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Importance of Family in Society Essay

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The family institution has always played an essential role in forming society, civilization, and culture. The definition of family has changed throughout the history, and the reason for this was various factors: from ancient religious concepts and philosophies to modern political ideologies and economics. However, this essay provides a look at a family from a particular perspective. The family both forms and changes the worldview of parents who have taken responsibility for people close to them, and it brings up the children born in it as well. Thus, a family is two or more people united by love for each other and, most importantly, by strength and will to take responsibility for each other.

Family values, in their essence, have several elements necessary to create a strong foundation of mutual understanding and dialogue within the group. The central family values include, for example, internal ones: the unity of culture and faith in the family, mutual understanding, love, and support between parents and children. Moreover, dialogue between all family members is significant because mutual understanding and communication are the essential elements of any strong relationship between people. External values are of no lesser meaning; these imply autonomy from the influence of the state and information coming from mass media. Additionally, public school education, school clubs, communities of children, and other activities imposed by the state fall into this category. The influence of these organizations alienates a person from the family, making them operators of political interests that encourage fragmentation within small communities and ideological centralization. To summarize, family values comprise adherence to its firm foundation, consisting of love, shared views and dialogue within it, and autonomy from external influences outside it.

Next, responsibility plays an essential role in the formation of a healthy family. First of all, the authority of the parents as the prominent family members is relevant to this question. Family life for many modern people seems to be a heavy burden, which is easier to quit than to continue the long and challenging building of a strong union. This view comes from numerous factors inherent in modern society, mired in infantilism, skepticism, and reckless atheism, depriving a person of any responsibility to himself and community. Parents are responsible not only for their partners or children. More importantly, parents are responsible for themselves and their will, which keeps the family together. Thus, each parent’s responsibility is to be a person who can maintain the family’s coherence.

On the other hand, children have a colossal responsibility before their families. Sometimes this responsibility is higher than the parental responsibility even. Children might not meet the parents’ expectations to a great extent but instead accept the proper care, time, and resources that have been given to them. However, children succumb to the most crucial test of their will due to childish frivolity and youthful maximalism and the strength of those convictions that their parents helped them find. Therefore, children are responsible for themselves and the proper use of the family’s opportunities, which is sometimes difficult and requires discipline.

As to the discipline, there is a misconception that it should be supported by a steady hand, violence, and emotional pressure on children and partners. This approach has shown its inconsistency throughout the entire history of civilized humankind. For example, research from Howarth et al. (272) reveals that domestic violence “is associated with a significant risk to children’s physical and psychological safety and well‐being across the lifespan.” The key to maintaining discipline without aggression and trauma is dialogue, which includes communication, joint problem solving and discussing essential family members’ life details. In brief, a key to healthy discipline is dialogue instead of punishment and other violent actions among family members.

As a result, a particular foundation is needed for conducting a dialogue and determining the moral and ethical conditions. As such, religion dominates the family and acts as a vital factor in the consolidation and direction of family members’ development. In this essay, the suggested belief system is Christianity for several reasons. The basis of religion is love and compassion; this and the simple way of explaining humanistic values and Christian life in a community imply the importance of dialogue. Faith within the family allows for a discussion within the framework of common morality and ethics, allowing each member to reveal the essence of their thoughts and ideas. Thus, religion creates a moral and ethical consensus in the family, creating a general framework for discourse and setting its vector.

It could be seen that such a perception of the institution of the family is prevalent. In this context, the words of William Bennett (par. 5) are relevant: “it is the values that a child is taught that will more determine that child’s fate”. Looking at modern society, one can notice that the influence of the family is the most critical factor of the personality, both in its initial period and in later life. In his article, Bennett reveals the issue of the family from the point of view, nowadays defined as “conservative.” This is reflected in criticism of the school system and popular culture in the lives of children. In short, Bennett considers the family’s moral and ethical ideals and imperative concepts to be the family’s foundation.

In addition, Bennett also expresses ideas about what positively affects the family in general and children in particular. His ideas include a strong religious and cultural unity within the family. Furthermore, he emphasizes a responsible and humanistic approach of parents to the upbringing of their children, i.e., guidance and upbringing with love and care, instead of harsh prescription and aggression. It also describes a critical element of the family: two parents, especially a father, in the process of raising a child. This is explained by the fact that in modern society, the irresponsible approach of parents to conceiving a child and forming a family leads to the absence of paternal guidance and maternal care. It is this that most fully corresponds to the definition of family discussed in this essay. Hence, Bennett’s position insists on the fundamental factors of family formation in the face of a humanistic approach and love and the presence of fatherhood and motherhood in education.

In conclusion, the family is the foundation of society, allowing an individual to live harmoniously, develop and stick together with people close to her, based on personal responsibility, love, and mutual understanding. Family values are essential since they create relationships in a group, allowing the family to conduct a dialogue and understand each other. Importantly, dialogue requires mutual support; discipline and faith are critical for the comfortable living of several individuals in a unity named family. It is generally held together by the responsibility of both parents and children and the humanism and communication of its members.

Works Cited

Bennet, William. “Remarks by William Bennet — The Forerunner.” The Forerunner . Web.

Howarth, Emma, et al. “Towards an Ecological Understanding of Readiness to Engage With Interventions for Children Exposed to Domestic Violence and Abuse: Systematic Review and Qualitative Synthesis of Perspectives of Children, Parents and Practitioners.” Health & Social Care in the Community , vol. 27, no. 2, 2018, pp. 271–92. Crossref . Web.

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Essay on Importance of Family for Students and Children

500 words essay on importance of family.

In today’s world when everything is losing its meaning, we need to realize the importance of family more than ever. While the world is becoming more modern and advanced, the meaning of family and what stands for remains the same.

A family is a group of people who are related by blood or heritage. These people are linked not only by blood but also by compassion, love, and support. A person’s character and personality are shaped by his or her family. There are various forms of families in today’s society. It is further subdivided into a tight and extended family (nuclear family, single parent, step-family, grandparent, cousins, etc.)

Family – A synonym for trust, comfort, love, care, happiness and belonging. Family is the relationship that we share from the moment we are born into this world. People that take care of us and help us grow are what we call family, and they become lifelines for us to live. Family members have an important role in deciding an individual’s success or failure in life since they provide a support system and source of encouragement.

It does not matter what kind of family one belongs to. It is all equal as long as there are caring and acceptance. You may be from a joint family, same-sex partner family, nuclear family, it is all the same. The relationships we have with our members make our family strong. We all have unique relations with each family member. In addition to other things, a family is the strongest unit in one’s life.

Things That Strengthens The Family

A family is made strong through a number of factors. The most important one is of course love. You instantly think of unconditional love when you think of family. It is the first source of love you receive in your life It teaches you the meaning of love which you carry on forever in your heart.

Secondly, we see that loyalty strengthens a family. When you have a family, you are devoted to them. You stick by them through the hard times and celebrate in their happy times. A family always supports and backs each other. They stand up for each other in front of a third party trying to harm them proving their loyalty.

Most importantly, the things one learns from their family brings them closer. For instance, we learn how to deal with the world through our family first. They are our first school and this teaching strengthens the bond. It gives us reason to stand by each other as we share the same values.

No matter what the situation arises, your family will never leave you alone. They will always stand alongside you to overcome the hardships in life. If anyone is dealing with any kind of trouble, even a small talk about it to the family will make ones’ mind lighter and will give them a sense of hope, an inner sense of strength to fight those problems.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Importance of Family

One cannot emphasize enough on the importance of family. They play a great role in our lives and make us better human beings. The one lucky enough to have a family often do not realize the value of a family.

However, those who do not have families know their worth. A family is our source of strength. It teaches us what relationships mean. They help us create meaningful relationships in the outside world. The love we inherit from our families, we pass on to our independent relationships.

Moreover, families teach us better communication . When we spend time with our families and love each other and communicate openly, we create a better future for ourselves. When we stay connected with our families, we learn to connect better with the world.

Similarly, families teach us patience. It gets tough sometimes to be patient with our family members. Yet we remain so out of love and respect. Thus, it teaches us patience to deal better with the world. Families boost our confidence and make us feel loved. They are the pillars of our strength who never fall instead keep us strong so we become better people.

We learn the values of love, respect, faith, hope, caring, cultures, ethics, traditions, and everything else that concerns us through our families. Being raised in a loving household provides a solid foundation for anyone.

People develop a value system inside their family structure in addition to life lessons. They learn what their family considers to be proper and wrong, as well as what the community considers to be significant.

Families are the epicentres of tradition. Many families keep on traditions by sharing stories from the past over the years. This allows you to reconnect with family relatives who are no longer alive. A child raised in this type of household feels as if they are a part of something bigger than themselves. They’ll be proud to be a part of a community that has had ups and downs. Communities thrive when families are strong. This, in turn, contributes to a robust society.

Q.1 What strengthens a family?

A.1 A family’s strength is made up of many factors. It is made of love that teaches us to love others unconditionally. Loyalty strengthens a family which makes the members be loyal to other people as well. Most importantly, acceptance and understanding strengthen a family.

Q.2 Why is family important?

A.2 Families are very important components of society and people’s lives. They teach us a lot about life and relationships. They love us and treat us valuably. They boost our self-confidence and make us feel valued. In addition, they teach us patience to deal with others in a graceful and accepting manner.

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Essay about Family: What It Is and How to Nail It

Humans naturally seek belonging within families, finding comfort in knowing someone always cares. Yet, families can also stir up insecurities and mental health struggles.

Family dynamics continue to intrigue researchers across different fields. Every year, new studies explore how these relationships shape our minds and emotions.

In this article, our dissertation service will guide you through writing a family essay. You can also dive into our list of topics for inspiration and explore some standout examples to spark your creativity.

What is Family Essay

A family essay takes a close look at the bonds and experiences within families. It's a common academic assignment, especially in subjects like sociology, psychology, and literature.

So, what's involved exactly? Simply put, it's an exploration of what family signifies to you. You might reflect on cherished family memories or contemplate the portrayal of families in various media.

What sets a family essay apart is its personal touch. It allows you to express your own thoughts and experiences. Moreover, it's versatile – you can analyze family dynamics, reminisce about family customs, or explore other facets of familial life.

If you're feeling uncertain about how to write an essay about family, don't worry; you can explore different perspectives and select topics that resonate with various aspects of family life.

Tips For Writing An Essay On Family Topics

A family essay typically follows a free-form style, unless specified otherwise, and adheres to the classic 5-paragraph structure. As you jot down your thoughts, aim to infuse your essay with inspiration and the essence of creative writing, unless your family essay topics lean towards complexity or science.

Here are some easy-to-follow tips from our essay service experts:

Focus on a Specific Aspect: Instead of a broad overview, delve into a specific angle that piques your interest, such as exploring how birth order influences sibling dynamics or examining the evolving role of grandparents in modern families.
Share Personal Anecdotes: Start your family essay introduction with a personal touch by sharing stories from your own experiences. Whether it's about a favorite tradition, a special trip, or a tough time, these stories make your writing more interesting.
Use Real-life Examples: Illustrate your points with concrete examples or anecdotes. Draw from sources like movies, books, historical events, or personal interviews to bring your ideas to life.
Explore Cultural Diversity: Consider the diverse array of family structures across different cultures. Compare traditional values, extended family systems, or the unique hurdles faced by multicultural families.
Take a Stance: Engage with contentious topics such as homeschooling, reproductive technologies, or governmental policies impacting families. Ensure your arguments are supported by solid evidence.
Delve into Psychology: Explore the psychological underpinnings of family dynamics, touching on concepts like attachment theory, childhood trauma, or patterns of dysfunction within families.
Emphasize Positivity: Share uplifting stories of families overcoming adversity or discuss strategies for nurturing strong, supportive family bonds.
Offer Practical Solutions: Wrap up your essay by proposing actionable solutions to common family challenges, such as fostering better communication, achieving work-life balance, or advocating for family-friendly policies.

Family Essay Topics

When it comes to writing, essay topics about family are often considered easier because we're intimately familiar with our own families. The more you understand about your family dynamics, traditions, and experiences, the clearer your ideas become.

If you're feeling uninspired or unsure of where to start, don't worry! Below, we have compiled a list of good family essay topics to help get your creative juices flowing. Whether you're assigned this type of essay or simply want to explore the topic, these suggestions from our history essay writer are tailored to spark your imagination and prompt meaningful reflection on different aspects of family life.

So, take a moment to peruse the list. Choose the essay topics about family that resonate most with you. Then, dive in and start exploring your family's stories, traditions, and connections through your writing.

Supporting Family Through Tough Times
Staying Connected with Relatives
Empathy and Compassion in Family Life
Strengthening Bonds Through Family Gatherings
Quality Time with Family: How Vital Is It?
Navigating Family Relationships Across Generations
Learning Kindness and Generosity in a Large Family
Communication in Healthy Family Dynamics
Forgiveness in Family Conflict Resolution
Building Trust Among Extended Family
Defining Family in Today's World
Understanding Nuclear Family: Various Views and Cultural Differences
Understanding Family Dynamics: Relationships Within the Family Unit
What Defines a Family Member?
Modernizing the Nuclear Family Concept
Exploring Shared Beliefs Among Family Members
Evolution of the Concept of Family Love Over Time
Examining Family Expectations
Modern Standards and the Idea of an Ideal Family
Life Experiences and Perceptions of Family Life
Genetics and Extended Family Connections
Utilizing Family Trees for Ancestral Links
The Role of Younger Siblings in Family Dynamics
Tracing Family History Through Oral Tradition and Genealogy
Tracing Family Values Through Your Family Tree
Exploring Your Elder Sister's Legacy in the Family Tree
Connecting Daily Habits to Family History
Documenting and Preserving Your Family's Legacy
Navigating Online Records and DNA Testing for Family History
Tradition as a Tool for Family Resilience
Involving Family in Daily Life to Maintain Traditions
Creating New Traditions for a Small Family
The Role of Traditions in Family Happiness
Family Recipes and Bonding at House Parties
Quality Time: The Secret Tradition for Family Happiness
The Joy of Cousins Visiting for Christmas
Including Family in Birthday Celebrations
Balancing Traditions and Unconditional Love
Building Family Bonds Through Traditions

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Family Essay Example

For a better grasp of the essay on family, our team of skilled writers has crafted a great example. It looks into the subject matter, allowing you to explore and understand the intricacies involved in creating compelling family essays. So, check out our meticulously crafted sample to discover how to craft essays that are not only well-written but also thought-provoking and impactful.

Final Outlook

In wrapping up, let's remember: a family essay gives students a chance to showcase their academic skills and creativity by sharing personal stories. However, it's important to stick to academic standards when writing about these topics. We hope our list of topics sparked your creativity and got you on your way to a reflective journey. And if you hit a rough patch, you can just ask us to ' do my essay for me ' for top-notch results!

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FAQs on Writing an Essay about Family

Family essays seem like something school children could be assigned at elementary schools, but family is no less important than climate change for our society today, and therefore it is one of the most central research themes.

Below you will find a list of frequently asked questions on family-related topics. Before you conduct research, scroll through them and find out how to write an essay about your family.

How to Write an Essay About Your Family History?

How to write an essay about a family member, how to write an essay about family and roots, how to write an essay about the importance of family.

Daniel Parker

is a seasoned educational writer focusing on scholarship guidance, research papers, and various forms of academic essays including reflective and narrative essays. His expertise also extends to detailed case studies. A scholar with a background in English Literature and Education, Daniel’s work on EssayPro blog aims to support students in achieving academic excellence and securing scholarships. His hobbies include reading classic literature and participating in academic forums.

is an expert in nursing and healthcare, with a strong background in history, law, and literature. Holding advanced degrees in nursing and public health, his analytical approach and comprehensive knowledge help students navigate complex topics. On EssayPro blog, Adam provides insightful articles on everything from historical analysis to the intricacies of healthcare policies. In his downtime, he enjoys historical documentaries and volunteering at local clinics.

How to Research a Topic: A Step-by-Step Guide

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Essay on Importance of Family For Kids & Students | Essay on Importance of Family in Our Life

February 7, 2024 by Veerendra

Essay on the importance of Family: Family is the most primary and fundamental social institution. The family welcomes a child into the world and nurtures him into a social being. Family is a universal institution found in every society.

Sociologists and anthropologists have never found any traces of a civilization that did not have the institution of the family. Family suffices every basic need of an individual, starting from food and shelter to human interaction. To help students understand the importance of family and help them to write essays on the topic in schools, we have provided in this article an extended essay and a short essay. We have also provided ten lines on the importance of family, to help students participate in creative writing and extempore contests.

You can read more Essay Writing about articles, events, people etc.

Long and Short Essay on the Importance of Family in English For Students and Children

We have given below an extended essay on the importance of family comprising 500 words and a brief essay on the topic containing 100-150 words.

Long Essay on the Importance of Family 500 words

Family is the most pervasive and permanent institution of society. The family comprises parents and children. Every individual is a part of two families, the family of origin and the family of procreation.

The family in which an individual takes birth is his family of origin. It comprises parents and siblings. The family which an individual helps in creating through sexual relationships is called the family of procreation. It includes husband, wife, and their offspring.

The contributions and importance of family are by far the vastest topic of discussion. A family performs every vital function in an individual’s life. To start with, families are prominent because they give rise to the next generation. The reproductive capacity of the family is essential in maintaining the existence of humankind.

A family performs the socialization function in an individual’s life. When a child is born, he does not know anything about human existence and his role in society. As he grows up, he learns that man becomes man only among men and that human interaction is crucial for survival. A family transforms a socially inactive person into a proper social being.

In today’s world, the socialization function of the family has gained maximum focus as parents are more alert to the socialization function of their children. A family teaches the child normative behavior and introduces him to social norms, folkways, and mores. The child learns how to behave in a society, in the company of other people. He determines which attitudes are considered to be socially appropriate and are approved by the community.

Read more on Relationship essay Writing for various festival topics.

The family is also the first teacher of a child. The child learns about the most basic values and virtues in the family. Not only does a child begin his academic base in the family, but he also gets his moral education. The family first teaches the concepts of respect, kindness, and honesty.

A family provides the provision of a home to children. The family guarantees a child’s safety. He knows that his parents are his primary caregivers and that his house is where he is the safest. The family is the nucleus of all social relationships. An individual learns the boundaries of different links in the family.

With changing times and with the onset of modern education, families have significantly become smaller in size. The age-old concept of joint families has become almost extinct. The need for individual opinion has caused the break-up of joint families. Smaller families have a more compact economic program as most of the time, both the man and a woman works to increase the family income.

The importance of the family lies in its unconditional support for its members. Be it a joint family or a nuclear family; it teaches a child to adjust and compromise. A family must make its members feel harmonious and develop ideas of solidarity.

These essays are usually written by classes 7-10.

Short Essay on Importance of Joint Family in English 150 words

The role of the family is not limited to giving birth to offspring. The family performs the role of a social coordinator in an individual’s life. A child learns about his identity in the family.

Parents usually understand enough to give adequate freedom to their children. Children develop their decision-making power in the family. They learn problem-solving behavior and, thus, become a fully functioning person. The role of the family has changed over the years. Earlier, families played an essential part in taking care of older adults. Nowadays, this function has been taken up by external agencies like old-age homes. However, the family continues to be the most important social institution.

Nobody can survive without the security and psychological assistance of the family.

These essays are mostly used by classes 1-6.

10 lines Essay on the Importance of Family Relationships in English

Family is the most permanent institution of all times and helps in shaping the individual for an independent life.
Family can be joint or nuclear, depending on the size of the family.
Joint families are not typical these days because industrialization has led large numbers of people to abandon their traditional, prominent families in villages and move to cities.
A nuclear family plays essential economic functions and also takes care of children in better ways.
Due to the growth of original thinking and ideas of democracy, there have been changes in the structure and functions of a family, but it continues to play a crucial role in our growth.
A stable bond between the members characterizes a family.
Family provides psychological security to its members and ensures that they are well-taken care.
The satisfaction of basic, intellectual, and spiritual needs always starts with the family.
No individual can become self-sufficient and survive in this world without the guidance of the family.
Family makes us who we are and helps in the development of our character.

