We explain what the different types of families are, the characteristics of each one and how they changed over time.
What are the types of family?
A family is called a group of individuals linked to each other by blood or relationship, who decide to live together and that establish legal, formal and lasting kinship ties among themselves.
It is a vital figure for understanding human society, which fulfills the basic functions of providing the young individual with a material, social and emotional starting point, that is: covering their minimum material and emotional needs and teaching them to socialize, to take with others inside and outside their family nucleus.
The family is the basis of society, since it is the minimum unit of social organization, that is, the basic group in which human beings organize ourselves, and therefore it is of utmost importance for sociology and anthropological studies.
The latter have demonstrated over time that the category of “family”, that is, What is traditionally understood as family is not something natural or universal but is also subject to historical, cultural and even ideological conditions.
For this reason, the concept of family has recently been subject to review and expansion, to build one that reflects the family diversity that exists in reality, that is, that reflects the many and varied ways of constituting a family in the present. of the 21st century. This is what we understand as types of families.
Before entering into the classification of families, we must distinguish between two fundamental considerations in this regard, which are not exactly types of family, but rather compositional parts of a family.
- The family nucleus usually composed of parents and offspring, who live closely together.
- The extended family made up of other close family members, such as uncles, cousins, grandparents, etc., who may or may not live together with the family nucleus.
The “type” family
The family that responds to the most established and traditional parameters of the culture, and that It consists of a father, a mother and a variable number of children (commonly between one and four). This family model has been held throughout history as the only true one or at least as the ideal, although in itself it has also varied as times change.
Originally, women had to occupy a passive role in the face of the man's authority and had to stay at home to raise their children, while the father went out to work. Nowadays these roles tend to be managed in a much more flexible way, thanks to the various social struggles for female equality and the modernization of family culture during the second half of the 20th century.
The single parent family
As its name indicates, it is a family composed of a single parent, either the father or the mother, who lives with his or her children. This type of family should not be understood as a “broken” family, given that there are many reasons why a parent is left alone in charge of the family, and they should not always be traumatic or a reason for regrets. In that sense, we can talk about:
- Widowhood cases.
- Divorce cases in which one of the former spouses does not remarry and does not maintain any relationship with the other.
- Cases of single mothers, or (although less frequent) of single fathers.
Until the mid-20th century, divorce carried a stigma for former spouses, especially for women. This reality, fortunately, has changed over time.
The one-person family
Similar to the single-parent family, but without children, it is a single individual who constitutes in himself his own family nucleus. This is what has traditionally been called a “single person”, although it can also be the result of marital separations or other types of family division events.
The family of separated parents
It is about the families whose parents separate or divorce, but do not renounce their participation in the children's lives. In this way, each parent can even have their own family, but between them a “separate” family is maintained: a family that does not share the physical space of the home, but that maintains its filial and emotional ties despite the distance. That is, these are families with divorced parents.
The reconstituted family
Also known as a composite or assembled family, it occurs when one of the parents incorporates a child from a previous relationship into a new family who joins the new nucleus despite not being a descendant of both parents. These “additional” children may come from families separated by divorce or widowhood, or from former single-parent families.
The homoparental family
In this case we are talking about a family with or without children, in which both spouses belong to the same sex. That is, families with homosexual fathers or mothers. Logically, these unions cannot conceive children biologically, but they can do so through adoption (depending on the legislation of each country) or by incorporating descendants from one of the spouses' previous families (as in the reconstituted family).
The adoptive family
The one that is composed of two parents and one or more children resulting from adoption or foster care processes that is, in which children are not the biological fruit of the union of the parents.
This, obviously, does not mean that they are any less of their children, nor that they cannot expect from said family all the love, support and benefits expected from a “typical” family. Quite the opposite: adoptive families are usually the result of full conviction and the desire to have children, rather than unforeseen or accidental pregnancies.
The DINK or DINKY family
Its name comes from the English acronym for “double income, no children” (double income, no kids) or “double income, no children yet” (double income, no kids yet). As is evident, it is generally young couples, who renounce paternity and maternity momentarily or permanently, that is, from families without children.
These families can be as happy as any other, and should not be seen as an “incomplete” or “defective” family, since there are thousands of happy reasons why a couple prefers not to have children.
Continue with: Human relationships
References
- “Family” on Wikipedia.
- “Types of family” in the Civic Training Guide of the Library of Congress of Chile.
- “From the typical family to the types of family: how the new family structures are thought of today” in Infobae (Argentina).
- “Family diversity: the different types of family” in FIEX Observatory (Spain).
