Extended families are making a comeback in many countries around the world

No matter what background you come from or how you were raised, family is extremely important. According to Malinowski, “Family is a necessary institution for fulfilling the task of child rearing in society”(Conley, 2013). Society has come a long way when it comes to family and it is much different than it was in the 1950’s. Not all families are nuclear families. A nuclear family is having a mother, father, and children that are all biological (Conley, 2013). This kind of family is what some would call more “traditional.” Today in the twenty first century it is getting harder and harder to find families that have actually stayed together. There are so many different kinds of families in today’s society, and more and more families are becoming blended families. A blended family is when two families come together (Conley, 2013). Many families today have single mons, single, dads, and even same sex parents. Family is not always the people that live in the same house as you, family also consists of extended family. An extended family is a network that goes beyond the main “nuclear” family (Conley,

The word family has changed so much in the past century. A family back in the 1950’s was probably considered a husband, wife, and one or more children. Times have changed and families have become much different. The Interpersonal Communication: Relating to Others book defines family as a, “Unit made up of any number of persons who live in relationship with one another over time in a common living space who are usually, but not always, united by marriage and kinship” (Beebe, Beebe & Redmond, 243). Families can be broken up into five different types. The first is the traditional family, which includes a mother, father, and their biological children. Next, is the blended family which includes

Because of their utmost devotion to each other, members of a blended family are able to adjust to new situations and be just as functional as a traditional nuclear family. They even have the potential to prosper more so than a traditional nuclear family. I will prove this by examining relationships between children and stepparents, stepsiblings, and the positive benefits that I have experienced being a member of a blended family myself.

Family is a very vital social group for any individual as well as society. It is the focal point around which life of every individual revolves. The day usually starts with family and also ends with family but in between we used to discharge our professional, social commitment. The desire to be with the family reflects the strong emotional bond individual share with family. Family is the basic unit of society and in its most simplest form it may consist of a husband, wife and children .In a broader sense it may refers to all relatives of several generations may be connected to each other by blood, marriage or adoption .The married couple not only lives under one roof but also stay connected physically, mentally, emotionally, socially moreover financially. They are supposed to complement each other by meeting need and aspirations of each other. A family basically based on the institution of marriage. So it is very much significant on the part of both husband and wife primarily about the need to have a healthy functional behavior for a life time to meet the commitment they are extending to each other.

As I stated before the extended family has played an important role in African-American families throughout history. Extended family is made up of the family that is outside of your immediate nuclear family, your uncles, aunts, grandparents and/or cousins. I don’t come from a nuclear family, instead I’m from a single-parent family, so my mom usually depended on some members of our extended family to help ‘get by’. Even now, I’m living with my grandparents, so my extended family has always played an important role, at least to this point, in my life. The extended family is sometimes used as an economic unit. African American families are especially known for this type of households. It allows the family to use resources and exchange goods and services, and other things that probably wouldn’t possible if they were on their own (Dickerson, 1995). This type of living arrangement goes back to West African cultures. For example, in the Ashanti tribe young women remained in their family compound because the mothers weren’t believed to be able to manage on their on. So they stayed and received help from the older women in the tribe and other young mothers to help care for the children (Dickerson, 1995). An extended family gives children someone other than their mother or father to relate to (Staples, 1994). It can be viewed as a special friendship that isn’t shared with either of the parents.

In the article written by Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian, “The Color of Family Ties: Race, Class, Gender, and Extended Family Involvement”, overviews the differences between the class, gender, and extended family involvement to Latino, Blacks, and Whites family. They researched that the so-called minorities stay close to their families. They prefer living in large extended families to provide each other with financial support and general family support.

Extended family, a family that goes beyond a nuclear family (a group of people tied by parenthood, consisting of a pair of adults and their socially recognized children), consisting of parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, all living in the same nearby area or in the same household. Extended families represent 17 percent of households in the U.S. and makes steady increases every year, “The U.S. population living in extended families increased from 58 million in 2001 to 85 million in 2014.” Extended families are more common in Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, and South America. In most of these countries, 40 percent of children live in a household with adults that are not their parents.