Frequently Asked Questions on Essay on Importance of Family

Question 1. What are the changes in the role of the family?

Answer: The role of the family has dramatically changed concerning taking care of the old and retired. Instead, the socialization of children has gained importance.

Question 2. Why did joint families become so rare?

Answer: Due to the rapid popularity of urban life and the growth of liberal and more individualistic ideas, it became difficult to adjust in joint families.

Question 3. What are small family norms?

Answer: Small family norms govern the functioning of nuclear families and guarantee that each member that he belongs in the family.

Question 4. What is a nuclear family?

Answer: A nuclear family comprises only the parents, children, and occasionally grandparents. It is the most commonly found type of family.

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Essay on Importance of Family in 500 Words

Updated on
Mar 8, 2024

Essay on Importance of Family: Family always comes first; everything else is secondary. The importance of family can be seen in the fact that a family always provides us with emotional, moral, and financial support. Family members take care of each other and provide security from external and internal threats. What we learn from family forms the foundation of our personality.

The importance of family can be seen from the fact that they are our first hope. To make the entire world a better place, the Indian Prime Minister emphasized the importance of family by highlighting the Sanskrit term ‘Vasudevakutumbakam’ . It means the ‘World is one family. ’ It states that your family is not limited to those with whom you share blood; every human is connected to others in some way.

Table of Contents

1 Importance of Family Support
2 Joint and Nuclear Families
3.1 Conclusion
4 10 Lines on the Importance of Family

‘A Place Where Someone Still Thinks Of You Is A Place You Can Call Home.’ – Unknown

Importance of Family Support

Family support is crucial at every stage in life. Right from the moment we are born, family support empowers us to understand the world around us. Every moment of life requires strong family support; from joy to challenges.

Our family lays the foundation of our personality. The kind of person we become is completely determined by the family support and care we have received. A family is responsible for a child’s first educational environment. Family teaches us important values and principles. We learn about our identity and the world around us from our family. Our emotional, social, and cognitive activities are shaped by the developments taking place in our family.

Master the art of essay writing with our blog on How to Write an Essay in English .

Joint and Nuclear Families

Families are of two types; joint families and nuclear families. Joint families are large or extended nuclear families where grandparents, parents, and children live together. Sometimes nuclear families also include uncle and aunt.

Nuclear families, on the other hand, are small families, which consist of parents and children. In today’s busy world, nuclear families have become more prevalent as children step out of their houses for study and occupation purposes.

In a joint family, relationships go beyond the nuclear family unit, fostering a broader support system that withstands the test of time. Nuclear and joint families have their advantages and challenges. Whether you are living in a nuclear or joint family, both are your blood. You need to take care of your family and keep them happy.

Also Read: Essay on Family in 100, 200 & 300 Words

Family and Happiness

Spending time with family brings happiness and satisfaction. Our family’s love, support, and encouragement help enhance self-esteem and confidence to face challenges and lead a positive life. Strong family connections are important for a happier life.

Our family’s unconditional love lays the foundation for happiness. Feeling accepted and valued for who you are, regardless of successes or failures, enhances overall well-being. This love serves as a constant, supporting individuals through life’s challenges.

The importance of family can vary from person to person. Some families are sensitive towards their children while others want their children to learn from the developments around them. In both cases, families are taking care of their children. Our family is our first hope. Therefore, accepting and valuing family support is important for a successful and happy life.

10 Lines on the Importance of Family

Here are 10 lines on the importance of family. Students can add them in their essays on the importance of family or similar topics.

Our family is our world.
Family always comes first.
Our family lays the foundation of our growth.
Our family is our first hope.
Our family provides us with emotional, moral, and financial support.
Family support is crucial to deal with challenging situations.
The kind of person we become is completely determined by the family support and care we have received.
The world can become a better place if we accept the entire world as a family.
Spending time with family brings happiness and satisfaction.
Our family’s unconditional love lays the foundation for happiness.

Ans: The importance of family can vary from person to person. Some families are sensitive towards their children while others want their children to learn from the developments around them. In both cases, families are taking care of their children. Our family is our first hope. Therefore, accepting and valuing family support is important for a successful and happy life.

Ans: Our family is our world. Family always comes first. Our family lays the foundation of our growth. Our family is our first hope. Our family provides us with emotional, moral, and financial support. Family support is crucial to deal with challenging situations.

Ans: Our family is our first hope. They provide us with emotional, moral, and financial support in every possible situation. Taking care of our loved ones must be our priority, as it shows how much we care for them.

Shiva Tyagi

With an experience of over a year, I've developed a passion for writing blogs on wide range of topics. I am mostly inspired from topics related to social and environmental fields, where you come up with a positive outcome.

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Home — Essay Samples — Life — Family Values — Family Values And Their Importance

Family Values and Their Importance

Categories: Family Values

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Defining family values, the importance of family values, promoting positive relationships, fostering problem-solving skills.

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The Importance of Family (10 Powerful Reasons)

Family is important because it offers emotional support, nurtures a feeling of belonging, encourages educational growth, and fosters cognitive development. A family meets diverse needs throughout the various phases of life, from infancy through old age.

Families serve crucial societal functions, including socialization, values transmission, and social stability. Families can influence a child’s brain development, prospects of success in life, the formation of future relationships, health, and overall life satisfaction.

Table of Contents

What is family?

A family is generally a group of individuals who come together to provide a natural environment for the development of their children and the well-being of the family’s members. The relationships between the family members can be defined in many ways. Here are 4 common ways to define a family.

Biological or blood relations : Traditionally, a family is defined as a group of blood-related people. This includes parents and their children, siblings, and extended relatives like grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Social and cultural definition : Socially and culturally, a family can include individuals who are not necessarily related by blood or law but are bound by emotional ties, care, and support. This can include stepfamilies, godparents, close friends, and others who play a significant role in an individual’s life.
Legal definition : Legally, a family often includes those related by blood, marriage, or adoption. In the United States, this definition varies by the legal context. For example, the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) have their own interpretations and definitions of family.
Personal and Emotional Definition : On a personal level, family can mean different things to different people. For some, it’s about biological connections; for others, it’s about who they share their life with, who cares for them, and who they care for.

What is the importance of family?

Here are 10 reasons why family is important.

Provide emotional support

A good family is a source of emotional support and unconditional love. Adults who received emotional support from their family during childhood are associated with experiencing fewer depressive symptoms, according to a 2004 study published in the American Psychological Association’s “Psychology and Aging” journal. 1

A healthy family with good parenting is associated with better emotional regulation, self-confidence, mental health, social competence, and resilience. Families can be a source of support in good times and in bad.

Foster belongingness and identity

Families shape an individual’s identity and belonging from a young age. As social creatures, belonging to a group is important for our self-concept. Families provide a sense of social identity, a sense of self, and a feeling that we belong to something larger than ourselves.

Promote education

Families facilitate children’s education by creating learning opportunities, providing intellectual stimulation, and modeling literacy and language skills.

Foster cognitive development and academic performance

Families provide an environment that stimulates cognitive skills, such as problem-solving and critical thinking and supports and encourages academic achievements.

Facilitate socialization

Families play a central role in socializing children and teaching social norms, cultural differences, manners, prosocial behavior, and beliefs. Family members help children understand social relationships and navigate community dynamics.

Maintain physical health

Families instill healthy lifestyles by educating family members about nutrition, exercise, and hygiene. These efforts lay the foundation for children’s long-term physical well-being. Additionally, families provide essential care and support during illness, aiding in recovery and managing health challenges.

Guide moral development

Parents shape their children’s moral development by modeling ethical behavior and teaching right from wrong. Many cultures hold family itself as a fundamental moral value.

Preserve cultural and traditional transmission

Families pass down language, rituals, customs, stories, and belief systems from generation to generation, preserving cultural identity and traditions.

Ensure economic support and security

Families provide material support, including food, clothing, and shelter. This economic support contributes to a sense of security and stability from childhood through older adulthood.

Uphold continuity and legacy

Families preserve cultural heritage and traditions, ensuring these are passed down through generations. A 2015 study conducted by the Manchester Metropolitan University indicated that a family helps individuals gain a sense of continuity by providing a shared history and a link to the past through narratives. 2

Why do we need a family?

Our families are one of the most important things in our lives. We need a family for different reasons at various stages of our lives.

When babies are born, they need a family’s care and protection to survive.
Children need a family’s guidance to learn. They also need a family’s assistance to grow physically and mentally.
Teenagers need a family’s continued financial and emotional support. They also need a family’s to develop their independent identity.
Adults need a family’s emotional connection to feel loved and belong.
Seniors need a family to have a sense of purpose in life.

Is family the most important thing?

Yes, family is the most important thing to many people. In a survey conducted at the University of London in 1995 with 2,000 adult respondents, 31% mentioned relationships with family or relatives as the most important thing in their lives – the highest percentage for any item. 3

However, family is not the most important thing to everyone. In a 2015 study conducted at Kean University, 43.5% of 354 graduate and undergraduate students were estranged from their families. Reasons for estrangement included disagreement, financial issues, divorce, substance abuse, and abuse. 4

What is the importance of family in society?

The importance of family in society includes the following 5 factors.

Socialization : Families instill values, beliefs, and norms in children that support a peaceful, well-functioning society. They teach kids fundamental social skills like language, customs, roles, and norms. They also shape children’s prosocial behaviors like cooperation, respect, and contribution to the community. Well-socialized children grow into productive adult citizens.
Values transmission : Families are the primary way values such as responsibility, honesty, generosity, etc., are passed down to shape future generations and society.
Social stability and structure : There is a strong connection between family nurturing and the well-being of society. Family is a basic building block of society, performing an important role in providing structure and stability. Strong family units contribute to a stable social framework, which is essential for the overall functioning and cohesiveness of the community.
Community engagement and development : Families often participate in community activities and local governance, contributing to developing strong, supportive, and resilient communities.
Economic support : Families provide economic support for children, the elderly, sick, and unemployed family members, reducing the burden on society. Families also contribute to society through consumption and production.

What is the role of family in child development?

Families play 5 important roles in child development.

Shape brain development : Family experiences can impact brain development , according to a 2011 research published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. The research reviewed over 50 studies on brain development and found direct evidence that factors such as maltreatment and maternal deprivation during childhood could lead to changes in brain structure, volume, growth, and activities. Early experiences lay the groundwork for developing a healthy brain, emotional regulation, social competence, and resilience. 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2010.02281.x
Contribute to life success : Researchers have observed that parenting and the family play a crucial role in a child’s life and success in all the societies studied. For instance, a Harvard University study conducted in 1938 tried to determine the secret of raising successful kids. 268 male Harvard students were tracked for 70 years in the Harvard Grant Study, the first of its kind. Their mental and physical health, as well as their successes and failures, was analyzed. A loving family and healthy relationships are strongly linked to a successful and happy life. 5
Influence future relationships : According to the attachment theory theorized by psychiatrist John Bowlby and psychologist Mary Ainsworth, family plays an important role in establishing children’s attachment styles. This early attachment influences the child’s emotional development, self-perception, and future relationships. 6
Impact health and well-being : Numerous studies have consistently shown that family life is an important aspect of our well-being. A strong family unit characterized by positive, supportive relationships enhances mental and physical health. For example, a 2011 study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison revealed that family structure was significantly linked to teenagers’ behavioral issues, physical health, and emotional health. 7 A supportive family environment fosters a sense of security and belonging, contributing to lower stress levels and improved health outcomes. 8
Predict life satisfaction: In a 1980 study conducted at Indiana State University, life satisfaction levels at 4 stages of adult life from early adulthood (ages 22-34) to late adulthood (ages 65 and older) were examined. A strong family life was one of the strongest predictors of life satisfaction at each stage. 9

Why is family important to you?

Family is important to people in many different ways. Here are 10 potential reasons why family can be important to you.

Family can offer unconditional love.
Family gives you strength and support to face difficulties in life.
Family models good values.
Family provides companionship and a sense of belonging.
Family helps you build self-esteem.
Family provides you with shelter and safety.
Family teaches you vital lessons in life.
Family gives you a sense of security and stability.
Family teaches you moral values.
Family enhances mental health.

How does family influence your life?

A family influences your life in many different ways. Some influences are positive, while others are negative. From our earliest moments, our families shape our understanding of the world, our beliefs and values, habits and behaviors, and even our personalities.

Our families provide our first social interactions and environments for learning. Parents, siblings, and extended family teach us through their words, actions, encouragement, and discipline. Growing up, we observe how our families communicate, solve problems, express emotions, and relate to one another and the outside world. Consciously and unconsciously, we integrate much of what we learn from our families into our ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

The family relationships and dynamics we experience can impact our self-esteem, mental health, worldviews, communication patterns, decision-making, relationships outside the family, and more. Healthy, loving family bonds often lead to positive development and outcomes later in life. Dysfunctional family environments can negatively shape us, too.

Our families leave lasting imprints on who we become as individuals. Their influences remain with us as we mature and start our own families, determining what values, behaviors, and environments we pass on to our children. For better and worse, our families shape our lives through the lessons they teach us and the models they provide.

Why should we help our family?

We should help our families because families provide not just basic needs for children but also emotional needs. A loved one can be a source of strength during hard times. By being there for family when they need us, we reciprocate this love and care they have provided us. When we support family members, we reinforce our relationships and embody the family values of love, responsibility, generosity, and a sense of community.

How do families develop strong foundations?

To develop strong foundations, here are 4 ways to promote a strong sense of family.

Invest in family support: Families provide not just basic needs for children but also emotional needs. A loved one can be a source of strength during hard times. Showing children unconditional love is one of the best ways to create a support system. It is their safe haven, so they know they can always come home.
Improve communication : Open communication is critical to building close connections. Good communication means everyone should be able to speak up, including children. They can have open discussions and share their thoughts honestly and respectfully. Happy, healthy family dynamics rely on respecting each other’s thoughts and feelings and compromising when necessary. Each family member feels connected and is part of something bigger than themselves.
Cherish family dinner time : A 2006 study published in the Journal of Adolescent Health highlighted its significance in the positive development of teenagers. This extensive study surveyed 99,462 high school students across the United States and discovered a notable positive correlation between regular family dinners and essential aspects such as commitment to learning, the development of positive values, social competencies, and a positive sense of identity. Conversely, it found that these family meals were inversely associated with high-risk behaviors, including substance use, sexual activity, depression, suicidal tendencies, antisocial behaviors, and violence. 10
Prioritize quality time together : The value of family time lies not just in its quantity but significantly in its quality. Quality time goes beyond just engaging in enjoyable activities; it encompasses being present and supportive during your child’s challenging moments and actively participating in their life. These meaningful interactions are what constitute true quality time.

Do I need a family to be happy?

No, you don’t need a family to be happy. True happiness can come from within through personal fulfillment, self-discovery, achieving competence, a sense of purpose, and healthy relationships. What brings fulfillment varies significantly among individuals.

In addition, having a family does not automatically equate to happiness. For instance, children in abusive family environments often do not have a happy childhood .

Similarly, parenthood doesn’t guarantee happiness. A study by the Berlin Social Science Center 2014 found that new parents were generally less happy than their childless counterparts. 11

Is it OK not to have a family?

Yes, it is OK not to have a family. In 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau found that married-couple households without children under 18 were more common than married-couple households with children. Not everyone feels compelled to have children or establish a traditional family structure. 12

Your happiness and love for your life are what matter most. If not having a family aligns with your happiness and life goals, it’s the right path for you. There is no need to conform to societal norms or feel pressured to do what everyone else does. Prioritize what brings you fulfillment and joy.

1. Shaw BA, Krause N, Chatters LM, Connell CM, Ingersoll-Dayton B. Emotional Support From Parents Early in Life, Aging, and Health. Psychology and Aging . Published online March 2004:4-12. doi: 10.1037/0882-7974.19.1.4
2. Bennett J. Narrating family histories: Negotiating identity and belonging through tropes of nostalgia and authenticity. Current Sociology . Published online April 20, 2015:449-465. doi: 10.1177/0011392115578984
3. Bowling A. What things are important in people’s lives? A survey of the public’s judgements to inform scales of health related quality of life. Social Science & Medicine . Published online November 1995:1447-1462. doi: 10.1016/0277-9536(95)00113-l
4. Conti RP. Family Estrangement: Establishing a Prevalence Rate. JPBS . Published online 2015. doi: 10.15640/jpbs.v3n2a4
5. Woodhams V, de Lusignan S, Mughal S, et al. Triumph of hope over experience: learning from interventions to reduce avoidable hospital admissions identified through an Academic Health and Social Care Network. BMC Health Serv Res . Published online June 10, 2012. doi: 10.1186/1472-6963-12-153
6. Ainsworth MDS. The Bowlby-Ainsworth attachment theory. Behav Brain Sci . Published online September 1978:436-438. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x00075828
7. Langton CE, Berger LM. Family Structure and Adolescent Physical Health, Behavior, and Emotional Well-Being. Social Service Review . Published online September 2011:323-357. doi: 10.1086/661922
8. Elgar FJ, Craig W, Trites SJ. Family Dinners, Communication, and Mental Health in Canadian Adolescents. Journal of Adolescent Health . Published online April 2013:433-438. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2012.07.012
9. Medley ML. Life Satisfaction across Four Stages of Adult Life. Int J Aging Hum Dev . Published online October 1980:193-209. doi: 10.2190/d4lg-aljq-8850-gydv
10. Fulkerson JA, Story M, Mellin A, Leffert N, Neumark-Sztainer D, French SA. Family Dinner Meal Frequency and Adolescent Development: Relationships with Developmental Assets and High-Risk Behaviors. Journal of Adolescent Health . Published online September 2006:337-345. doi: 10.1016/j.jadohealth.2005.12.026
11. Pollmann‐Schult M. Parenthood and Life Satisfaction: Why Don’t Children Make People Happy? J of Marriage and Family . Published online March 4, 2014:319-336. doi: 10.1111/jomf.12095
12. . Married Couple Households Made Up Most of Family Households. United States Census Bureau. Published 2023. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/05/family-households-still-the-majority.html

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Essay on My Family

List of essays on my family, essay on my family – short essay for kids in english (essay 1 – 250 words), essay on my family – for children (essay 2 – 300 words), essay on my family – paragraph (essay 3 – 400 words), essay on my family –topics (essay 4 – 500 words), essay on my family (essay 5 – 500 words), essay on my family – why i love my family (essay 6 – 500 words), essay on my family – for school students (class 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 standard) (essay 7 – 500 words), essay on my family (essay 8 – 750 words), essay on my family – long essay (essay 9 – 1000 words).

A family is one of the greatest gift god has given to all living creatures on the earth including humans. It is a privilege to have a happy family as not everyone in the world has it.

The joy of living with your parents, fighting with your siblings over petty can just make you smile the moment you think of it. In order to inculcate the values of a family in the students, we have composed some short essays for students.

These essays are suited for students of all ages and classes. Not only these essays shall give an insight on how a family should be but shall also enrich the students with the moral values of a family.

Audience: The below given essays are exclusively written for kids, children and school students.

Family is important to every one of us and we all love our family. Wherever we go in this world and whatever we may achieve, our heart and soul will always be in our home because it is where our beautiful family is. Nothing in this world can be stronger than the bonding of the blood . The members of the same family may have differences of opinions, may quarrel often for silly things but in spite of all these it is our family that supports us during our ups and downs.

