What is a Family
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
To define family requires taking something so broad and expansive and trying to conform it into a neat and tidy package. Unfortunately, to do so would undoubtedly exclude many variations of family that have evolved into living, breathing, functioning, organisms from the changing necessities of human kind.
One way to analyze family is to define it by physical structure. 50 years ago, if you asked a college student what a family was, he would define it as a mother, father, and children living in one household. His description may have included a grandparent from time to time, but the general idea was to only acknowledge those members who were a part of the traditional family structure. We termed that structure the nuclear family and it has colored our perceptions of what family should be for many years. The fact is nuclear families were never the traditional norm. They were a byproduct of one of media's very first attempts to color our perceptions. Since of course perception is reality for most people. The idea that a family must have these distinct characteristics was successfully ingrained into our existence...