Facts about Family

Living amidst a large or extended family provides training in tolerance, charity, and acceptance of differences.

Some religions regard the family as an institution created by God for people to perfect themselves, become like God and experience oneness with God.

Not surprisingly, religion and family tend to go hand in hand.

Other family patterns include polygamous (usually patriarchal) and single-parent families (usually headed by a female).

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 nuclear family consists of husband and wife and their children, while the extended family includes grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Social conservatives often express concern over a purported decay of the family and see this as a sign of the crumbling of contemporary society.

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.

Moral virtues, empathy, and good human relationships are learned in the family.

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.

A strong nuclear or extended family provides a haven of love and intimacy.

The extended family provides a superior alternative to the nuclear family in many cultures, expanding the family dynamic intergenerationally.

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

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.

The man typically is responsible for income and support, the woman for home and family matters.

Precisely because of this crucial role in character development, family dysfunction is the origin of some of the deepest emotional and psychological scars.

Nevertheless, the family remains irreplaceable as the primary locus of love and personal fulfillment.

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.

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.

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 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.

Family dysfunction can cause such emotional damage that people will risk everything to escape their families.

The family is universally formed to protect and nurture children.

From the point of view of the parent(s), the family's purpose is to produce and socialize children within a culture.

Some lose confidence in family life and choose the option of remaining single.

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 structure provides the basic context for human development, as its members take on successive roles as children, siblings, spouses, parents, and grandparents.

Grandparents offer a unique form of support to the family, both to the parents and to the children.

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.

All religions recognize the importance of the family and have moral teachings that support it.

French troops occupied Berne in 1798, during the French Revolutionary Wars, when it was stripped of most of its territories.

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.

Within the family and within the society respect for authority has a high premium.

A partner was admired and loved for his or her honesty, compassion, generosity of spirit, decency, loyalty to the family, and fairness….

Today, many people tend to idealize the two-parent nuclear family as the ideal family structure.

Marxism holds that the family is a structure of human domination.

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.

A strong family provides a social support network that its members are able to rely on in times of stress.

The dynamic of a family changes when a sibling arrives on the scene.

Strong families have long been grounded in religious values, for religion provides many buttresses to strengthen family bonds.

The family is the primary means through which most people cultivate their character and learn about love.

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.

Le Play developed a four-fold typology of the family, each which inculcated a certain set of values.

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.

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.

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.

The two-parent family is important in the development of children and beneficial to their mental and emotional health.

According to sociology and anthropology, the primary function of the family is to reproduce society, biologically and socially.

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.

Nevertheless, utopian attempts to replace the family with collective social structures, viz the Kibbutz, have not had long-term success.

Martin Luther termed the family "the school of love."

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.

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.

When a newly married couple moves far away from their parents, establishing their own nuclear family, isolation from their extended family may prove stressful.

The extended family provides a superior alternative to the nuclear family in many cultures, expanding the family dynamic intergenerationally.

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.