As the saying goes, “ Family is the best thing you could ever wish for. They are there for you during the ups and downs and love you no matter what”.

Contrary to this saying, we cannot choose our family as we choose our friends. But I can say that I’m blessed with a wonderful family. My family is very small with four members – my mother, my father, my elder sister and me. My family is a middle class family and my father is officially the bread winner of our family. My mother supports him financially by taking tuitions for school children.

We do not have much money or wealth but what my family has in abundance is love for each other which cannot be replaced by anything else in this world. My father and my mother are the role models to my sister and me. They struggle a lot to give us a better life. More than anything they have taught us discipline and morals of life which is helping us to lead our lives in a righteous path even today.

I cannot ask anything more to God since he has already showered me with my family which I treasure the most every second and will safeguard even in the future.

The family is a valuable god gift which plays a most crucial role in every individual’s life. I love my family very much because all of my family members stand in my good as well as bad times. From moral teachings to love and support, my family has always helped me without any demand. There is no doubt that we experience our biggest triumphs when we really connect to them.

My family is like a strong pillar for me, on which I can rely blindly anytime I require support. From my family, I have learned the social graces of loyalty & cooperation.

My family consists of my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, my father, two young sisters and myself. My grandparents are the pillars of my family and my grandfather is the head of my family. He is the one whose decision relating to any matter is final and all of us do respect it.

Right from my childhood, my family members have prepared me for the challenges that I’ll face in the years ahead. In addition to this, all of my family members help and serve each other at times of need. These qualities that I have learnt from my family has helped me to shape my adult life in a right manner.

I am really very attached to my grandfather. He holds an excellent life experience because he has already faced so many ups and downs. My Grandfather has helped me to build my perception & vision towards society.

My family has always been there to motivate and encourage me to overcome all difficulties in life and achieve success. The role of every member in my family is unique and important in their own way. I thank God that I have grown up in a family full of love and discipline. My family values will definitely help me in becoming a better person.

A person without family and its love never becomes completely happy in his/her life. I am complete and happy with my family that includes five members. My family is a group of five including me, father, mother, brother, and sister. Family bonding is a unique type of love that gives you every lesson needed to live a harmonious life.

Growing under the supervision of a caring and loving family will increase our social values and overall well-being. Each member of my family carries out equal responsibility in sculpting the strong bonding needed for a better future and develop moral importance in each other.

My father owns a successful business of office stationery store. He uses the money to cover all our expenses and give a better lifestyle to the family. He works hard day and night to get us better education, food, home, etc. He hides all his tiredness when he comes home after a long day to spend quality time with us.

My mother is a talented homemaker who also does a part-time tailoring at home. She does all her duties with at most interest, from taking care of us to all the household chores and finds time to pursue her passion as well. She is a multi-tasker and does all the tasks from helping us in our studies to preparing delicious healthy foods to sculpt us into a better human being.

My brother is an engineering graduate and does a job in a well-known company. He is my best well-wisher and helps me in all ups and downs. My sister is also an engineering graduate and an employee in an IT company. She always finds time to help me with all my difficulties and she is my secret keeper too.

My family is a lifeline to whom I can run to, whatever may be the situation I am facing. My family guides me to be a good person and help me in nurturing good values. We, humans, are animals that live together spreading love and care for each other, and this togetherness is called family. The absence of such a divine bonding make us equal to animals.

Family value and growing in such a caring surrounding helps me to pass all the struggles and hardships that I face in my daily life. Whatever be the situation we are facing, our family will never leave us alone. My family is a blessing for me and I value everyone in my family with equal respect and love.

Most of the people in the world are blessed with having a family. A family, with whom you can share all your joys and sorrows, who is there to guide you through your growing years, who stands by you in the toughest of the situations. I too am blessed to have such a family.

My family is one the most bizarre family in the world. We are four people, my mother, my father, my younger brother and me. While my father is the one who does work for a living, it is my mother who is the boss of the house. My father is a humble person. He is an officer in a government department. My mother is a housewife. It is our mother who takes care of our studies as our father is often busy with his official assignments and even travels for days together. We just miss him when he is not at home.

He never scolds us. But, our mother is just the opposite. She wants us to remain disciplined and we often get scolded by her. However, our father comes to our rescue most of the times. My brother, still in school is the one with whom I love to spend my time the most. Not because I love to play with him, but because, being the elder sister, I enjoy instructing him and showing him who is more powerful at home. He, at a time, seems so helpless when our mother says to obey his sister. I just love that moment. But not all days are the same. I hate having to study all along while he gets to play more than me.

The Atmosphere in my Family:

We largely have a peaceful atmosphere at home. After school, our time is spent on studying, playing and watching television, which of course our mother does not like. Unlike other couples, my mother and father seldom have a fight. In fact, as soon we see an argument brewing up, one of them just withdraws and it is just rare to see a heated conversation between them. This is what I like the most about them as I feel that my parents are so cool. It is only me and brother who love to fight with each other.

However, we know that behind those fights, it is actually our love for each other which binds us together. I just enjoy being at home spending time with my parents and my brother. I just feel how bad it would be when tomorrow I and my brother shall move on for our professional lives and we shall not be able to spend much time together. However, it is the memories of today which shall be with me forever and will bring a smile on my face anytime when I feel low.

The Importance of a Family:

A family is said to be the first school of a child. It is from here you start to learn how to speak, walk and interact with the world. It is important to value the importance of a family in one’s life. At times, people feel that they are grown-ups and that their parent’s advice does not matter anymore, but that is not true. It is the elders of the family who at any given of time would know the world better than us and we should all respect our family members and love our siblings as well. It is the family who builds our character and we should feel fortunate to have a family around us.

Introduction

My family values are what I take so dear to my heart because they have made me what I am today and I plan on passing these great values to my children in future. Every family has those things, acts and values that they hold in high esteem and they cherish so much. These vales have become a part of them: most times, it is what distinguishes the traits in each family and in some ways it makes or mars the future of the family members. Same applies to my family, we have some set values that has become a part of us and it has made my life a lot better because I have become a better person who is not only valuable to himself but also to the society at large. I will be sharing some of these values with you.

My Family Values:

Some of my family values include:

1. Honesty:

This is a principle that is highly protected in my family. My dad has this saying that, “honesty is the best policy.” Ever since I was little, my family has taught me how to be honest and the benefits that lie within. Sometimes, my parents even test us in ways we were not expecting and a reward is given to the person that comes out honest. This is one of my family values that I cherish so much and I am proud that it is what my family hold in high esteem.

2. Kindness to Others:

This is not a common trait to all. My mom has this belief that if the world and everybody in it shows love and kindness to one another, there will be no hatred and wars will be eradicated. This is a family value that we cherish so much. I learnt to show love to everybody. Even when we did not have much, my parents will still give to those who are needy. My dad says that the world is like a river, we would eventually flow into one another later and you do not know the future, the person you helped today might eventually be of help to you tomorrow.

3. Education:

This is a value that has been passed from generation to generation in my family. My dad would say that education is the best legacy you can give to a child. My family does everything in their capacity for you to get a sound and benefitting education. The acquisition of knowledge is also quite important. All of us try to gain more and more knowledge because we all have a family slogan that says “knowledge is power and that power makes me a hero.”

4. Dress and Appearance:

This is a religious value we cherish in my family. My dad would say that you are addressed the way you dress. I do not want to be address wrongly and give out a wrong impression. So, our appearance really matter a lot to us and the way we dress.

Conclusion:

Every family has one thing or the other that they hold in high esteem and tend to pass on from generation to generation. This is what makes a family a united sect not because we are related by blood but because of we share the same values.

Introduction:

Why I love my family is a question that has been floating through my mind for a very long time because no matter how hard I try to pin out a reason why I love them, I just can’t find one. This can be due to fact that they mean the whole world to me and I will do anything for them. I love my family a lot and I would like to share some of the reasons why I love my family and will never trade them for anything.

Why I Love My Family:

I have a family that consists of 6 people: my father, my mother and four children which includes me. For you to understand why I love my family I will tell you a little about each of them and why I love them so much.

My father is the best father in the world: well, that’s what I say. He is a business manager. I look up to my father a lot because I will like to take a lot of his behaviours and make it mine. He taught me to be contented with whatever I have. We did not have much when I was growing up; my dad lost his job and still did not allow anything of the pressure change how he behaved to us at home. He is caring, gentle, accommodating and disciplined.

My mum is the best cook in the world. I do not know where I would be today without my mum. I owe her a lot. She is a teacher by profession and this fascinates me a lot because not only is she inculcating knowledge in the young minds of tomorrow, she is also building the future of our society at large. I want to be like my mum. I remember those times when she had to sacrifice when the most precious of her things just to make me happy. She is loving, caring, understanding, accommodating. In fact, she is everything you can ever wish for in a mother.

My elder sisters are the best. Although they can be frustrating sometimes but that is mostly because of my stubbornness. They pretend they do not really care but deep inside they do. The things they do even subconsciously say otherwise. I remember a day in elementary school, I was being bullied a boy in class. On this particular day, he hit me. Unknowing to me, my sister heard about it and she beat the boy and made him apologise to me, I felt so happy that day because I had someone who had my back.

My brother is one of the best gifts I have received. He is the last child and this gives him an opportunity to be annoying if you know what I mean. He is joyful and always ready to heed correction. There was this day, I heard him bragging to his friends about how awesome I am, and I was the happiest that day.

We all have one reason or the other on why we love our family. I love mine because they are the best gift I could ever ask for and the fact that they have been there for me through the good, bad and funny times.

Importance of family is something that is greatly overlooked and underrated in the world we live in today. The definition that the family had about one hundred years before now was very clear. Back then, a family was believed to be a unit that consisted of the father that was in charge of the finances of the family, a mother whose primary duty was to look after the home and take care of the children and then there were the children. Largely based on the region you are from, a family can also include members of the extended family like aunts, uncles and grandparents. This type of family system is referred to as joint family.

Family Importance:

A family that is important is one that is very strong. If a family is going to be very strong, there is a need for the bond between them to be very strong. Bonds that help in keeping the members of a family with each other are relationships. If there are very strong relationships among all the members of a family, there is going to be stronger commitment between all of them and the family as a unit will be very important.

Better communication is also a result of family relationships that are very strong. If all the family members can take time out to talk and know each other well, the bond between them is bound to be very strong. Even if the conversations are about big things or small things, it does not really matter. The most important thing is that all family members stay connected to one another. It is very important that they all list to each other and understand every member.

How to make Family Bonds Very Strong:

We have various things that can help our family bond to improve.

A few of them include:

1. Love: love is the most important thing we need for our bonds as a family to improve. When we love the members in our family, we will also be able to know all about privacy, intimacy, caring, belonging and sharing. When there is love in a family, the family will prosper.

2. Loyalty: loyalty is something that comes as a result of love. Family members should stay devoted to each other. It is important that we are able to count on our family to have our back anytime we are facing problems.

The importance of family can never be overstated even though we live in a different time now and our attitudes to relationships, marriage and what a family should be has changed. The family is something that we need to help share our problems and be there for us anytime we have issues. A lot of the things that were not acceptable in the past and we now see as normal. Even with all the changes that the society has effected on our family system, the family still remains the major foundation of our society and this will remain the same.

My family is the best gift I have got. A family can be simply said to mean a social group of different people in our society that includes one or more parents and also their children. In a family, every member of the family commits to other members of the family in a mutual relationship. A family is a very important unit and the smallest unit in the society. A family whether a big one or a small one is of very great importance and use to all of its members and is believed to be the unit of our society that is strongest because the society is formed from the coming together and culmination of various families.

In many cultures, the family serves a child’s first school where the child learns all about their traditions and cultures more importantly learn about all the rudimentary values in life. A family is very essential in the teaching of healthy habits and good manners to all the members of the family. It gives the members of the family the opportunity to become people with better character in our society. I feel very lucky to be born into a small and lovely family; I learnt a lot of things from my family.

I am from a middle class and average family with six members (my father, my mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, my younger brother and me). My grandfather is the head of the family and we all respect and listen to him. He is really wise and tries to advise each and every one of us using his many life experiences. He has been involved in many interesting and adventurous activities that he tells me about all the time. Most of the time, he has the final say on all of our family issues and he does his best to make all his decisions impartial.

Any time we are eating today as a family, he sits at the top of the table; we all have designated seats at the dining table. When my brother and I are available, my grandfather teaches us about our traditions and cultures. My grandfather is very friendly and has a cool and great personality and tries to talk nicely and calmly to everyone passing across his message without being rude. He helps my brother and sometimes me with our assignments. He majorly teaches us about all of the tools we need to be successful in life including punctuality, discipline, moral, cleanliness, continuity, honesty, hard work and trustworthiness.

My lovely grandmother is one of the nicest people I know, she tells my brother and I lovely stories every night. My father is a civil engineer and he is very hardworking, sincere and punctual. He is the breadwinner of the family and does his best to provide for every member of the family even if that means he has to work extra hours. My mother is very sweet and takes care of every member of the family even though she works as an accountant at a firm. She wakes up very early in the morning to make preparations for the day. My brother is a funny and jovial person that enjoys sporting activities and I love him so much.

Sometimes I wish my cousins, uncles and aunts lived with us, I love having them around. There are a lot of advantages and disadvantages of having everyone around. I have highlighted some below.

Some advantages are:

1. It gives a better routine of living that can contribute to a proper growth.

2. Having a joint family helps in following the numerous principles of an equitable economy and helps teach discipline and respect. It also teaches us how to share the burden of other family members.

3. There is the understanding of having to adjust to the needs of other family members.

4. The children in a large family get to grow up in a happy environment because they have children of their age around that they can play with.

5. All the members of a joint family are usually very disciplined and responsible as everyone has to follow the instructions of the family head.

Some of the disadvantages include:

1. There is always the chance of a rift or fight between the family members because of the possible imbalance of feelings of oneness, brotherly love and feeling of generosity.

2. There is a chance of the members of the family that earn very high looking down on members of the family that do not.

The concept of family is important in India for every individual. Family defines an individual background in terms of social relations and growth. Families influence the lives of individuals from childhood to adulthood especially in decisions concerning life milestones like marriage and career paths. Indian families live together for up to four generations under one roof and they manage to maintain lose family relations compared to other families across the globe. Indian families tend to stick to their cultural practices as a family and they maintain religious practices that cut across the family. Elders in Indian families are respected by the members of the family and their opinions are considered during decision making.

What Family Really Means :

Basic knowledge defines a family as a group of people who share genetic and legal bonds. However, the concept of family means a lot more for other people than just the bond and it incorporates the concepts of culture and religion. In India, the concept of family differs from what the rest of the world perceives as family.

Families in India go beyond nuclear and extend to wider circles, whereby the extended family lives together and are closely related. The relationships in the family are strong such that cousins are considered siblings and aunts and uncles are considered parents. Family also means the unconditional love among the members of the family whereby there is support in terms of finances and emotions.

Why the Family is so important:

The family plays a central role in lives of individuals in teaching of moral values. Parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents have been known to teach the children on morality and disciplinary issue s in most cultures. Both spiritual and moral values are instilled through family. Family give a sense of belonging to individuals because they are over by the family and supported at all times.

A family will always support its members with needs including financial and emotional needs. In a family, there has been established levels of satisfaction and happiness from the joy of being together. Families also helping community development through contributions and participating in activities in the community. The family is important in the society in maintaining order, discipline and peace.

I come from a big family. My family has not moved to an urban area and so we still live as a wider circle together with the extended family. In my nuclear family, I am the first born of four children. I have one sister and two brothers who are still at school. I have three aunts and two uncles. My cousins are twelve in number and most of them are at school except for the youngest ones.

My grandparents are very old and they do not get out of the house much and are being taken care by my parents and aunts. Most of the children are always at school and the house gets quiet but during holiday, we all unite together as a full house. My family is of the middle class in terms of wealth. Our religion is Hindu and we all practice the Indian cultures and traditions. What I love about my family is that everyone is a good cook and the food is always amazing. Members of my family are kind and respectful and that is why we rarely have disputes. The family support is strong and we all love each other.

Why I love My Family:

Having a big family is interesting because the house always feels warm. As I had earlier mentioned, my family is made of good cooks, which makes me love them. There is always teamwork within the family and good relationships are maintained. I like the adventurous nature of my family because we always have fun whenever we go for holiday vacations or have a family event.

Moral cultural and spiritual values are highly cared for in the society. My family is oriented in good moral values and believe we make a good role model for the society. Despite the influence of education, the family has been able to maintain the culture and traditions of Indian people. The love that exists in my family is precious and that is the most important value of all times because what family without love?

Our Weekend Outings and House Parties:

We do not have many of these in our family because of the different schedules among the members. We only have weekend outings and house parties during holidays. Birthday parties are and weddings are the parties that we frequently have as a family. I love parties at home because the food is usually exceptionally good. Also, the dancing and happy faces. Weekend outings are usually in form of picnics and they are usually full of games.

Cousins Visit during Summer:

My family is young and only three of my cousins are in college. The rest are in high school or elementary schools. Whenever my cousins come home from school, it is a happy moment for the whole family and we host parties to welcome them home. Whenever my older cousins are at home, I enjoy their company and I love to hear stories about college because that is where I will be in a few years’ time.

In the spirit of holidays, we have a vacation or two in a year. During these vacations, plans begin early and when the time comes, it is enjoyable and relaxing. Vacations for us as children tend to be more enjoyable because we have an environment away from home and with minimal parental supervision and we tend to explore and talk among ourselves. Team building during vacations strengthens the bond in families.

Family is a blessing to individuals because that is where they belong and it is what defines them. A good family is built through moral values and team effort. Having family events and parties or vacations re important is strengthening the relationships within a family. A happy individual is definitely from a happy family.

Family , My Family , Relationships

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Importance Of Family Essay - 100, 200, 500 Words

It is essential to have a family because members provide emotional and financial support and unwavering affection. They will never stop trying to find the best in you, even if you don't see it in yourself, and they'll push you to reach your potential. Here are a few sample essays on the Importance of Family.

100 Words Essay on The Importance of Family

200 words essay on the importance of family, 500 words essay on the importance of family.

Importance Of Family Essay - 100, 200, 500 Words

Family plays a crucial role in shaping our lives and provides us with love, support, and identity. A family is a source of unconditional love that teaches us the true meaning of love and helps us carry it with us throughout our lives. Loyalty and strong bonds are key elements of a family that help to strengthen relationships and create a sense of belonging. Family also teaches us important life skills such as patience and relationship-building, which help us to form meaningful connections with the outside world. Overall, the family is a source of strength and provides us with the foundation we need to grow and thrive.

The significance of one's family cannot be overstated. The family serves as a foundation for our personal and social growth, providing us with love, support, and guidance. Our homes should be places where we instill in our children important values such as love, respect, faith, hope, care, culture, ethics, tradition, and more. For many, nothing compares to the love and support provided by family. Family members are obligated to support each other emotionally and financially, making the family unit a crucial social institution.

Growing up in a family environment helps children develop strong principles and values, while also teaching important life lessons such as honesty, reliability, and compassion. The family is essential to our overall well-being, serving as our central support system and backbone of existence. Each family member plays a unique role, contributing to the whole, and providing us with the strength we need to reach our full potential.

The home is a crucial educational environment that plays a major role in shaping our lives. Having a family provides us with stability and support, aiding our intellectual and social development, as well as our physical and emotional growth. Despite asking for little, families provide us with as much love and support as they can, no matter what circumstances we face. The presence of family helps to bring out our individuality, and serves as our central support system and backbone of existence. Each family member is valuable and contributes their unique qualities to the whole, providing us with the support we need to soar and achieve our dreams.

Family is one of the most important aspects of an individual's life. It provides a sense of security, stability, and support that is essential for a person's overall well-being and development. The family unit is a crucial social institution, consisting of individuals who are obligated to support each other emotionally and financially. The love and support provided by family members helps individuals overcome life's challenges and reach their full potential.

