑ Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, The Good Marriage (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 64.

13. ↑ Marshall Fightlin, "Conjugal Intimacy," New Oxford Review 51/1 (Jan.–Feb. 1984): 8–14.

14. ↑ James Nelson, "Varied Meanings of Marriage and Fidelity," in Perspectives on Marriage: A Reader, ed. Kieran Scott and Michael Warren (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 101.

15. ↑ Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee, The Good Marriage (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 329.

16. ↑ Blaine J. Fowers, "Psychology and the Good Marriage," American Behavioral Scientist 41/4 (January 1998): 516–542.

17. ↑ David Elkind, The Hurried Child (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1981), 26–27.

18. ↑ Brian Volck, "Welcoming a Stranger: A New View of Parenting," America 76/20 (1997): 7–9.

19. ↑ Frad Barnes, "The Family: A Reader’s Digest Poll," Reader’s Digest (July 1992): 50.

20. ↑ Diane Baumrind, "Effects of Authoritative Parental Control on Child Behavior," Child Development 47 (4): 887–907.

21. ↑ Erik H. Erikson, Joan M. Erikson, and Helen Q. Kivnick, Vital Involvement in Old Age: The Experience of Old Age in Our Time (New York: Norton, 1986), 53.

22. ↑ Ibid.

23. ↑ Glenn T. Stanton, Why Marriage Matters for Adults, Focus on the Family, 2003. Retrieved July 11, 2007.

24. ↑ James Q. Wilson, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), 16.

25. ↑ Robert T. Michael, et al., Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1994), 124–129; Edward O. Laumann, et al., The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 364; Andrew Greeley, Faithful Attraction: Discovering Intimacy, Love and Fidelity in American Marriage (New York: Tom Doherty Association, 1991), ch. 6.

26. ↑ Michael C. Kearl, Marriage and Family Processes, Trinity University. Retrieved July 11, 2007.

27. ↑ Glenn T. Stanton, Why Marriage Matters for Children, Focus on the Family, 2003. Retrieved July 11, 2007.

28. ↑ Mary Parke, “Are Married Parents Really Better for Children?” Center for Law and Social Policy Policy Brief, May 2003: 1.

29. ↑ Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 47.

30. ↑ Deborah Dawson, “Family Structure and Children’s Health and Well-Being: Data from the 1988 National Health Interview Survey on Child Health,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 53 (1991): 573–584.

31. ↑ Elaine Kamarck and William Galston, “Putting Children First: A Progressive Family Policy for the 1990s,” Progressive Policy Institute Report, September 27, 1990: 14–15.

32. ↑ Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, The Relationship Between Family Structure and Adolescent Substance Use (Rockville, MD: National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information, 1996).

33. ↑ Dawn Upchurch, et al., “Neighborhood and Family Contexts of Adolescent Sexual Activity,” Journal of Marriage and Family 61 (1999): 920–930.

34. ↑ Irwin Garfinkel and Sara McLanahan, Single Mothers and Their Children: A New American Dilemma (Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press, 1986), 30–31.

35. ↑ Michael Gordon, “The Family Environment of Sexual Abuse: A Comparison of Natal and Stepfather Abuse,” Child Abuse and Neglect 13 (1985): 121–130.

36. ↑ Elaine Kamarck and William Galston, “Putting Children First: A Progressive Family Policy for the 1990s,” Progressive Policy Institute Report, September 27, 1990: 12.

37. ↑ National Center for Health Statistics, Married Adults are Healthiest, New CDC Report Shows, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved July 11, 2007.

38. ↑ Linda J. Waite, "Does Marriage Matter?" Demography 32 (1995): 483–507.

39. ↑ Harold Morowitz, "Hiding in the Hammond Report," Hospital Practice (August 1975): 39.

40. ↑ J. S. Goodwin, et al., “The Effect of Marital Status on Stage, Treatment, and Survival of Cancer Patients,” Journal of the American Medical Association 258(21): 3125–3130.