He also found that relatives continue to be the main source of informal support in all social classes. The effects of there being more extended families is that in some areas of the world there is an ageing population, which can also mean that there are more empty nest families, these are families where the children have left home and it is just the elderly parents living in the home. An example of extended families can be found in South Asian families, here the family is vertically extended. In one household there is a man, his sons and grandsons, their wives and any unmarried daughters, this would make a family relatively large. Living like this means that kinship ties a strong and it also causes the younger generations to change their behaviour as the family would be quite ‘old fashioned’, which causes them to stay living with their family and increasing family size in Southern Asia.

Society is composed of many elements based on values, traditions, cultures, government’s policies etc.; and family is one of the main basic ingredients, forming the society. Therefore, as the society changes its element, family is also forced to change the flow of life. Yet, during the past 50 years, our society has undergone big social transformations which are seen as “dramatic and unparallel changes” or a “veritable revolution”. Thus, the two basic forms of family, the extended family and the

Family is one of the hardest words to define. There are many definitions and thoughts of what a family consists of. When one accepts the definition of the census family given by Statistics Canada then a family becomes “a married couple and the children, if any… a couple living common law and the children, if any… a lone parent with at least one child living in the same dwelling… grandchild living with grandparents but no parents present… Census families can be opposite or same sex and children may be adopted, by birth, or marriage and all members must be living in the same dwelling” (Baker 2014). With family being such a difficult term to agree on, the creation of a complex study of family life emerges. The factors that influence family life are put into three theory categories; Social Structure, Interpersonal Factors, as well as Ideas, Global Culture, and Public Discourse.

Family by its nature is a social unit wherein children grow up and it acts like the socialization agent. Children receive their earliest and most consistent socialization here in the family. In a family it is very important as to how parents cater the needs of their children and how children take care of them in return. Parents as well as the child are very important part of the developmental process, as it is the parents who will shape the children as what they will become. The parent child relationship influences each other and together they shape the relationship they engage in it.

Family according to humans is a group of comprised of a woman, her dependent children and at least one adult male joined through marriage or blood relationship. The family may take many forms, from single married couples with their children like in North America to a large group composed of several brothers and sisters with the sisters children like the Nayar of India. The particular form taken by the family is related to particular social, historical and ecological concepts. Households are task-orientated residential units within which economic production, consumption, inheritance, child rearing and shelter are organized and carried out. Among the vast majority of human societies, households either consist of families or their

Sometimes men stay out of the home for few days for fishing when women have to look after affairs of the household as well as community and children. Maldives communities are close-knit who works as an extended family, by supporting each other in every aspect of life from upbringing children, fishing in the group, to collecting fish or helping families in their hard times. Because of that, the neighbours treat each other as family, children of a family receive special care of the people besides their parents, which is a testimony of integrity of the

Everyone is part of a family. Family, sometimes provide us with a sense of identity and sense of belonging. The definition of family, according to , is when two or more people are related by marriage or blood. Sociologists also define family as an institution. It is called an institution as it meets social needs such as child bearing, basic necessities and economic resources. The traditional type of family is called a nuclear family. A nuclear family consists of a mum, dad and their children. Although nuclear families are the norm and also more dominant here in Singapore, there has also been a rise in alternative families. Alternative families are families that are not part of the social norm, such as a single parent household, blended families and extended families. A family is also either dead, which means they are not changing or they are in a state of constant transition. This essay aims to shed light on a few of the factors and theories that cause a family to be dead or to be transitioning constantly.

People living together as an extended family occasionally feel a greater security and belonging. This is an advantage of extended type of family because this family contains more people to serve as resources during crisis and provides more role models for behavior of values. The disadvantage of living in an extended type of family is shouldering more expenses for their basic needs.