How Family Supports Us

The family serves as the first educational environment for children, teaching them important values and principles. Children learn about their identity and the world around them through their family experiences. They develop their emotional, social, and cognitive skills within the home, and learn about relationships, communication, and respect. A strong family environment is crucial for a child's healthy development, and can shape their future relationships and behaviors.

Family provides individuals with a sense of belonging and connection. Family members share a unique bond, based on love, trust, and mutual support. Family relationships offer individuals the opportunity to build meaningful connections with others, which are essential for their emotional well-being. Family can offer comfort and support in times of need, and can provide a sense of belonging and security, even in the face of adversity.

One of the most important aspects of family is the love and support provided by its members. Family members are there for each other, offering comfort and guidance, no matter what life may bring. This unconditional love and support is essential for an individual's mental and emotional well-being, and can provide a sense of security and stability that is unmatched by any other type of relationship.

In addition to emotional and psychological support, families can also provide financial support, which is essential in times of need. Family members may help each other with expenses, offer financial advice, and support each other through financial difficulties. This type of support is particularly important for individuals who are facing financial hardship or unemployment, and can help alleviate the stress and anxiety associated with these challenges.

My family is a close-knit unit of four members. My parents are my biggest supporters and have always been there for me, no matter what. They have instilled in me strong values such as honesty, kindness, and respect for others. I have a younger brother who is my best friend and constant source of laughter.

Growing up, my family was always there to encourage me in my interests and support me in my endeavors. They pushed me to work hard in school and to chase my dreams. I have learned so much from my parents, such as the value of hard work, persistence, and determination. Their unwavering love and support has given me the confidence to strive for success in all aspects of my life.

Family is also about creating memories together. Whether it's taking a family vacation, cooking a meal together, or simply watching a movie, these moments bring us closer and help us bond. In my family, we make a point to spend quality time together and enjoy each other's company.

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Essay on the Importance of Family

Family is the place where you learn your first lesson in life. Your family members are the only assets that will remain with you forever.

I am attached to my family greatly and everybody in my family is educated enough and has a beautiful nature. In this post, you will find a brilliant essay on the importance of family.

Daily Test - Attempt Now

Essay on the Importance of Family (200 Words)

Family serves as the foundation where we acquire our initial life lessons. Our family members are lifelong assets that remain with us unconditionally. Irrespective of the circumstances, family members always stand by each other’s side, providing unwavering support. Within the family unit, we are instilled with essential values and morals. We learn to respect our elders and nurture a love for our younger ones. Our family consistently imparts invaluable lessons to us, encompassing virtues such as honesty, dependability, kindness, and more.

Even though I am currently in my final year as a student, my family continues to treat me with the tenderness of a child, enveloping me with abundant love and care.

My family, consisting of five members, holds an unparalleled position in my heart. They are the precious gems that illuminate my life. The relentless dedication they exhibit in their work, striving to fulfill our every desire, deepens my love and respect for my parents immeasurably. Each night, we engage in games and stimulating discussions, ensuring that we spend quality time together.

The deep respect and utmost regard I hold for my family extend far beyond the confines of mere kinship. It stems from the unmatched and incredible sacrifices made on my behalf.

Also, Read Essay on My Father

Essay on the Importance of Family (350 Words)

Family plays a vital role in our lives, being the place where we acquire our earliest life lessons. Our family members are irreplaceable assets that will remain with us throughout our journey. Regardless of the circumstances we face, our family is always there to offer unwavering support. The importance of family lies in the fact that it instills in us good values and morals.

Within the family unit, we are taught the importance of respecting our elders and cherishing our younger ones. It is within the family that we consistently learn valuable lessons about honesty, dependability, kindness, and other virtues. Despite being a student in my final year, my family continues to treat me with the tenderness and care reminiscent of childhood.

My family of five members holds a special place in my heart. Leading our family is my father, who is a teacher. He shoulders the responsibility of guiding and providing for our family, making him my hero. I deeply respect him for his ability to foresee the needs of our family and fulfill his duties with utmost dedication.

My mother, a wonderful woman, is both a housewife and a skilled beautician. She is everything to me and possesses an unparalleled understanding of who I am. Together, we navigate the daily challenges and various aspects of life as partners.

Amongst our family members, my grandmother exudes an endearing charm. Her presence ensures that everyone rises early in the morning. Additionally, I have an elder brother who stands tall and pursues his passion as a YouTuber and cooking enthusiast. He also has a love for cricket and a fascination with gadgets.

I love my family as they are the jewels of my life. Their tireless efforts in providing for our needs and desires deepen my affection and admiration for my parents. Every night, we engage in games and meaningful discussions, cherishing quality time spent together.

My family commands the deepest respect and utmost regard from me, not only because they are my family, but also due to their unmatched and incredible sacrifices made on my behalf.

Also, Read Essay on My Mother

Essay on the Importance of Family (450 Words)

Family is the foundational place where we acquire our initial life lessons. Our family members are invaluable assets that remain with us throughout our journey. Regardless of the circumstances we face, our family members are always there to provide unwavering support. It is within the family that we learn and embraces good values and morals.

Respecting our elders and nurturing the love for the younger ones are values instilled within the family unit. From our family, we consistently learn vital lessons about honesty, dependability, kindness, and more. Even as a student in my final year, my family continues to treat me with the tenderness and care reminiscent of childhood, enveloping me with a deep sense of love and care.

My family, comprising five members, holds an irreplaceable place in my heart. At the helm of our family is my father, a teacher, who leads and guides us. He embodies strength and responsibility, bearing all the burdens and fulfilling his duties to shape our family’s reality. I hold immense respect for him and his remarkable deeds.

Notably, my father does not impose his career choices on me. He encourages me to follow my own path, based on my interests, suitability, and capabilities. However, he desires that I pursue a future that offers growth and opportunities.

My mother, a housewife, and a skilled beautician, is a loving and remarkable woman. She understands me deeply and serves as my closest companion in everyday tasks and challenges. Her elegance and insightful actions shape me into a noble individual. She motivates me to engage in character-building activities and creates an environment conducive to my natural growth and learning.

Within our family, my grandmother holds a special place. Her presence compels everyone to rise early in the morning. She possesses a talent for crafting delicious sweet dishes, which we all adore. Her focus and meticulousness contribute to maintaining order in our lives.

Additionally, my elder brother, the tallest among us, pursues his passion as a YouTuber and has a keen interest in cooking. He also finds joy in playing cricket and has a fascination with gadgets. While he may not prioritize academics, he possesses a kind and amiable disposition.

I deeply cherish my family, for they are invaluable treasures in my life. Their relentless hard work to fulfill our desires engenders even greater love and respect for my parents. Engaging in nightly games and diverse discussions allows us to savor quality time together.

The deep respect and utmost regard I hold for my family extend beyond the bounds of familial ties. It is rooted in the unparalleled and incredible sacrifices made for my well-being and growth.

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Essay on the Importance of Family (600 Words)

Family is the foundational institution where we acquire our first life lessons. Our family members are the most precious assets that will remain by our side forever. Family holds immense importance as its members are always there to support and stand by each other, regardless of the circumstances. It is within the family that we are taught and embrace good values and morals.

Respecting our elders and showing love towards the younger ones are integral values instilled within the family unit. Family plays a crucial role in consistently teaching us about honesty, dependability, kindness, and various other virtues. Despite being a student in my final year, my family always treats me with affection, evoking a profound sense of love and care.

To me, my family is the epitome of perfection. We are a nuclear family consisting of five members. My father, a teacher, assumes the role of the head and leader of our family. He shapes our family’s reality, making him my hero. With his foresight, he predicts the needs of the time and shoulders all responsibilities, ensuring the family’s well-being. I deeply respect him for his remarkable deeds.

My father never imposes his career choices on me. He desires that I pursue a path of my own, one that aligns with my interests, suitability, and capabilities. However, he aspires for my future to be filled with opportunities and success.

My father is my ultimate role model. He actively engages in all activities with me, guiding and correcting me, ensuring I make the right decisions. He provides enlightening lectures that shape my mindset, prioritizing my better career prospects. I hold immense love for my father, appreciating his unmatched fatherhood and the incredible sacrifices he has made for me.

My mother, a homemaker and talented beautician, is a delightful woman. She is my everything, understanding me intimately and profoundly. My mother stands as my partner in everyday tasks and various issues, supporting me unconditionally.

Beauty radiates from my mother, making her the most captivating woman I have ever seen. Through her insightful and graceful actions, she molds me into a noble individual. She motivates me to engage in character-building activities and creates an environment that facilitates natural and abundant learning.

Occasionally, my mother employs firm measures to discipline me and impart valuable life lessons. However, I am aware that her core nature is gentle and nurturing.

My grandmother, the most adorable person in our family, inspires an early morning routine for everyone. Her culinary expertise in creating delectable sweet dishes is cherished and adored by all. She is a focused individual, and her presence brings order and harmony into our lives.

My elder brother, towering over me in height, is a passionate YouTuber with a keen interest in cooking. He indulges in his love for cricket and possesses a fascination with gadgets. Although he may not prioritize his studies, he possesses a kind and gentlemanly nature.

The love I have for my family knows no bounds. They are the cherished gems of my life. Their relentless hard work and determination to fulfill our desires deepen my love and respect for my parents. Engaging in nightly games and meaningful discussions allows us to create lasting memories and spend quality time together.

I hold deep respect and admiration for my family, not only because they are my kin but also for their unparalleled and incredible sacrifices made for my well-being. I am grateful for their unwavering love and support.

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Essay on Importance of Family in English for Children and Students

Table of Contents

Essay on Importance of Family: We all are well aware of the role our families play in our individual lives. There is no difference of opinion on the point that our families play a very significant role in our lives. A family provides much needed emotional, social, financial and other support to us. Without a family life would be unimaginably difficult and everyday tasks would have been impossible to achieve. The feeling that someone loves you and waiting for you to return safe and on time, can better be experienced than stated. The importance of a family is well understood by those who don’t have one. Being all alone in this big world is the worst thing to happen to someone; on the contrary, having a family is the best.

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Long and Short Essay on Importance of Family in English

We have provided below short and long essay on importance of family in English.

The essays have been written in simple yet effective English so that you can easily remember them and present them when needed.
After going through these importance of family essay you will know what the importance of a family is, what makes a family so important etc.
The essays will be extremely helpful whenever you are asked to speak about your family or write an essay on it.

Short Essay on Importance of Family – Essay 1 (200 words)

Introduction.

If one looks at the strict definition of family, it is the people you share genetic material with, the ones who are related to you by birth. This starts with your immediate family – your mother, your father or your parents and your siblings. Then there is your extended family – grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins. This strict definition, however, doesn’t cover every aspect of family. Marriage, for example, is one of the most common ways to join a family. Adoption is another. The one fact that cannot be denied is that the family is important.

Importance of Family

Regardless of what form family might take for you, one thing is certain – family shapes us. Our family is our first introduction to the world. It is also our first interaction with it. We learn the most basic and the most important social skills from our family. In addition, we also fulfil our emotional needs through them. Human beings are social animals, something that means that it is not possible for us to lead entirely solitary lives. Modern life is tough and stressful. Handling it becomes a lot easier if you have a support system behind you. That support system is your family.

Love them or hate them, families are a very essential part of our lives. They play crucial roles in teaching us how to deal with the world. Without a family, an individual’s identity isn’t ever complete.

Essay on Why Family is Important to Me – Essay 2 (300 words)

While the strict definition of family states family as being those people who are biologically related to you, in real life the term is much vaster than that. Families can come in many formats – from the traditional nuclear family to those in which children are raised by relatives to same-sex partners with their children. Many people turn to their friends for love and support and, therefore, consider them their real families. Regardless of what each one of us defines as family, one thing is pretty certain – we need our family.

Why Family is Important to Me

One of the main reasons family is essential to me is that we provide support and security for each other. This doesn’t only mean financial support but also emotional support. The knowledge that should something go wrong with my life, I won’t be alone makes me feel much more confident and ready to face the world.

Another reason family is very important to me is that they are the ones who love and understand me. Everyone has emotional needs. We are a species as reliant on our emotions as our intellect. For our well-being, both mental and physical, we need emotional connect. My family provides that to me in spades. They understand why I do the things I do and love me anyway. My family gives me unconditional love.

My family also gives me the feeling that I belong somewhere. They give me my roots. Knowing where I belong gives me the anchor I need to deal with everything the world throws at me.

Having a family is such a basic necessity that often we take it for granted when we have it. Our families stay with us from our first breath to our last. They provide us with the foundation upon which we build ourselves. To me, my family is an extension of myself.

Essay on Reasons Why Family is Important in Life – Essay 3 (400 words)

Family is our foundation. It is through family that we learn our first interactions with the world. Teaches us how to love and be loved, how to offer and receive support and how to respect others while earning their respect. It provides the framework for our views of the world. The socially acceptable version of family is the people who are biologically related to you.

However, when you look at what a family actually means, you realize that family can be anyone, the people you were born to or the people you choose to be with. Love them or hate them, you cannot deny the fact that your family is pivotal in your life and there are quite a few reasons for that.

Family Provides Us Security

A family provides us with a sense of security. It acts as the bulwark against the world that we need. On a purely practical level, we are unable to care for ourselves when we come into the world. It is our family who takes care of our basic needs and protects us. As we grow older, that protection expands to give us a place where we can find emotional security as well.

Family Teaches Us Values

Our first social interactions are with our family. Hence, a family has great influence over how we interact with each other and society at large. For any kind of productive interaction, we need to follow certain rules and norms. Our family imparts the knowledge of these norms to us and these norms are called values. They determine not just the interactions but the thinking that goes behind those interactions.

Family Gives Us Satisfaction

You’ve got the promotion at work or the top grades in school. Imagine having no one to talk to about it. You decide to go on a vacation. Imagine having to do it all alone. You lost your job or had your heart broken. Imagine having no one who can listen to your sorrows. A family does all of this for us and so much more. It makes us happy and fulfilled.

Without a family we end up navigating the calms, the storms and the choppy waters of life all alone. If we do not have a family to anchor us, we often fail at this navigation and drown under the force of everything life throws at us. Family gives us the strength we need to get through the bad times and celebrates the good times with us.

Essay on Importance of Family in Society – Essay 4 (500 words)

If one looks at the old definition of a family, what a family was a hundred years ago, it is pretty clear cut. A family was a unit consisting of a father who took care of it financially, a mother who looked after hearth and home and one or more children. Depending upon which part of the world you were in, this could also expand to include extended family members such as grandparents and uncles and aunts and their families. This system was called a joint family.

Family in Modern Times

We have come a long way since then. With the emergence of feminism, nuclear families and many other societal changes the traditional version of a family is no longer completely true. This has led many to believe that the concept of a family is dying out. However, nothing could be further from the truth. It is not that the family is dying out; instead, the fact is that our concept of what constitutes a family has changed. A family can consist of single parents, same-sex partners and even friends. In other words, as society has changed, so has the idea of what a family is.

Importance of Family in the Society

The prevalence of divorce has led many people to believe that the family construct is no longer valid and is crumbling. This, however, is just not true. The fact of the matter is that the concept of what a family is has evolved to keep up with the changes in modern society. This then means that family still is at the foundation of society. The only thing that has changed is the type of family that holds society up.

A family is needed to take care of the vulnerable, those members of society who aren’t able to take care of themselves such as children, the elderly and the ill. The basic needs of such members can only be met when they have value to a society and that value comes through family.

A family is essential to our need for love and belonging. As per Abram Maslow’s diagram called the Hierarchy of Needs, once the needs at the bottom of the pyramid such as food, water and shelter have been fulfilled, we have emotional needs. We need to feel love and we need somewhere to belong to. A family provides that foundation.

A family is the first social environment that we interact with. It is through family that we learn the basics of social interactions and socialize ourselves, i.e. learn to interact productively with society. It is through family that we learn how to survive and thrive.

Times have changed. Our attitudes towards marriage, relationships and what constitutes a family have also changed. Relationships that were taboo once are now considered normal. Those resistant to these changes have predicted the breakdown of society and said that families are under attack. However, all that has really happened is that our concept of what a family is has evolved along with the social changes of the last 100 years. Families are still the foundation of society and they always will be.

Long Essay on Importance of Family Relationships – Essay 5 (600 words)

The modern world has a different definition of family than has been the norm for thousands of years. However, the basic principle behind a family hasn’t changed – caring. No matter what the type of family unit – single parent family, same-sex partners, nuclear family, joint family or step family – care for each other is the foundation of family.

To further this, in order to keep families strong the relationships amongst the members of the family have to be strong too. Each member of the family is unique and has his or her own personality. The interactions each of them has with other members of the family are unique. Nevertheless, the interactions need to nurture and strengthen the bonds between family members or the family will drift apart.

What Makes Family Relationships Strong?

There are quite a few factors that help strengthen family relationships. Some of the most important ones are:

Love – This is the factor that comes to mind first. Love is what is at the heart of the family. Everyone has the need to love and be loved and the family is where they give and receive that love first. In fact, the family is where we learn to love. Through love we learn about intimacy, privacy, belonging, caring and sharing. However, love doesn’t just come by itself; each family member has to work on it and nurture it.

Loyalty – Some would say that this is a natural offshoot of love. A family that is strong is devoted to each other. When dark times come, the family stands together to face them. They defend each other and stand up for each other when an outsider attacks. Also they cheer each other on to victories and commiserate with each other in defeats. They believe in each other.

Learning – Since the family is the first social interaction we have, this is where we have our first learning too. Families teach us about behaviour, skills and values. Strong families teach their members how to navigate the outside world but do not allow the outside world to rule them. They become examples to society of how families should be.

Importance of Family Relationships

In order for a family to be strong, the bonds amongst them need to be strong. Relationships are the bonds that keep a family together. If the family has a good relationship with its members, they will have a stronger commitment to each other. Family unity will be important.

Strong family relationships also mean better communication. The members of the family take out the time to talk to each other. The conversations could be about small things or big ones – that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the family members are connected to each other. They understand one another and listen to what the other person has to say.

The strength of family relationships gives members the impetus to appreciate each other. After love, this may be the most sought after need in a human being. Everyone feels the need to be appreciated; it helps us feel worthwhile and boosts our self-confidence. Stronger family bonds mean that when a family member appreciates you, it enhances your self-esteem and in turn makes it easier for you to express your appreciation.

In the end, strong relationships amongst family members are essential to keeping a family together. A family without good relationships falls apart very quickly and in doing so traumatises the family members on different levels. Too many family units falling apart and the fabric of society start crumbling. In other words, strong family relationships are the basic glue that holds society together.

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Article contents

Family, culture, and communication.

V. Santiago Arias V. Santiago Arias College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University
and Narissra Maria Punyanunt-Carter Narissra Maria Punyanunt-Carter College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.504
Published online: 22 August 2017

Through the years, the concept of family has been studied by family therapists, psychology scholars, and sociologists with a diverse theoretical framework, such as family communication patterns (FCP) theory, dyadic power theory, conflict, and family systems theory. Among these theories, there are two main commonalities throughout its findings: the interparental relationship is the core interaction in the familial system because the quality of their communication or coparenting significantly affects the enactment of the caregiver role while managing conflicts, which are not the exception in the familial setting. Coparenting is understood in its broader sense to avoid an extensive discussion of all type of families in our society. Second, while including the main goal of parenting, which is the socialization of values, this process intrinsically suggests cultural assimilation as the main cultural approach rather than intergroup theory, because intercultural marriages need to decide which values are considered the best to be socialized. In order to do so, examples from the Thai culture and Hispanic and Latino cultures served to show cultural assimilation as an important mediator of coparenting communication patterns, which subsequently affect other subsystems that influence individuals’ identity and self-esteem development in the long run. Finally, future directions suggest that the need for incorporating a nonhegemonic one-way definition of cultural assimilation allows immigration status to be brought into the discussion of family communication issues in the context of one of the most diverse countries in the world.

parental communication
dyadic power
family communication systems
cultural assimilation

Introduction

Family is the fundamental structure of every society because, among other functions, this social institution provides individuals, from birth until adulthood, membership and sense of belonging, economic support, nurturance, education, and socialization (Canary & Canary, 2013 ). As a consequence, the strut of its social role consists of operating as a system in a manner that would benefit all members of a family while achieving what is considered best, where decisions tend to be coherent, at least according to the norms and roles assumed by family members within the system (Galvin, Bylund, & Brommel, 2004 ). Notwithstanding, the concept of family can be interpreted differently by individual perceptions to an array of cultural backgrounds, and cultures vary in their values, behaviors, and ideas.

