The following two statements about the family were written at different times by the same author, Hope Jensen Leichter.
"The family is an arena in which virtually the entire range of human experience can take place. Warfare, love, violence, tenderness, honesty, deceit, private property, communal sharing, power manipulation, informed consent, formal status hierarchies, egalitarian decision-making--all can be found within the setting of the family."
"The more one looks at the family, the more it isn't there."
Although they may seem to be contradictory--saying that the family is both all and nothing at all--they, in fact, underscore the two most salient features of the family. First, the family is the oldest and most basic social unit. Second, it has become so variable in the forms it has assumed over the years that it defies definition in a way acceptable to all the diverse groups that consider themselves families: From their perspective, there is no such thing as "the" family.
This is why the much-heralded 1980 White House Conference on the Family became the White House Conference on Families and ended not with a bang but a whimper: The distinguished participants in "the endless seminars and colloquia preparing this Conference" found it "impossible to arrive at even rudimentary consensus on what 'the American family' was supposed to be. … The meetings and discussions … became a veritable battlefield of competing interests and philosophies."
Not only do family forms vary in the United States as well as in other countries, but in the contemporary world it is not at all unusual for a parent to belong to several different types of families in the course of a lifetime. Consider, for example, the hypothetical case of Marsha, who marries John. In time, they have children and become a nuclear family. When John's father dies, his mother and elderly sister come to live with them, and they become an extended family. Marsha, however, finds that living with in-laws does nothing to improve a souring marriage, and the ensuing divorce leaves her with the children and a single-parent family. Taking a job in a law office, she falls in love with a colleague who is a widower with children of his own, and when she marries him she becomes a stepparent in a stepfamily. She and her husband want to have a child together, but when they find they cannot, they take in an orphaned child and successively form a foster family and an adoptive family. All this is eventually too much for Marsha, and she runs off to join a commune, where she gets along so well with two other parent-child combinations that the three decide to move in together and become a group family.
This has elements of a soap opera, of course, but in the unsettled world of today few if any of us can say with certainty that the parental role we now have will be the only one we will ever have. Different family forms are of more than academic interest: Each change may alter the parental role in significant ways, and we may find ourselves playing unexpected parts with unfamiliar lines.
Let us review the major forms of the family, along with the prospective advantages and disadvantages of
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