41. ↑ Robert Coombs, "Marital Status and Personal Well-Being: A Literature Review," Family Relations 40 (1991): 97–102.

42. ↑ Stets, Jan, "Cohabiting and Marital Aggression: The Role of Social Isolation," Journal of Marriage and Family 53 (1991): 669-680; "Criminal Victimization in the United States, 1992," U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, (March 1994), p. 31, NCJ-145125.

43. ↑ Daniel Goleman, "75 Years Later, Study is Still Tracking Geniuses," New York Times, March 7, 1995.

44. ↑ Janet Wilmoth and Gregor Koso, "Does Marital History Matter? Marital Status and Wealth Outcomes among Pre-retirement Adults," Journal of Marriage and Family 64 (2002): 743–754; Linda J. Waite, "Does Marriage Matter?" Demography 32 (1995): 483–507.

45. ↑ Michael G. Lawler, "Marriage in the Bible," in Perspectives on Marriage: A Reader, ed. Kieran Scott and Michael Warren (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 21.

46. ↑ I. Epstein, The Babylonian Talmud (New York: Soncino Press, 1948).

47. ↑ Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius (New York: Random House, 1938).

48. ↑ Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, The Marrying Kind: Which Men Marry and Why, The State of Our Unions: The Social Health of Marriage in America, 2004. Retrieved July 11, 2007.

49. ↑ Ibid.

50. ↑ Bradley J. Strahan, Does Religion Support Family Relationships?: It Depends on What Kind of Religion, paper presented at the Australian Family Research Conference, November 1996. Retrieved July 11, 2007.

51. ↑ Harville Hendrix, Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples (New York: Harper-Collins, 1998).

52. ↑ Todd, Emmanuel. The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) ISBN 0631137246

53. ↑ Brian Williams, Stacey C. Sawyer, and Carl M. Wahlstrom, Marriage, Families, and Intimate Relationships (Boston: Pearson, 2005 ISBN 0-205-36674-0).

54. ↑ James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), 158.

55. ↑ Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 3rd ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1987 ISBN 0060419873), 183.

References

  Devine, Tony, Joon Ho Seuk, and Andrew Wilson. Cultivating Heart and Character: Educating for Life's Most Essential Goals. Chapel Hill, NC: Character Development Publishing, 2000. ISBN 1-892056-15-1

  Erikson, Erik. Childhood and Society.. W.W. Norton, 1993. ISBN 039331068X

  Fraiberg, Selma H. The Magic Years. Simon & Schuster, 1996. ISBN 0684825503

  Georgas, James, John W. Berry, Fons J. R. van de Vijver, Çigdem Kagitçibasi, and Ype H. Poortinga, eds. Families Across Cultures: A 30-Nation Psychological Study. Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 0521822971

  Scott, Kieran, and Michael Warren, eds. Perspectives on Marriage: A Reader, 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0195313461

  Spock, Benjamin. Baby and Child Care, 8th ed. New York: Pocket Books, 2004. ISBN 0743476670

  Wallerstein, Judith S., and Sandra Blakeslee. The Good Marriage. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. ISBN 0446672483

  Wilson, James Q. The Moral Sense. New York: Free Press, 1993. ISBN 0029354064

External links

All links retrieved July 11, 2007.

  National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC) – NHMRC is a national resource and clearinghouse for information and research relating to healthy marriages.

  Building Strong Families – An educational program of the University of Missouri Extension.

  Family and Marriage – Articles on family issues by Focus on the Family.

  Family Research Laboratory – University of New Hampshire.

  Smartmarriages.com – Clearinghouse for marriage, family, and couples education.

  Why Marriage Matters, 2nd ed. (2005) – Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

  The Consequences of Marriage for African-Americans: A Comprehensive Literature Review (2005) – Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values.

  Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) – The U.S. Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) Healthy Marriage Initiative is a clearinghouse for research on marriage and family aimed at supporting federal programs to promote strong families as a part of its social services mission.