The difficulty of conceptualizing this social institution suggests that family is a culture-bound phenomenon (Bales & Parsons, 2014 ). In essence, culture represents how people view themselves as part of a unique social collective and the ensuing communication interactions (Olaniran & Roach, 1994 ); subsequently, culture provides norms for behavior having a tremendous impact on those family members’ roles and power dynamics mirrored in its communication interactions (Johnson, Radesky, & Zuckerman, 2013 ). Thus, culture serves as one of the main macroframeworks for individuals to interpret and enact those prescriptions, such as inheritance; descent rules (e.g., bilateral, as in the United States, or patrilineal); marriage customs, such as ideal monogamy and divorce; and beliefs about sexuality, gender, and patterns of household formation, such as structure of authority and power (Weisner, 2014 ). For these reasons, “every family is both a unique microcosm and a product of a larger cultural context” (Johnson et al., 2013 , p. 632), and the analysis of family communication must include culture in order to elucidate effective communication strategies to solve familial conflicts.

In addition, to analyze familial communication patterns, it is important to address the most influential interaction with regard to power dynamics that determine the overall quality of family functioning. In this sense, within the range of family theories, parenting function is the core relationship in terms of power dynamics. Parenting refers to all efforts and decisions made by parents individually to guide their children’s behavior. This is a pivotal function, but the quality of communication among people who perform parenting is fundamental because their internal communication patterns will either support or undermine each caregiver’s parenting attempts, individually having a substantial influence on all members’ psychological and physical well-being (Schrodt & Shimkowski, 2013 ). Subsequently, parenting goes along with communication because to execute all parenting efforts, there must be a mutual agreement among at least two individuals to conjointly take care of the child’s fostering (Van Egeren & Hawkins, 2004 ). Consequently, coparenting serves as a crucial predictor of the overall family atmosphere and interactions, and it deserves special attention while analyzing family communication issues.

Through the years, family has been studied by family therapists, psychology scholars, and sociologists, but interaction behaviors define the interpersonal relationship, roles, and power within the family as a system (Rogers, 2006 ). Consequently, family scholarship relies on a wide range of theories developed within the communication field and in areas of the social sciences (Galvin, Braithwaite, & Bylund, 2015 ) because analysis of communication patterns in the familial context offers more ecological validity that individuals’ self-report measures. As many types of interactions may happen within a family, there are many relevant venues (i.e., theories) for scholarly analysis on this subject, which will be discussed later in this article in the “ Family: Theoretical Perspectives ” section. To avoid the risk of cultural relativeness while defining family, this article characterizes family as “a long-term group of two or more people related through biological, legal, or equivalent ties and who enact those ties through ongoing interactions providing instrumental and/or emotional support” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 5).

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the most relevant theories in family communication to identify frustrations and limitations with internal communication. Second, as a case in point, the United States welcomes more than 50 million noncitizens as temporary visitors and admits approximately 1 million immigrants to live as lawful residents yearly (Fullerton, 2014 ), this demographic pattern means that nearly one-third of the population (102 million) comes from different cultural backgrounds, and therefore, the present review will incorporate culture as an important mediator for coparenting, so that future research can be performed to find specific techniques and training practices that are more suitable for cross-cultural contexts.

Family: Theoretical Perspectives

Even though the concept of family can be interpreted individually and differently in different cultures, there are also some commonalities, along with communication processes, specific roles within families, and acceptable habits of interactions with specific family members disregarding cultural differences. This section will provide a brief overview of the conceptualization of family through the family communication patterns (FCP) theory, dyadic power theory, conflict, and family systems theory, with a special focus on the interparental relationship.

Family Communication Patterns Theory

One of the most relevant approaches to address the myriad of communication issues within families is the family communication patterns (FCP) theory. Originally developed by McLeod and Chaffee ( 1973 ), this theory aims to understand families’ tendencies to create stable and predictable communication patterns in terms of both relational cognition and interpersonal behavior (Braithwaite & Baxter, 2005 ). Specifically, this theory focuses on the unique and amalgamated associations derived from interparental communication and its impact on parenting quality to determine FCPs and the remaining interactions (Young & Schrodt, 2016 ).

To illustrate FCP’s focus on parental communication, Schrodt, Witt, and Shimkowski ( 2014 ) conducted a meta-analysis of 74 studies (N = 14,255) to examine the associations between the demand/withdraw family communication patterns of interaction, and the subsequent individual, relational, and communicative outcomes. The cumulative evidence suggests that wife demand/husband withdraw and husband demand/wife withdraw show similar moderate correlations with communicative and psychological well-being outcomes, and even higher when both patterns are taken together (at the relational level). This is important because one of the main tenets of FCP is that familial relationships are drawn on the pursuit of coorientation among members. Coorientation refers to the cognitive process of two or more individuals focusing on and assessing the same object in the same material and social context, which leads to a number of cognitions as the number of people involved, which results in different levels of agreement, accuracy, and congruence (for a review, see Fitzpatrick & Koerner, 2005 ); for example, in dyads that are aware of their shared focus, two different cognitions of the same issue will result.

Hereafter, the way in which these cognitions are socialized through power dynamics determined socially and culturally by roles constitutes specific interdependent communication patterns among family members. For example, Koerner and Fitzpatrick ( 2006 ) provide a taxonomy of family types on the basis of coorientation and its impact on communication pattern in terms of the degree of conformity in those conversational tendencies. To wit, consensual families mostly agree for the sake of the hierarchy within a given family and to explore new points of view; pluralistic families allow members to participate equally in conversations and there is no pressure to control or make children’s decisions; protective families maintain the hierarchy by making decisions for the sake of achieving common family goals; and laissez-faire families, which are low in conversation and conformity orientation, allow family members to not get deeply involved in the family.

The analysis of family communication patterns is quintessential for family communication scholarly work because it influences forming an individual’s self concept in the long run. As a case in point, Young and Schrodt ( 2016 ) surveyed 181 young adults from intact families, where conditional and interaction effects between communication patterns and conformity orientation were observed as the main predictors of future romantic partners. Moreover, this study concluded that FCPs and interparental confirmation are substantial indicators of self-to-partner confirmation, after controlling for reciprocity of confirmation within the romantic relationship. As a consequence, FCP influences children’s and young adults’ perceptions of romantic behavior (e.g., Fowler, Pearson, & Beck, 2010 ); the quality of communication behavior, such as the degree of acceptation of verbal aggression in romantic dyads (e.g., Aloia & Solomon, 2013 ); gender roles; and conflict styles (e.g., Taylor & Segrin, 2010 ), and parental modeling (e.g., Young & Schrodt, 2016 ).

This suggests three important observations. First, family is a very complex interpersonal context, in which communication processes, specific roles within families, and acceptable habits of interactions with specific family members interact as subsystems (see Galvin et al., 2004 ; Schrodt & Shimkowski, 2013 ). Second, among those subsystems, the core interaction is the individuals who hold parenting roles (i.e., intact and post divorced families); the couple (disregarding particular sexual orientations), and, parenting roles have a reciprocal relationship over time (Le, McDaniel, Leavitt, & Feinberg, 2016 ). Communication between parenting partners is crucial for the development of their entire family; for example, Schrodt and Shimkowski ( 2013 ) conducted a survey with 493 young adult children from intact (N = 364) and divorced families (N = 129) about perceptions of interparental conflict that involves triangulation (the impression of being in the “middle” and feeling forced to display loyalty to one of the parents). Results suggest that supportive coparental communication positively predicts relational satisfaction with mothers and fathers, as well as mental health; on the other hand, antagonist and hostile coparental communication predicted negative marital satisfaction.

Consequently, “partners’ communication with one another will have a positive effect on their overall view of their marriage, . . . and directly result[ing in] their views of marital satisfaction” (Knapp & Daly, 2002 , p. 643). Le et al. ( 2016 ) conducted a longitudinal study to evaluate the reciprocal relationship between marital interaction and coparenting from the perspective of both parents in terms of support or undermining across the transition to parenthood from a dyadic perspective; 164 cohabiting heterosexual couples expecting their first child were analyzed from pregnancy until 36 months after birth. Both parents’ interdependence was examined in terms of three variables: gender difference analysis, stability over time in marriage and coparenting, and reciprocal associations between relationship quality and coparenting support or undermining. The findings suggest a long-term reciprocal association between relationship quality and coparenting support or undermining in heterosexual families; the quality of marriage relationship during prenatal stage is highly influential in coparenting after birth for both men and women; but, coparenting is connected to romantic relationship quality only for women.

Moreover, the positive association between coparenting and the parents’ relationship relates to the spillover hypothesis, which posits that the positive or negative factors in the parental subsystem are significantly associated with higher or lower marital satisfaction in the spousal subsystem, respectively. Ergo, overall parenting performance is substantially affected by the quality of marital communication patterns.

Dyadic Power

In addition, after analyzing the impact of marital interaction quality in families on marital satisfaction and future parental modeling, it is worth noting that marital satisfaction and coparenting are importantly mediated by power dynamics within the couple (Halstead, De Santis, & Williams, 2016 ), and even mediates marital commitment (e.g., Lennon, Stewart, & Ledermann, 2013 ). If the quality of interpersonal relationship between those individuals who hold parenting roles determines coparenting quality as well, then the reason for this association lies on the fact that virtually all intimate relationships are substantially characterized by power dynamics; when partners perceive more rewards than costs in the relationship, they will be more satisfied and significantly more committed to the relationship (Lennon et al., 2013 ). As a result, the inclusion of power dynamics in the analysis of family issues becomes quintessential.

For the theory of dyadic power, power in its basic sense includes dominance, control, and influence over others, as well as a means to meet survival needs. When power is integrated into dyadic intimate relationships, it generates asymmetries in terms of interdependence between partners due to the quality of alternatives provided by individual characteristics such as socioeconomic status and cultural characteristics such as gender roles. This virtually gives more power to men than women. Power refers to “the feeling derived from the ability to dominate, or control, the behavior, affect, and cognitions of another person[;] in consequence, this concept within the interparental relationship is enacted when one partner who controls resources and limiting the behavioral options of the other partner” (Lennon et al., 2013 , p. 97). Ergo, this theory examines power in terms of interdependence between members of the relationship: the partner who is more dependent on the other has less power in the relationship, which, of course, directly impact parenting decisions.

As a case in point, Worley and Samp ( 2016 ) examined the balance of decision-making power in the relationship, complaint avoidance, and complaint-related appraisals in 175 heterosexual couples. Findings suggest that decision-making power has a curvilinear association, in which individuals engaged in the least complaint avoidance when they were relatively equal to their partners in terms of power. In other words, perceptions of one another’s power potentially encourage communication efficacy in the interparental couple.

The analysis of power in intimate relationships, and, to be specific, between parents is crucial because it not only relates to marital satisfaction and commitment, but it also it affects parents’ dyadic coping for children. In fact, Zemp, Bodenmann, Backes, Sutter-Stickel, and Revenson ( 2016 ) investigated parents’ dyadic coping as a predictor of children’s internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and prosocial behavior in three independent studies. When there is a positive relationship among all three factors, the results indicated that the strongest correlation was the first one. Again, the quality of the marital and parental relationships has the strongest influence on children’s coping skills and future well-being.

From the overview of the two previous theories on family, it is worth addressing two important aspects. First, parenting requires an intensive great deal of hands-on physical care, attention to safety (Mooney-Doyle, Deatrick, & Horowitz, 2014 ), and interpretation of cues, and this is why parenting, from conception to when children enter adulthood, is a tremendous social, cultural, and legally prescribed role directed toward caregiving and endlessly attending to individuals’ social, physical, psychological, emotional, and cognitive development (Johnson et al., 2013 ). And while parents are making decisions about what they consider is best for all family members, power dynamics play a crucial role in marital satisfaction, commitment, parental modeling, and overall interparental communication efficacy in the case of postdivorce families. Therefore, the likelihood of conflict is latent within familial interactions while making decisions; indeed, situations in which family members agree on norms as a consensus is rare (Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990 ).

In addition to the interparental and marital power dynamics that delineates family communication patterns, the familial interaction is distinctive from other types of social relationships in the unequaled role of emotions and communication of affection while family members interact and make decisions for the sake of all members. For example, Ritchie and Fitzpatrick ( 1990 ) provided evidence that fathers tended to perceive that all other family members agree with his decisions or ideas. Even when mothers confronted and disagreed with the fathers about the fathers’ decisions or ideas, the men were more likely to believe that their children agreed with him. When the children were interviewed without their parents, however, the majority of children agreed with the mothers rather than the fathers (Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990 ). Subsequently, conflict is highly present in families; however, in general, the presence of conflict is not problematic per se. Rather, it is the ability to manage and recover from it and that could be problematic (Floyd, 2014 ).

One of the reasons for the role of emotions in interpersonal conflicts is explained by the Emotion-in-Relationships Model (ERM). This model states that feelings of bliss, satisfaction, and relaxation often go unnoticed due to the nature of the emotions, whereas “hot” emotions, such as anger and contempt, come to the forefront when directed at a member of an interpersonal relationship (Fletcher & Clark, 2002 ). This type of psychophysical response usually happens perhaps due to the different biophysical reactive response of the body compared to its reaction to positive ones (Floyd, 2014 ). There are two dimensions that define conflict. Conflict leads to the elicitation of emotions, but sometimes the opposite occurs: emotions lead to conflict. The misunderstanding or misinterpretation of emotions among members of a family can be a source of conflict, as well as a number of other issues, including personality differences, past history, substance abuse, mental or physical health problems, monetary issues, children, intimate partner violence, domestic rape, or maybe just general frustration due to recent events (Sabourin, Infante, & Rudd, 1990 ). In order to have a common understanding of this concept for the familial context in particular, conflict refers to as “any incompatibility that can be expressed by people related through biological, legal, or equivalent ties” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 6). Thus, the concept of conflict goes hand in hand with coparenting.

There is a myriad of everyday family activities in which parents need to decide the best way to do them: sometimes they are minor, such as eating, watching TV, or sleeping schedules; others are more complicated, such as schooling. Certainly, while socializing and making these decisions, parents may agree or not, and these everyday situations may lead to conflict. Whether or not parents live together, it has been shown that “the extent to which children experience their parents as partners or opponents in parenting is related to children’s adjustment and well-being” (Gable & Sharp, 2016 , p. 1), because the ontology of parenting is materialized through socialization of values about every aspect and duty among all family members, especially children, to perpetuate a given society.

As the findings provided in this article show, the study of family communication issues is pivotal because the way in which those issues are solved within families will be copied by children as their values. Values are abstract ideas that delineate behavior toward the evaluation of people and events and vary in terms of importance across individuals, but also among cultures. In other words, their future parenting (i.e., parenting modeling) of children will replicate those same strategies for conflict solving for good or bad, depending on whether parents were supportive between each other. Thus, socialization defines the size and scope of coparenting.

The familial socialization of values encompasses the distinction between parents’ personal execution of those social appraisals and the values that parents want their children to adopt, and both are different things; nonetheless, familial socialization does not take place in only one direction, from parents to children. Benish-Weisman, Levy, and Knafo ( 2013 ) investigated the differentiation process—or, in other words, the distinction between parents’ own personal values and their socialization values and the contribution of children’s values to their parents’ socialization values. In this study, in which 603 Israeli adolescents and their parents participated, the findings suggest that parents differentiate between their personal values and their socialization values, and adolescents’ values have a specific contribution to their parents’ socialization values. As a result, socialization is not a unidirectional process affected by parents alone, it is an outcome of the reciprocal interaction between parents and their adolescent children, and the given importance of a given value is mediated by parents and their culture individually (Johnson et al., 2013 ). However, taking power dynamics into account does not mean that adolescents share the same level of decision-making power in the family; thus, socialization take place in both directions, but mostly from parents to children. Finally, it is worth noticing that the socialization of values in coparenting falls under the cultural umbrella. The next section pays a special attention to the role of culture in family communication.

The Role of Culture in Parenting Socialization of Values

There are many individual perceived realities and behaviors in the familial setting that may lead to conflict among members, but all of them achieve a common interpretation through culture; indeed, “all family conflict processes by broad cultural factors” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 46). Subsequently, the goal of this section is to provide an overview of the perceived realities and behaviors that exist in family relationships with different cultural backgrounds. How should one approach the array of cultural values influencing parental communication patterns?

An interesting way of immersing on the role of culture in family communication patterns and its further socialization of values is explored by Schwartz ( 1992 ). The author developed a value system composed of 10 values operationalized as motivational goals for modern society: (a) self-direction (independence of thought and action); (b) stimulation (excitement, challenge, and novelty); (c) hedonism (pleasure or sensuous gratification); (d) achievement (personal success according to social standards); (e) power (social status, dominance over people and resources); (f) conformity (restraint of actions that may harm others or violate social expectations); (g) tradition (respect and commitment to cultural or religious customs and ideas); (h) benevolence (preserving and enhancing the welfare of people to whom one is close); (i) universalism (understanding, tolerance, and concern for the welfare of all people and nature); and (j) security (safety and stability of society, relationships, and self).

Later, Schwartz and Rubel ( 2005 ) applied this value structure, finding it to be commonly shared among over 65 countries. Nevertheless, these values are enacted in different ways by societies and genders about the extent to which men attribute more relevance to values of power, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, and self-direction, and the opposite was found for benevolence and universalism and less consistently for security. Also, it was found that all sex differences were culturally moderated, suggesting that cultural background needs to be considered in the analysis of coparental communication when socializing those values.

Even though Schwartz’s work was more focused on individuals and societies, it is a powerful model for the analysis of the role of culture on family communication and parenting scholarships. Indeed, Schwartz et al. ( 2013 ) conducted a longitudinal study with a sample of 266 Hispanic adolescents (14 years old) and their parents that looked at measures of acculturation, family functioning, and adolescent conduct problems, substance use, and sexual behavior at five time points. Results suggest that higher levels of acculturation in adolescents were linked to poorer family functioning; however, overall assimilation negatively predicted adolescent cigarette smoking, sexual activity, and unprotected sex. The authors emphasize the role of culture, and acculturation patterns in particular, in understanding the mediating role of family functioning and culture.

Ergo, it is crucial to address the ways in which culture affects family functioning. On top of this idea, Johnson et al. ( 2013 ) observed that Western cultures such as in the United States and European countries are oriented toward autonomy, favoring individual achievement, self-reliance, and self-assertiveness. Thus, coparenting in more autonomous countries will socialize to children the idea that achievement in life is an outcome of independence, resulting in coparenting communication behaviors that favor verbal praise and feedback over physical contact. As opposed to autonomy-oriented cultures, other societies, such as Asian, African, and Latin American countries, emphasize interdependence over autonomy; thus, parenting in these cultures promotes collective achievement, sharing, and collaboration as the core values.

These cultural orientations can be observed in parents’ definitions of school readiness and educational success; for Western parents, examples include skills such as counting, recognizing letters, or independently completing tasks such as coloring pictures, whereas for more interdependent cultures, the development of obedience, respect for authority, and appropriate social skills are the skills that parents are expecting their children to develop to evaluate school readiness. As a matter of fact, Callaghan et al. ( 2011 ) conducted a series of eight studies to evaluate the impact of culture on the social-cognitive skills of one- to three-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings such as Canada, Peru, and India. The results showed that children’s acquisition of specific cognitive skills is moderated by specific learning experiences in a specific context: while Canadian children were understanding the performance of both pretense and pictorial symbols skillfully between 2.5 and 3.0 years of age, on average, Peruvian and Indian children mastered those skills more than a year later. Notwithstanding, this finding does not suggest any kind of cultural superiority; language barriers and limitations derived from translation itself may influence meanings, affecting the results (Sotomayor-Peterson, De Baca, Figueredo, & Smith-Castro, 2013 ). Therefore, in line with the findings of Schutz ( 1970 ), Geertz ( 1973 ), Grusec ( 2002 ), Sotomayor-Peterson et al. ( 2013 ), and Johnson et al. ( 2013 ), cultural values provide important leverage for understanding family functioning in terms of parental decision-making and conflict, which also has a substantial impact on children’s cognitive development.

Subsequently, cultural sensitivity to the analysis of the familial system in this country needs to be specially included because cultural differences are part of the array of familial conflicts that may arise, and children experience real consequences from the quality of these interactions. Therefore, parenting, which is already arduous in itself, and overall family functioning significantly become troublesome when parents with different cultural backgrounds aim to socialize values and perform parenting tasks. The following section provides an account of these cross-cultural families.

Intercultural Families: Adding Cultural Differences to Interparental Communication

For a country such as the United States, with 102 million people from many different cultural backgrounds, the presence of cross-cultural families is on the rise, as is the likelihood of intermarriage between immigrants and natives. With this cultural diversity, the two most prominent groups are Hispanics and Asians, particular cases of which will be discussed next. Besides the fact that parenting itself is a very complex and difficult task, certainly the biggest conflict consists of making decisions about the best way to raise children in terms of their values with regard to which ethnic identity better enacts the values that parents believe their children should embrace. As a result, interracial couples might confront many conflicts and challenges due to cultural differences affecting marital satisfaction and coparenting.

Assimilation , the degree to which a person from a different cultural background has adapted to the culture of the hostage society, is an important phenomenon in intermarriage. Assimilationists observe that children from families in which one of the parents is from the majority group and the other one from the minority do not automatically follow the parent from the majority group (Cohen, 1988 ). Indeed, they follow their mothers more, whichever group she belongs to, because of mothers are more prevalent among people with higher socioeconomic status (Gordon, 1964 ; Portes, 1984 ; Schwartz et al., 2013 ).

In an interracial marriage, the structural and interpersonal barriers inhibiting the interaction between two parents will be reduced significantly if parents develop a noncompeting way to communicate and solve conflicts, which means that both of them might give up part of their culture or ethnic identity to reach consensus. Otherwise, the ethnic identity of children who come from interracial marriages will become more and more obscure (Saenz, Hwang, Aguirre, & Anderson, 1995 ). Surely, parents’ noncompeting cultural communication patterns are fundamental for children’s development of ethnic identity. Biracial children develop feelings of being outsiders, and then parenting becomes crucial to developing their strong self-esteem (Ward, 2006 ). Indeed, Gordon ( 1964 ) found that children from cross-racial or cross-ethnic marriages are at risk of developing psychological problems. In another example, Jognson and Nagoshi ( 1986 ) studied children who come from mixed marriages in Hawaii and found that the problems of cultural identification, conflicting demands in the family, and of being marginal in either culture still exist (Mann & Waldron, 1977 ). It is hard for those mixed-racial children to completely develop the ethnic identity of either the majority group or the minority group.

The question of how children could maintain their minority ethnic identity is essential to the development of ethnic identity as a whole. For children from interracial marriage, the challenge to maintain their minority ethnic identity will be greater than for the majority ethnic identity (Waters, 1990 ; Schwartz et al., 2013 ) because the minority-group spouse is more likely to have greater ethnic consciousness than the majority-group spouse (Ellman, 1987 ). Usually, the majority group is more influential than the minority group on a child’s ethnic identity, but if the minority parent’s ethnicity does not significantly decline, the child’s ethnic identity could still reflect some characteristics of the minority parent. If parents want their children to maintain the minority group’s identity, letting the children learn the language of the minority group might be a good way to achieve this. By learning the language, children form a better understanding of that culture and perhaps are more likely to accept the ethnic identity that the language represents (Xin & Sandel, 2015 ).

In addition to language socialization as a way to contribute to children’s identity in biracial families, Jane and Bochner ( 2009 ) indicated that family rituals and stories could be important in performing and transforming identity. Families create and re-create their identities through various kinds of narrative, in which family stories and rituals are significant. Festivals and rituals are different from culture to culture, and each culture has its own. Therefore, exposing children to the language, rituals, and festivals of another culture also could be helpful to form their ethnic identity, in order to counter problems of self-esteem derived from the feeling of being an outsider.

To conclude this section, the parenting dilemma in intercultural marriages consists of deciding which culture they want their children to be exposed to and what kind of heritage they want to pass to children. The following section will provide two examples of intercultural marriages in the context of American society without implying that there are no other insightful cultures that deserve analysis, but the focus on Asian-American and Hispanics families reflects the available literature (Canary & Canary, 2013 ) and its demographic representativeness in this particular context. In addition, in order to acknowledge that minorities within this larger cultural background deserve more attention due to overemphasis on larger cultures in scholarship, such as Chinese or Japanese cultures, the Thai family will provide insights into understanding the role of culture in parenting and its impact on the remaining familial interaction, putting all theories already discussed in context. Moreover, the Hispanic family will also be taken in account because of its internal pan-ethnicity variety.

An Example of Intercultural Parenting: The Thai Family

The Thai family, also known as Krob Krua, may consist of parents, children, paternal and maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, grandchildren, in-laws, and any others who share the same home. Thai marriages usually are traditional, in which the male is the authority figure and breadwinner and the wife is in charge of domestic items and the homemaker. It has been noted that Thai mothers tend to be the major caregivers and caretakers in the family rather than fathers (Tulananda, Young, & Roopnarine, 1994 ). On the other hand, it has been shown that Thai mothers also tend to spoil their children with such things as food and comfort; Tulananda et al. ( 1994 ) studied the differences between American and Thai fathers’ involvement with their preschool children and found that American fathers reported being significantly more involved with their children than Thai fathers. Specifically, the fathers differed in the amount of socialization and childcare; Thai fathers reported that they obtained more external support from other family members than American fathers; also, Thai fathers were more likely to obtain support for assisting with daughters than sons.

Furthermore, with regard to the family context, Tulananda and Roopnarine ( 2001 ) noted that over the years, some attention has been focused on the cultural differences among parent-child behaviors and interactions; hereafter, the authors believed that it is important to look at cultural parent-child interactions because that can help others understand children’s capacity to socialize and deal with life’s challenges. As a matter of fact, the authors also noted that Thai families tend to raise their children in accordance with Buddhist beliefs. It is customary for young Thai married couples to live with either the wife’s parents (uxorilocal) or the husband’s parents (virilocal) before living on their own (Tulananda & Roopnarine, 2001 ). The process of developing ethnicity could be complicated. Many factors might influence the process, such as which parent is from the minority culture and the cultural community, as explained in the previous section of this article.

This suggests that there is a difference in the way that Thai and American fathers communicate with their daughters. As a case in point, Punyanunt-Carter ( 2016 ) examined the relationship maintenance behaviors within father-daughter relationships in Thailand and the United States. Participants included 134 American father-daughter dyads and 154 Thai father-daughter dyads. The findings suggest that when quality of communication was included in this relationship, both types of families benefit from this family communication pattern, resulting in better conflict management and advice relationship maintenance behaviors. However, differences were found: American fathers are more likely than American daughters to employ relationship maintenance behaviors; in addition, American fathers are more likely than Thai fathers to use relationship maintenance strategies.

As a consequence, knowing the process of ethnic identity development could provide parents with different ways to form children’s ethnic identity. More specifically, McCann, Ota, Giles, and Caraker ( 2003 ), and Canary and Canary ( 2013 ) noted that Southeast Asian cultures have been overlooked in communication studies research; these countries differ in their religious, political, and philosophical thoughts, with a variety of collectivistic views and religious ideals (e.g., Buddhism, Taoism, Islam), whereas the United States is mainly Christian and consists of individualistic values.

The Case of Hispanic/Latino Families in the United States

There is a need for including Hispanic/Latino families in the United States because of the demographic representativeness and trends of the ethnicity: in 2016 , Hispanics represent nearly 17% of the total U.S. population, becoming the largest minority group. There are more than 53 million Hispanics and Latinos in the United States; in addition, over 93% of young Hispanics and Latinos under the age of 18 hold U.S. citizenship, and more than 73,000 of these people turn 18 every month (Barreto & Segura, 2014 ). Furthermore, the current Hispanic and Latino population is spread evenly between foreign-born and U.S.-born individuals, but the foreign-born population is now growing faster than the number of Hispanic children born in the country (Arias & Hellmueller, 2016 ). This demographic trend is projected to reach one-third of the U.S. total population by 2060 ; therefore, with the growth of other minority populations in the country, the phenomenon of multiracial marriage and biracial children is increasing as well.

Therefore, family communication scholarship has an increasing necessity to include cultural particularities in the analysis of the familial system; in addition to the cultural aspects already explained in this article, this section addresses the influence of familism in Hispanic and Latino familial interactions, as well as how immigration status moderates the internal interactions, reflected in levels of acculturation, that affect these families negatively.

With the higher marriage and birth rates among Hispanics and Latinos living in the United States compared to non-Latino Whites and African American populations, the Hispanic familial system is perhaps the most stereotyped as being familistic (Glick & Van Hook, 2008 ). This family trait consists of the fact that Hispanics place a very high value on marriage and childbearing, on the basis of a profound commitment to give support to members of the extended family as well. This can be evinced in the prevalence of extended-kind shared households in Hispanic and Latino families, and Hispanic children are more likely to live in extended-family households than non-Latino Whites or blacks (Glick & Van Hook, 2008 ). Living in extended-family households, most likely with grandparents, may have positive influences on Hispanic and Latino children, such as greater attention and interaction with loving through consistent caregiving; grandparents may help by engaging with children in academic-oriented activities, which then affects positively cognitive educational outcomes.

However, familism is not the panacea for all familial issues for several reasons. First, living in an extended-family household requires living arrangements that consider adults’ needs more than children’s. Second, the configuration of Hispanic and Latino households is moderated by any immigration issues with all members of the extended family, and this may cause problems for children (Menjívar, 2000 ). The immigration status of each individual member may produce a constant state of flux, whereas circumstances change to adjust to economic opportunities, which in turn are limited by immigration laws, and it gets even worse when one of the parents isn’t even present in the children’s home, but rather live in their home country (Van Hook & Glick, 2006 ). Although Hispanic and Latino children are more likely to live with married parents and extended relatives, familism is highly affected by the immigration status of each member.

On the other hand, there has been research to address the paramount role of communication disregarding the mediating factor of cultural diversity. For example, Sotomayor-Peterson et al. ( 2013 ) performed a cross-cultural comparison of the association between coparenting or shared parental effort and family climate among families from Mexico, the United States, and Costa Rica. The overall findings suggest what was explained earlier in this article: more shared parenting predicts better marital interaction and family climate overall.

In addition, parenting quality has been found to have a positive relationship with children’s developmental outcomes. In fact, Sotomayor-Peterson, Figueredo, Christensen, and Taylor ( 2012 ) conducted a study with 61 low-income Mexican American couples, with at least one child between three and four years of age, recruited from a home-based Head Start program. The main goal of this study was to observe the extent that shared parenting incorporates cultural values and income predicts family climate. The findings suggest that the role of cultural values such as familism, in which family solidarity and avoidance of confrontation are paramount, delineate shared parenting by Mexican American couples.

Cultural adaptation also has a substantial impact on marital satisfaction and children’s cognitive stimulation. Indeed, Sotomayor-Peterson, Wilhelm, and Card ( 2011 ) investigated the relationship between marital relationship quality and subsequent cognitive stimulation practices toward their infants in terms of the actor and partner effects of White and Hispanic parents. The results indicate an interesting relationship between the level of acculturation and marital relationship quality and a positive cognitive stimulation of infants; specifically, marital happiness is associated with increased cognitive stimulation by White and high-acculturated Hispanic fathers. Nevertheless, a major limitation of Hispanic acculturation literature has been seen, reflecting a reliance on cross-sectional studies where acculturation was scholarly operationalized more as an individual difference variable than as a longitudinal adaptation over time (Schwartz et al., 2013 ).

Culture and Family Communication: the “so what?” Question

This article has presented an entangled overview of family communication patterns, dyadic power, family systems, and conflict theories to establish that coparenting quality plays a paramount role. The main commonality among those theories pays special attention to interparental interaction quality, regardless of the type of family (i.e., intact, postdivorce, same-sex, etc.) and cultural background. After reviewing these theories, it was observed that the interparental relationship is the core interaction in the familial context because it affects children from their earlier cognitive development to subsequent parental modeling in terms of gender roles. Thus, in keeping with Canary and Canary ( 2013 ), no matter what approach may be taken to the analysis of family communication issues, the hypothesis that a positive emotional climate within the family is fostered only when couples practice a sufficient level of shared parenting and quality of communication is supported.

Nevertheless, this argument does not suggest that the role of culture in the familial interactions should be undersold. While including the main goal of parenting, which is the socialization of values, in the second section of this article, the text also provides specific values of different countries that are enacted and socialized differently across cultural contexts to address the role of acculturation in the familial atmosphere, the quality of interactions, and individual outcomes. As a case in point, Johnson et al. ( 2013 ) provided an interesting way of seeing how cultures differ in their ways of enacting parenting, clarifying that the role of culture in parenting is not a superficial or relativistic element.

In addition, by acknowledging the perhaps excessive attention to larger Asian cultural backgrounds (such as Chinese or Japanese cultures) by other scholars (i.e., Canary & Canary, 2013 ), an insightful analysis of the Thai American family within the father-daughter relationship was provided to exemplify, through the work of Punyanunt-Carter ( 2016 ), how specific family communication patterns, such as maintenance relationship communication behaviors, affect the quality of familial relationships. Moreover, a second, special focus was put on Hispanic families because of the demographic trends of the United States, and it was found that familism constitutes a distinctive aspect of these families.

In other words, the third section of this article provided these two examples of intercultural families to observe specific ways that culture mediates the familial system. Because one of the main goals of the present article was to demonstrate the mediating role of culture as an important consideration for family communication issues in the United States, the assimilationist approach was taken into account; thus, the two intercultural family examples discussed here correspond to an assimilationist nature rather than using an intergroup approach.

This decision was made without intending to diminish the value of other cultures or ethnic groups in the country, but an extensive revision of all types of intercultural families is beyond the scope of this article. Second, the assimilationist approach forces one to consider cultures that are in the process of adapting to a new hosting culture, and the Thai and Hispanic families in the United States comply with this theoretical requisite. For example, Whites recognize African Americans as being as American as Whites (i.e., Dovidio, Gluszek, John, Ditlmann, & Lagunes, 2010 ), whereas they associate Hispanics and Latinos with illegal immigration in the United States (Stewart et al., 2011 ), which has been enhanced by the U.S. media repeatedly since 1994 (Valentino et al., 2013 ), and it is still happening (Dixon, 2015 ). In this scenario, “ask yourself what would happen to your own personality if you heard it said over and over again that you were lazy, a simple child of nature, expected to steal, and had inferior blood? . . . One’s reputation, whether false or true, cannot be hammered, hammered, hammered, into one’s head without doing something to one’s character” (Allport, 1979 , p. 142, cited in Arias & Hellmueller, 2016 ).

As a consequence, on this cultural canvas, it should not be surprising that Lichter, Carmalt, and Qian ( 2011 ) found that second-generation Hispanics are increasingly likely to marry foreign-born Hispanics and less likely to marry third-generation or later coethnics or Whites. In addition, this study suggests that third-generation Hispanics and later were more likely than in the past to marry non-Hispanic Whites; thus, the authors concluded that there has been a new retreat from intermarriage among the largest immigrant groups in the United States—Hispanics and Asians—in the last 20 years.

If we subscribe to the idea that cultural assimilation goes in only one direction—from the hegemonic culture to the minority culture—then the results of Lichter, Carmalt, and Qian ( 2011 ) should not be of scholarly concern; however, if we believe that cultural assimilation happens in both directions and intercultural families can benefit both the host and immigrant cultures (for a review, see Schwartz et al., 2013 ), then this is important to address in a country that just elected a president, Donald Trump, who featured statements racially lambasting and segregating minorities, denigrating women, and criticizing immigration as some of the main tenets of his campaign. Therefore, we hope that it is clear why special attention was given to the Thai and Hispanic families in this article, considering the impact of culture on the familial system, marital satisfaction, parental communication, and children’s well-being. Even though individuals with Hispanic ancentry were in the United States even before it became a nation, Hispanic and Latino families are still trying to convince Americans of their right to be accepted in American culture and society.

With regard to the “So what?” question, assimilation is important to consider while analyzing the role of culture in family communication patterns, power dynamics, conflict, or the functioning of the overall family system in the context of the United States. This is because this country is among the most popular in the world in terms of immigration requests, and its demographics show that one out of three citizens comes from an ethnic background other than the hegemonic White culture. In sum, cultural awareness has become pivotal in the analysis of family communication issues in the United States. Furthermore, the present overview of family, communication, and culture ends up supporting the idea of positive associations being derived from the pivotal role of marriage relationship quality, such that coparenting and communication practices vary substantially within intercultural marriages moderated by gender roles.

Culture is a pivotal moderator of these associations, but this analysis needs to be tethered to societal structural level, in which cultural differences, family members’ immigration status, media content, and level of acculturation must be included in family research. This is because in intercultural marriages, in addition to the tremendous parenting role, they have to deal with cultural assimilation and discrimination, and this becomes important if we care about children’s cognitive development and the overall well-being of those who are not considered White. As this article shows, the quality of familial interactions has direct consequences on children’s developmental outcomes (for a review, see Callaghan et al., 2011 ).

Therefore, the structure and functioning of family has an important impact on public health at both physiological and psychological levels (Gage, Everett, & Bullock, 2006 ). At the physiological level, the familial interaction instigates expression and reception of strong feelings affecting tremendously on individuals’ physical health because it activates neuroendocrine responses that aid stress regulation, acting as a stress buffer and accelerating physiological recovery from elevated stress (Floyd & Afifi, 2012 ; Floyd, 2014 ). Robles, Shaffer, Malarkey, and Kiecolt-Glaser ( 2006 ) found that a combination of supportive communication, humor, and problem-solving behavior in husbands predicts their wives’ cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)—both physiological factors are considered as stress markers (see 2006 ). On the other hand, the psychology of individuals, the quality of family relationships has major repercussions on cognitive development, as reflected in educational attainment (Sohr-Preston et al., 2013 ), and highly mediated by cultural assimilation (Schwartz et al., 2013 ), which affects individuals through parenting modeling and socialization of values (Mooney-Doyle, Deatrick, & Horowitz, 2014 ).

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11.3: Sociological Perspectives on the Family

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Learning Objectives

Summarize understandings of the family as presented by functional, conflict, and social interactionist theories.

Sociological views on today’s families generally fall into the functional, conflict, and social interactionist approaches introduced earlier in this book. Let’s review these views, which are summarized in Table 11.1.

Table 11.1 Theory Snapshot

Theoretical perspective	Major assumptions
Functionalism	The family performs several essential functions for society. It socializes children, it provides emotional and practical support for its members, it helps regulate sexual activity and sexual reproduction, and it provides its members with a social identity. In addition, sudden or far-reaching changes in the family’s structure or processes threaten its stability and weaken society.
Conflict	The family contributes to social inequality by reinforcing economic inequality and by reinforcing patriarchy. The family can also be a source of conflict, including physical violence and emotional cruelty, for its own members.
Symbolic interactionism	The interaction of family members and intimate couples involves shared understandings of their situations. Wives and husbands have different styles of communication, and social class affects the expectations that spouses have of their marriages and of each other. Romantic love is the common basis for American marriages and dating relationships, but it is much less common in several other contemporary nations.

Social Functions of the Family

Recall that the functional perspective emphasizes that social institutions perform several important functions to help preserve social stability and otherwise keep a society working. A functional understanding of the family thus stresses the ways in which the family as a social institution helps make society possible. As such, the family performs several important functions.

First, the family is the primary unit for socializing children . As previous chapters indicated, no society is possible without adequate socialization of its young. In most societies, the family is the major unit in which socialization happens. Parents, siblings, and, if the family is extended rather than nuclear, other relatives all help to socialize children from the time they are born.

Figure 11.3

One of the most important functions of the family is the socialization of children. In most societies the family is the major unit through which socialization occurs.

Second, the family is ideally a major source of practical and emotional support for its members. It provides them food, clothing, shelter, and other essentials, and it also provides them love, comfort, help in times of emotional distress, and other types of intangible support that we all need.

Third, the family helps regulate sexual activity and sexual reproduction . All societies have norms governing with whom and how often a person should have sex. The family is the major unit for teaching these norms and the major unit through which sexual reproduction occurs. One reason for this is to ensure that infants have adequate emotional and practical care when they are born. The incest taboo that most societies have, which prohibits sex between certain relatives, helps to minimize conflict within the family if sex occurred among its members and to establish social ties among different families and thus among society as a whole.

Fourth, the family provides its members with a social identity . Children are born into their parents’ social class, race and ethnicity, religion, and so forth. As we have seen in earlier chapters, social identity is important for our life chances. Some children have advantages throughout life because of the social identity they acquire from their parents, while others face many obstacles because the social class or race and ethnicity into which they are born is at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Beyond discussing the family’s functions, the functional perspective on the family maintains that sudden or far-reaching changes in conventional family structure and processes threaten the family’s stability and thus that of society. For example, most sociology and marriage-and-family textbooks during the 1950s maintained that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family was the best arrangement for children, as it provided for a family’s economic and child-rearing needs. Any shift in this arrangement, they warned, would harm children and by extension the family as a social institution and even society itself. Textbooks no longer contain this warning, but many conservative observers continue to worry about the impact on children of working mothers and one-parent families. We return to their concerns shortly.

The Family and Conflict

Conflict theorists agree that the family serves the important functions just listed, but they also point to problems within the family that the functional perspective minimizes or overlooks altogether.

First, the family as a social institution contributes to social inequality in several ways. The social identity it gives to its children does affect their life chances, but it also reinforces a society’s system of stratification. Because families pass along their wealth to their children, and because families differ greatly in the amount of wealth they have, the family helps reinforce existing inequality. As it developed through the centuries, and especially during industrialization, the family also became more and more of a patriarchal unit (see earlier discussion), helping to ensure men’s status at the top of the social hierarchy.

Second, the family can also be a source of conflict for its own members. Although the functional perspective assumes the family provides its members emotional comfort and support, many families do just the opposite and are far from the harmonious, happy groups depicted in the 1950s television shows. Instead, and as the news story that began this chapter tragically illustrated, they argue, shout, and use emotional cruelty and physical violence. We return to family violence later in this chapter.

Families and Social Interaction

Social interactionist perspectives on the family examine how family members and intimate couples interact on a daily basis and arrive at shared understandings of their situations. Studies grounded in social interactionism give us a keen understanding of how and why families operate the way they do.

Some studies, for example, focus on how husbands and wives communicate and the degree to which they communicate successfully (Tannen, 2001).Tannen, D. (2001). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation . New York, NY: Quill. A classic study by Mirra Komarovsky (1964)Komarovsky, M. (1964). Blue-collar marriage . New York, NY: Random House. found that wives in blue-collar marriages liked to talk with their husbands about problems they were having, while husbands tended to be quiet when problems occurred. Such gender differences seem less common in middle-class families, where men are better educated and more emotionally expressive than their working-class counterparts. Another classic study by Lillian Rubin (1976)Rubin, L. B. (1976). Worlds of pain: Life in the working-class family . New York, NY: Basic Books. found that wives in middle-class families say that ideal husbands are ones who communicate well and share their feelings, while wives in working-class families are more apt to say that ideal husbands are ones who do not drink too much and who go to work every day.

Other studies explore the role played by romantic love in courtship and marriage. Romantic love , the feeling of deep emotional and sexual passion for someone, is the basis for many American marriages and dating relationships, but it is actually uncommon in many parts of the contemporary world today and in many of the societies anthropologists and historians have studied. In these societies, marriages are arranged by parents and other kin for economic reasons or to build alliances, and young people are simply expected to marry whoever is chosen for them. This is the situation today in parts of India, Pakistan, and other developing nations and was the norm for much of the Western world until the late 18th and early 19th centuries (Lystra, 1989).Lystra, K. (1989). Searching the heart: Women, men, and romantic love in nineteenth-century America . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

The family ideally serves several functions for society. It socializes children, provides practical and emotional support for its members, regulates sexual reproduction, and provides its members with a social identity.
Reflecting conflict theory’s emphases, the family may also produce several problems. In particular, it may contribute for several reasons to social inequality, and it may subject its members to violence, arguments, and other forms of conflict.
Social interactionist understandings of the family emphasize how family members interact on a daily basis. In this regard, several studies find that husbands and wives communicate differently in certain ways that sometimes impede effective communication.

For Your Review

As you think how best to understand the family, do you favor the views and assumptions of functional theory, conflict theory, or social interactionist theory? Explain your answer.
Do you think the family continues to serve the function of regulating sexual behavior and sexual reproduction? Why or why not?

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15.2 Sociological Perspectives on the Family

Learning objective.

Summarize understandings of the family as presented by functional, conflict, and social interactionist theories.

Table 15.1 Theory Snapshot

Theoretical perspective	Major assumptions
Functionalism	The family performs several essential functions for society. It socializes children, it provides emotional and practical support for its members, it helps regulate sexual activity and sexual reproduction, and it provides its members with a social identity. In addition, sudden or far-reaching changes in the family’s structure or processes threaten its stability and weaken society.
Conflict	The family contributes to social inequality by reinforcing economic inequality and by reinforcing patriarchy. The family can also be a source of conflict, including physical violence and emotional cruelty, for its own members.
Symbolic interactionism	The interaction of family members and intimate couples involves shared understandings of their situations. Wives and husbands have different styles of communication, and social class affects the expectations that spouses have of their marriages and of each other. Romantic love is the common basis for American marriages and dating relationships, but it is much less common in several other contemporary nations.

Social Functions of the Family

One of the most important functions of the family is the socialization of children. In most societies the family is the major unit through which socialization occurs.

Colleen Kelly – Kids Playing Monopoly Chicago – CC BY 2.0.

Third, the family helps regulate sexual activity and sexual reproduction . All societies have norms governing with whom and how often a person should have sex. The family is the major unit for teaching these norms and the major unit through which sexual reproduction occurs. One reason for this is to ensure that infants have adequate emotional and practical care when they are born. The incest taboo that most societies have, which prohibits sex between certain relatives, helps minimize conflict within the family if sex occurred among its members and to establish social ties among different families and thus among society as a whole.

Fourth, the family provides its members with a social identity . Children are born into their parents’ social class, race and ethnicity, religion, and so forth. As we have seen in earlier chapters, social identity is important for our life chances. Some children have advantages throughout life because of the social identity they acquire from their parents, while others face many obstacles because the social class or race/ethnicity into which they are born is at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

The Family and Conflict

Families and Social Interaction

Some studies, for example, focus on how husbands and wives communicate and the degree to which they communicate successfully (Tannen, 2001). A classic study by Mirra Komarovsky (1964) found that wives in blue-collar marriages liked to talk with their husbands about problems they were having, while husbands tended to be quiet when problems occurred. Such gender differences seem less common in middle-class families, where men are better educated and more emotionally expressive than their working-class counterparts. Another classic study by Lillian Rubin (1976) found that wives in middle-class families say that ideal husbands are ones who communicate well and share their feelings, while wives in working-class families are more apt to say that ideal husbands are ones who do not drink too much and who go to work every day.

Key Takeaways

The family ideally serves several functions for society. It socializes children, provides practical and emotional support for its members, regulates sexual reproduction, and provides its members with a social identity.
Reflecting conflict theory’s emphases, the family may also produce several problems. In particular, it may contribute for several reasons to social inequality, and it may subject its members to violence, arguments, and other forms of conflict.
Social interactionist understandings of the family emphasize how family members interact on a daily basis. In this regard, several studies find that husbands and wives communicate differently in certain ways that sometimes impede effective communication.

For Your Review

As you think how best to understand the family, do you favor the views and assumptions of functional theory, conflict theory, or social interactionist theory? Explain your answer.
Do you think the family continues to serve the function of regulating sexual behavior and sexual reproduction? Why or why not?

Komarovsky, M. (1964). Blue-collar marriage . New York, NY: Random House.

Lystra, K. (1989). Searching the heart: Women, men, and romantic love in nineteenth-century America . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Rubin, L. B. (1976). Worlds of pain: Life in the working-class family . New York, NY: Basic Books.

Tannen, D. (2001). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation . New York, NY: Quill.

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Innov Aging

Family Relationships and Well-Being

Patricia a thomas.

1 Department of Sociology and Center on Aging and the Life Course, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana

2 Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, East Lansing

Debra Umberson

3 Department of Sociology and Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

Family relationships are enduring and consequential for well-being across the life course. We discuss several types of family relationships—marital, intergenerational, and sibling ties—that have an important influence on well-being. We highlight the quality of family relationships as well as diversity of family relationships in explaining their impact on well-being across the adult life course. We discuss directions for future research, such as better understanding the complexities of these relationships with greater attention to diverse family structures, unexpected benefits of relationship strain, and unique intersections of social statuses.

Translational Significance

It is important for future research and health promotion policies to take into account complexities in family relationships, paying attention to family context, diversity of family structures, relationship quality, and intersections of social statuses in an aging society to provide resources to families to reduce caregiving burdens and benefit health and well-being.

For better and for worse, family relationships play a central role in shaping an individual’s well-being across the life course ( Merz, Consedine, Schulze, & Schuengel, 2009 ). An aging population and concomitant age-related disease underlies an emergent need to better understand factors that contribute to health and well-being among the increasing numbers of older adults in the United States. Family relationships may become even more important to well-being as individuals age, needs for caregiving increase, and social ties in other domains such as the workplace become less central in their lives ( Milkie, Bierman, & Schieman, 2008 ). In this review, we consider key family relationships in adulthood—marital, parent–child, grandparent, and sibling relationships—and their impact on well-being across the adult life course.

We begin with an overview of theoretical explanations that point to the primary pathways and mechanisms through which family relationships influence well-being, and then we describe how each type of family relationship is associated with well-being, and how these patterns unfold over the adult life course. In this article, we use a broad definition of well-being, including multiple dimensions such as general happiness, life satisfaction, and good mental and physical health, to reflect the breadth of this concept’s use in the literature. We explore important directions for future research, emphasizing the need for research that takes into account the complexity of relationships, diverse family structures, and intersections of structural locations.

Pathways Linking Family Relationships to Well-Being

A life course perspective draws attention to the importance of linked lives, or interdependence within relationships, across the life course ( Elder, Johnson, & Crosnoe, 2003 ). Family members are linked in important ways through each stage of life, and these relationships are an important source of social connection and social influence for individuals throughout their lives ( Umberson, Crosnoe, & Reczek, 2010 ). Substantial evidence consistently shows that social relationships can profoundly influence well-being across the life course ( Umberson & Montez, 2010 ). Family connections can provide a greater sense of meaning and purpose as well as social and tangible resources that benefit well-being ( Hartwell & Benson, 2007 ; Kawachi & Berkman, 2001 ).

The quality of family relationships, including social support (e.g., providing love, advice, and care) and strain (e.g., arguments, being critical, making too many demands), can influence well-being through psychosocial, behavioral, and physiological pathways. Stressors and social support are core components of stress process theory ( Pearlin, 1999 ), which argues that stress can undermine mental health while social support may serve as a protective resource. Prior studies clearly show that stress undermines health and well-being ( Thoits, 2010 ), and strains in relationships with family members are an especially salient type of stress. Social support may provide a resource for coping that dulls the detrimental impact of stressors on well-being ( Thoits, 2010 ), and support may also promote well-being through increased self-esteem, which involves more positive views of oneself ( Fukukawa et al., 2000 ). Those receiving support from their family members may feel a greater sense of self-worth, and this enhanced self-esteem may be a psychological resource, encouraging optimism, positive affect, and better mental health ( Symister & Friend, 2003 ). Family members may also regulate each other’s behaviors (i.e., social control) and provide information and encouragement to behave in healthier ways and to more effectively utilize health care services ( Cohen, 2004 ; Reczek, Thomeer, Lodge, Umberson, & Underhill, 2014 ), but stress in relationships may also lead to health-compromising behaviors as coping mechanisms to deal with stress ( Ng & Jeffery, 2003 ). The stress of relationship strain can result in physiological processes that impair immune function, affect the cardiovascular system, and increase risk for depression ( Graham, Christian, & Kiecolt-Glaser, 2006 ; Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001 ), whereas positive relationships are associated with lower allostatic load (i.e., “wear and tear” on the body accumulating from stress) ( Seeman, Singer, Ryff, Love, & Levy-Storms, 2002 ). Clearly, the quality of family relationships can have considerable consequences for well-being.

Marital Relationships

A life course perspective has posited marital relationships as one of the most important relationships that define life context and in turn affect individuals’ well-being throughout adulthood ( Umberson & Montez, 2010 ). Being married, especially happily married, is associated with better mental and physical health ( Carr & Springer, 2010 ; Umberson, Williams, & Thomeer, 2013 ), and the strength of the marital effect on health is comparable to that of other traditional risk factors such as smoking and obesity ( Sbarra, 2009 ). Although some studies emphasize the possibility of selection effects, suggesting that individuals in better health are more likely to be married ( Lipowicz, 2014 ), most researchers emphasize two theoretical models to explain why marital relationships shape well-being: the marital resource model and the stress model ( Waite & Gallager, 2000 ; Williams & Umberson, 2004 ). The marital resource model suggests that marriage promotes well-being through increased access to economic, social, and health-promoting resources ( Rendall, Weden, Favreault, & Waldron, 2011 ; Umberson et al., 2013 ). The stress model suggests that negative aspects of marital relationships such as marital strain and marital dissolutions create stress and undermine well-being ( Williams & Umberson, 2004 ), whereas positive aspects of marital relationships may prompt social support, enhance self-esteem, and promote healthier behaviors in general and in coping with stress ( Reczek, Thomeer, et al., 2014 ; Symister & Friend, 2003 ; Waite & Gallager, 2000 ). Marital relationships also tend to become more salient with advancing age, as other social relationships such as those with family members, friends, and neighbors are often lost due to geographic relocation and death in the later part of the life course ( Liu & Waite, 2014 ).

Married people, on average, enjoy better mental health, physical health, and longer life expectancy than divorced/separated, widowed, and never-married people ( Hughes & Waite, 2009 ; Simon, 2002 ), although the health gap between the married and never married has decreased in the past few decades ( Liu & Umberson, 2008 ). Moreover, marital links to well-being depend on the quality of the relationship; those in distressed marriages are more likely to report depressive symptoms and poorer health than those in happy marriages ( Donoho, Crimmins, & Seeman, 2013 ; Liu & Waite, 2014 ; Umberson, Williams, Powers, Liu, & Needham, 2006 ), whereas a happy marriage may buffer the effects of stress via greater access to emotional support ( Williams, 2003 ). A number of studies suggest that the negative aspects of close relationships have a stronger impact on well-being than the positive aspects of relationships (e.g., Rook, 2014 ), and past research shows that the impact of marital strain on health increases with advancing age ( Liu & Waite, 2014 ; Umberson et al., 2006 ).

Prior studies suggest that marital transitions, either into or out of marriage, shape life context and affect well-being ( Williams & Umberson, 2004 ). National longitudinal studies provide evidence that past experiences of divorce and widowhood are associated with increased risk of heart disease in later life especially among women, irrespective of current marital status ( Zhang & Hayward, 2006 ), and longer duration of divorce or widowhood is associated with a greater number of chronic conditions and mobility limitations ( Hughes & Waite, 2009 ; Lorenz, Wickrama, Conger, & Elder, 2006 ) but only short-term declines in mental health ( Lee & Demaris, 2007 ). On the other hand, entry into marriages, especially first marriages, improves psychological well-being and decreases depression ( Frech & Williams, 2007 ; Musick & Bumpass, 2012 ), although the benefits of remarriage may not be as large as those that accompany a first marriage ( Hughes & Waite, 2009 ). Taken together, these studies show the importance of understanding the lifelong cumulative impact of marital status and marital transitions.

Gender Differences

Gender is a central focus of research on marital relationships and well-being and an important determinant of life course experiences ( Bernard, 1972 ; Liu & Waite, 2014 ; Zhang & Hayward, 2006 ). A long-observed pattern is that men receive more physical health benefits from marriage than women, and women are more psychologically and physiologically vulnerable to marital stress than men ( Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001 ; Revenson et al., 2016 ; Simon, 2002 ; Williams, 2004 ). Women tend to receive more financial benefits from their typically higher-earning male spouse than do men, but men generally receive more health promotion benefits such as emotional support and regulation of health behaviors from marriage than do women ( Liu & Umberson, 2008 ; Liu & Waite, 2014 ). This is because within a traditional marriage, women tend to take more responsibility for maintaining social connections to family and friends, and are more likely to provide emotional support to their husband, whereas men are more likely to receive emotional support and enjoy the benefit of expanded social networks—all factors that may promote husbands’ health and well-being ( Revenson et al., 2016 ).

However, there is mixed evidence regarding whether men’s or women’s well-being is more affected by marriage. On the one hand, a number of studies have documented that marital status differences in both mental and physical health are greater for men than women ( Liu & Umberson, 2008 ; Sbarra, 2009 ). For example, Williams and Umberson (2004) found that men’s health improves more than women’s from entering marriage. On the other hand, a number of studies reveal stronger effects of marital strain on women’s health than men’s including more depressive symptoms, increases in cardiovascular health risk, and changes in hormones ( Kiecolt-Glaser & Newton, 2001 ; Liu & Waite, 2014 ; Liu, Waite, & Shen, 2016 ). Yet, other studies found no gender differences in marriage and health links (e.g., Umberson et al., 2006 ). The mixed evidence regarding gender differences in the impact of marital relationships on well-being may be attributed to different study samples (e.g., with different age groups) and variations in measurements and methodologies. More research based on representative longitudinal samples is clearly warranted to contribute to this line of investigation.

Race-Ethnicity and SES Heterogeneity

Family scholars argue that marriage has different meanings and dynamics across socioeconomic status (SES) and racial-ethnic groups due to varying social, economic, historical, and cultural contexts. Therefore, marriage may be associated with well-being in different ways across these groups. For example, women who are black or lower SES may be less likely than their white, higher SES counterparts to increase their financial capital from relationship unions because eligible men in their social networks are more socioeconomically challenged ( Edin & Kefalas, 2005 ). Some studies also find that marital quality is lower among low SES and black couples than white couples with higher SES ( Broman, 2005 ). This may occur because the former groups face more stress in their daily lives throughout the life course and these higher levels of stress undermine marital quality ( Umberson, Williams, Thomas, Liu, & Thomeer, 2014 ). Other studies, however, suggest stronger effects of marriage on the well-being of black adults than white adults. For example, black older adults seem to benefit more from marriage than older whites in terms of chronic conditions and disability ( Pienta, Hayward, & Jenkins, 2000 ).

Directions for Future Research

The rapid aging of the U.S. population along with significant changes in marriage and families indicate that a growing number of older adults enter late life with both complex marital histories and great heterogeneity in their relationships. While most research to date focuses on different-sex marriages, a growing body of research has started to examine whether the marital advantage in health and well-being is extended to same-sex couples, which represents a growing segment of relationship types among older couples ( Denney, Gorman, & Barrera, 2013 ; Goldsen et al., 2017 ; Liu, Reczek, & Brown, 2013 ; Reczek, Liu, & Spiker, 2014 ). Evidence shows that same-sex cohabiting couples report worse health than different-sex married couples ( Denney et al., 2013 ; Liu et al., 2013 ), but same-sex married couples are often not significantly different from or are even better off than different-sex married couples in other outcomes such as alcohol use ( Reczek, Liu, et al., 2014 ) and care from their partner during periods of illness ( Umberson, Thomeer, Reczek, & Donnelly, 2016 ). These results suggest that marriage may promote the well-being of same-sex couples, perhaps even more so than for different-sex couples ( Umberson et al., 2016 ). Including same-sex couples in future work on marriage and well-being will garner unique insights into gender differences in marital dynamics that have long been taken for granted based on studies of different-sex couples ( Umberson, Thomeer, Kroeger, Lodge, & Xu, 2015 ). Moreover, future work on same-sex and different-sex couples should take into account the intersection of other statuses such as race-ethnicity and SES to better understand the impact of marital relationships on well-being.

Another avenue for future research involves investigating complexities of marital strain effects on well-being. Some recent studies among older adults suggest that relationship strain may actually benefit certain dimensions of well-being. These studies suggest that strain with a spouse may be protective for certain health outcomes including cognitive decline ( Xu, Thomas, & Umberson, 2016 ) and diabetes control ( Liu et al., 2016 ), while support may not be, especially for men ( Carr, Cornman, & Freedman, 2016 ). Explanations for these unexpected findings among older adults are not fully understood. Family and health scholars suggest that spouses may prod their significant others to engage in more health-promoting behaviors ( Umberson, Crosnoe, et al., 2010 ). These attempts may be a source of friction, creating strain in the relationship; however, this dynamic may still contribute to better health outcomes for older adults. Future research should explore the processes by which strain may have a positive influence on health and well-being, perhaps differently by gender.

Intergenerational Relationships

Children and parents tend to remain closely connected to each other across the life course, and it is well-established that the quality of intergenerational relationships is central to the well-being of both generations ( Merz, Schuengel, & Schulze, 2009 ; Polenick, DePasquale, Eggebeen, Zarit, & Fingerman, 2016 ). Recent research also points to the importance of relationships with grandchildren for aging adults ( Mahne & Huxhold, 2015 ). We focus here on the well-being of parents, adult children, and grandparents. Parents, grandparents, and children often provide care for each other at different points in the life course, which can contribute to social support, stress, and social control mechanisms that influence the health and well-being of each in important ways over the life course ( Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2003 ; Pinquart & Soerensen, 2007 ; Reczek, Thomeer, et al., 2014 ).

Family scholarship highlights the complexities of parent–child relationships, finding that parenthood generates both rewards and stressors, with important implications for well-being ( Nomaguchi & Milkie, 2003 ; Umberson, Pudrovska, & Reczek, 2010 ). Parenthood increases time constraints, producing stress and diminishing well-being, especially when children are younger ( Nomaguchi, Milkie, & Bianchi, 2005 ), but parenthood can also increase social integration, leading to greater emotional support and a sense of belonging and meaning ( Berkman, Glass, Brissette, & Seeman, 2000 ), with positive consequences for well-being. Studies show that adult children play a pivotal role in the social networks of their parents across the life course ( Umberson, Pudrovska, et al., 2010 ), and the effects of parenthood on health and well-being become increasingly important at older ages as adult children provide one of the major sources of care for aging adults ( Seltzer & Bianchi, 2013 ). Norms of filial obligation of adult children to care for parents may be a form of social capital to be accessed by parents when their needs arise ( Silverstein, Gans, & Yang, 2006 ).

Although the general pattern is that receiving support from adult children is beneficial for parents’ well-being ( Merz, Schulze, & Schuengel, 2010 ), there is also evidence showing that receiving social support from adult children is related to lower well-being among older adults, suggesting that challenges to an identity of independence and usefulness may offset some of the benefits of receiving support ( Merz et al., 2010 ; Thomas, 2010 ). Contrary to popular thought, older parents are also very likely to provide instrumental/financial support to their adult children, typically contributing more than they receive ( Grundy, 2005 ), and providing emotional support to their adult children is related to higher well-being for older adults ( Thomas, 2010 ). In addition, consistent with the tenets of stress process theory, most evidence points to poor quality relationships with adult children as detrimental to parents’ well-being ( Koropeckyj-Cox, 2002 ; Polenick et al., 2016 ); however, a recent study found that strain with adult children is related to better cognitive health among older parents, especially fathers ( Thomas & Umberson, 2017 ).

Adult Children

As children and parents age, the nature of the parent–child relationship often changes such that adult children may take on a caregiving role for their older parents ( Pinquart & Soerensen, 2007 ). Adult children often experience competing pressures of employment, taking care of their own children, and providing care for older parents ( Evans et al., 2016 ). Support and strain from intergenerational ties during this stressful time of balancing family roles and work obligations may be particularly important for the mental health of adults in midlife ( Thomas, 2016 ). Most evidence suggests that caregiving for parents is related to lower well-being for adult children, including more negative affect and greater stress response in terms of overall output of daily cortisol ( Bangerter et al., 2017 ); however, some studies suggest that caregiving may be beneficial or neutral for well-being ( Merz et al., 2010 ). Family scholars suggest that this discrepancy may be due to varying types of caregiving and relationship quality. For example, providing emotional support to parents can increase well-being, but providing instrumental support does not unless the caregiver is emotionally engaged ( Morelli, Lee, Arnn, & Zaki, 2015 ). Moreover, the quality of the adult child-parent relationship may matter more for the well-being of adult children than does the caregiving they provide ( Merz, Schuengel, et al., 2009 ).

Although caregiving is a critical issue, adult children generally experience many years with parents in good health ( Settersten, 2007 ), and relationship quality and support exchanges have important implications for well-being beyond caregiving roles. The preponderance of research suggests that most adults feel emotionally close to their parents, and emotional support such as encouragement, companionship, and serving as a confidant is commonly exchanged in both directions ( Swartz, 2009 ). Intergenerational support exchanges often flow across generations or towards adult children rather than towards parents. For example, adult children are more likely to receive financial support from parents than vice versa until parents are very old ( Grundy, 2005 ). Intergenerational support exchanges are integral to the lives of both parents and adult children, both in times of need and in daily life.

Grandparents

Over 65 million Americans are grandparents ( Ellis & Simmons, 2014 ), 10% of children lived with at least one grandparent in 2012 ( Dunifon, Ziol-Guest, & Kopko, 2014 ), and a growing number of American families rely on grandparents as a source of support ( Settersten, 2007 ), suggesting the importance of studying grandparenting. Grandparents’ relationships with their grandchildren are generally related to higher well-being for both grandparents and grandchildren, with some important exceptions such as when they involve more extensive childcare responsibilities ( Kim, Kang, & Johnson-Motoyama, 2017 ; Lee, Clarkson-Hendrix, & Lee, 2016 ). Most grandparents engage in activities with their grandchildren that they find meaningful, feel close to their grandchildren, consider the grandparent role important ( Swartz, 2009 ), and experience lower well-being if they lose contact with their grandchildren ( Drew & Silverstein, 2007 ). However, a growing proportion of children live in households maintained by grandparents ( Settersten, 2007 ), and grandparents who care for their grandchildren without the support of the children’s parents usually experience greater stress ( Lee et al., 2016 ) and more depressive symptoms ( Blustein, Chan, & Guanais, 2004 ), sometimes juggling grandparenting responsibilities with their own employment ( Harrington Meyer, 2014 ). Using professional help and community services reduced the detrimental effects of grandparent caregiving on well-being ( Gerard, Landry-Meyer, & Roe, 2006 ), suggesting that future policy could help mitigate the stress of grandparent parenting and enhance the rewarding aspects of grandparenting instead.

Substantial evidence suggests that the experience of intergenerational relationships varies for men and women. Women tend to be more involved with and affected by intergenerational relationships, with adult children feeling closer to mothers than fathers ( Swartz, 2009 ). Moreover, relationship quality with children is more strongly associated with mothers’ well-being than with fathers’ well-being ( Milkie et al., 2008 ). Motherhood may be particularly salient to women ( McQuillan, Greil, Shreffler, & Tichenor, 2008 ), and women carry a disproportionate share of the burden of parenting, including greater caregiving for young children and aging parents as well as time deficits from these obligations that lead to lower well-being ( Nomaguchi et al., 2005 ; Pinquart & Sorensen, 2006 ). Mothers often report greater parental pressures than fathers, such as more obligation to be there for their children ( Reczek, Thomeer, et al., 2014 ; Stone, 2007 ), and to actively work on family relationships ( Erickson, 2005 ). Mothers are also more likely to blame themselves for poor parent–child relationship quality ( Elliott, Powell, & Brenton, 2015 ), contributing to greater distress for women. It is important to take into account the different pressures and meanings surrounding intergenerational relationships for men and for women in future research.

Family scholars have noted important variations in family dynamics and constraints by race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Lower SES can produce and exacerbate family strains ( Conger, Conger, & Martin, 2010 ). Socioeconomically disadvantaged adult children may need more assistance from parents and grandparents who in turn have fewer resources to provide ( Seltzer & Bianchi, 2013 ). Higher SES and white families tend to provide more financial and emotional support, whereas lower SES, black, and Latino families are more likely to coreside and provide practical help, and these differences in support exchanges contribute to the intergenerational transmission of inequality through families ( Swartz, 2009 ). Moreover, scholars have found that a happiness penalty exists such that parents of young children have lower levels of well-being than nonparents; however, policies such as childcare subsidies and paid time off that help parents negotiate work and family responsibilities explain this disparity ( Glass, Simon, & Andersson, 2016 ). Fewer resources can also place strain on grandparent–grandchild relationships. For example, well-being derived from these relationships may be unequally distributed across grandparents’ education level such that those with less education bear the brunt of more stressful grandparenting experiences and lower well-being ( Mahne & Huxhold, 2015 ). Both the burden of parenting grandchildren and its effects on depressive symptoms disproportionately fall upon single grandmothers of color ( Blustein et al., 2004 ). These studies demonstrate the importance of understanding structural constraints that produce greater stress for less advantaged groups and their impact on family relationships and well-being.

Research on intergenerational relationships suggests the importance of understanding greater complexity in these relationships in future work. For example, future research should pay greater attention to diverse family structures and perspectives of multiple family members. There is an increasing trend of individuals delaying childbearing or choosing not to bear children ( Umberson, Pudrovska, et al., 2010 ). How might this influence marital quality and general well-being over the life course and across different social groups? Greater attention to the quality and context of intergenerational relationships from each family member’s perspective over time may prove fruitful by gaining both parents’ and each child’s perceptions. This work has already yielded important insights, such as the ways in which intergenerational ambivalence (simultaneous positive and negative feelings about intergenerational relationships) from the perspectives of parents and adult children may be detrimental to well-being for both parties ( Fingerman, Pitzer, Lefkowitz, Birditt, & Mroczek, 2008 ; Gilligan, Suitor, Feld, & Pillemer, 2015 ). Future work understanding the perspectives of each family member could also provide leverage in understanding the mixed findings regarding whether living in blended families with stepchildren influences well-being ( Gennetian, 2005 ; Harcourt, Adler-Baeder, Erath, & Pettit, 2013 ) and the long-term implications of these family structures when older adults need care ( Seltzer & Bianchi, 2013 ). Longitudinal data linking generations, paying greater attention to the context of these relationships, and collected from multiple family members can help untangle the ways in which family members influence each other across the life course and how multiple family members’ well-being may be intertwined in important ways.

Future studies should also consider the impact of intersecting structural locations that place unique constraints on family relationships, producing greater stress at some intersections while providing greater resources at other intersections. For example, same-sex couples are less likely to have children ( Carpenter & Gates, 2008 ) and are more likely to provide parental caregiving regardless of gender ( Reczek & Umberson, 2016 ), suggesting important implications for stress and burden in intergenerational caregiving for this group. Much of the work on gender, sexuality, race, and socioeconomic status differences in intergenerational relationships and well-being examine one or two of these statuses, but there may be unique effects at the intersection of these and other statuses such as disability, age, and nativity. Moreover, these effects may vary at different stages of the life course.

Sibling Relationships

Sibling relationships are understudied, and the research on adult siblings is more limited than for other family relationships. Yet, sibling relationships are often the longest lasting family relationship in an individual’s life due to concurrent life spans, and indeed, around 75% of 70-year olds have a living sibling ( Settersten, 2007 ). Some suggest that sibling relationships play a more meaningful role in well-being than is often recognized ( Cicirelli, 2004 ). The available evidence suggests that high quality relationships characterized by closeness with siblings are related to higher levels of well-being ( Bedford & Avioli, 2001 ), whereas sibling relationships characterized by conflict and lack of closeness have been linked to lower well-being in terms of major depression and greater drug use in adulthood ( Waldinger, Vaillant, & Orav, 2007 ). Parental favoritism and disfavoritism of children affects the closeness of siblings ( Gilligan, Suitor, & Nam, 2015 ) and depression ( Jensen, Whiteman, Fingerman, & Birditt, 2013 ). Similar to other family relationships, sibling relationships can be characterized by both positive and negative aspects that may affect elements of the stress process, providing both resources and stressors that influence well-being.

Siblings play important roles in support exchanges and caregiving, especially if their sibling experiences physical impairment and other close ties, such as a spouse or adult children, are not available ( Degeneffe & Burcham, 2008 ; Namkung, Greenberg, & Mailick, 2017 ). Although sibling caregivers report lower well-being than noncaregivers, sibling caregivers experience this lower well-being to a lesser extent than spousal caregivers ( Namkung et al., 2017 ). Most people believe that their siblings would be available to help them in a crisis ( Connidis, 1994 ; Van Volkom, 2006 ), and in general support exchanges, receiving emotional support from a sibling is related to higher levels of well-being among older adults ( Thomas, 2010 ). Relationship quality affects the experience of caregiving, with higher quality sibling relationships linked to greater provision of care ( Eriksen & Gerstel, 2002 ) and a lower likelihood of emotional strain from caregiving ( Mui & Morrow-Howell, 1993 ; Quinn, Clare, & Woods, 2009 ). Taken together, these studies suggest the importance of sibling relationships for well-being across the adult life course.

The gender of the sibling dyad may play a role in the relationship’s effect on well-being, with relationships with sisters perceived as higher quality and linked to higher well-being ( Van Volkom, 2006 ), though some argue that brothers do not show their affection in the same way but nevertheless have similar sentiments towards their siblings ( Bedford & Avioli, 2001 ). General social support exchanges with siblings may be influenced by gender and larger family context; sisters exchanged more support with their siblings when they had higher quality relationships with their parents, but brothers exhibited a more compensatory role, exchanging more emotional support with siblings when they had lower quality relationships with their parents ( Voorpostel & Blieszner, 2008 ). Caregiving for aging parents is also distributed differently by gender, falling disproportionately on female siblings ( Pinquart & Sorensen, 2006 ), and sons provide less care to their parents if they have a sister ( Grigoryeva, 2017 ). However, men in same-sex marriages were more likely than men in different-sex marriages to provide caregiving to parents and parents-in-law ( Reczek & Umberson, 2016 ), which may ease the stress and burden on their female siblings.

Although there is less research in this area, family scholars have noted variations in sibling relationships and their effects by race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Lower socioeconomic status has been associated with reports of feeling less attached to siblings and this influences several outcomes such as obesity, depression, and substance use ( Van Gundy et al., 2015 ). Fewer socioeconomic resources can also limit the amount of care siblings provide ( Eriksen & Gerstel, 2002 ). These studies suggest sibling relationship quality as an axis of further disadvantage for already disadvantaged individuals. Sibling relationships may influence caregiving experiences by race as well, with black caregivers more likely to have siblings who also provide care to their parents than white caregivers ( White-Means & Rubin, 2008 ) and sibling caregiving leading to lower well-being among white caregivers than minority caregivers ( Namkung et al., 2017 ).

Research on within-family differences has made great strides in our understanding of family relationships and remains a fruitful area of growth for future research (e.g., Suitor et al., 2017 ). Data gathered on multiple members within the same family can help researchers better investigate how families influence well-being in complex ways, including reciprocal influences between siblings. Siblings may have different perceptions of their relationships with each other, and this may vary by gender and other social statuses. This type of data might be especially useful in understanding family effects in diverse family structures, such as differences in treatment and outcomes of biological versus stepchildren, how characteristics of their relationships such as age differences may play a role, and the implications for caregiving for aging parents and for each other. Moreover, it is important to use longitudinal data to understand the consequences of these within-family differences over time as the life course unfolds. In addition, a greater focus on heterogeneity in sibling relationships and their consequences at the intersection of gender, race-ethnicity, SES, and other social statuses merit further investigation.

Relationships with family members are significant for well-being across the life course ( Merz, Consedine, et al., 2009 ; Umberson, Pudrovska, et al., 2010 ). As individuals age, family relationships often become more complex, with sometimes complicated marital histories, varying relationships with children, competing time pressures, and obligations for care. At the same time, family relationships become more important for well-being as individuals age and social networks diminish even as family caregiving needs increase. Stress process theory suggests that the positive and negative aspects of relationships can have a large impact on the well-being of individuals. Family relationships provide resources that can help an individual cope with stress, engage in healthier behaviors, and enhance self-esteem, leading to higher well-being. However, poor relationship quality, intense caregiving for family members, and marital dissolution are all stressors that can take a toll on an individual’s well-being. Moreover, family relationships also change over the life course, with the potential to share different levels of emotional support and closeness, to take care of us when needed, to add varying levels of stress to our lives, and to need caregiving at different points in the life course. The potential risks and rewards of these relationships have a cumulative impact on health and well-being over the life course. Additionally, structural constraints and disadvantage place greater pressures on some families than others based on structural location such as gender, race, and SES, producing further disadvantage and intergenerational transmission of inequality.

Future research should take into account greater complexity in family relationships, diverse family structures, and intersections of social statuses. The rapid aging of the U.S. population along with significant changes in marriage and families suggest more complex marital and family histories as adults enter late life, which will have a large impact on family dynamics and caregiving. Growing segments of family relationships among older adults include same-sex couples, those without children, and those experiencing marital transitions leading to diverse family structures, which all merit greater attention in future research. Moreover, there is some evidence that strain in relationships can be beneficial for certain health outcomes, and the processes by which this occurs merit further investigation. A greater use of longitudinal data that link generations and obtain information from multiple family members will help researchers better understand the ways in which these complex family relationships unfold across the life course and shape well-being. We also highlighted gender, race-ethnicity, and socioeconomic status differences in each of these family relationships and their impact on well-being; however, many studies only consider one status at a time. Future research should consider the impact of intersecting structural locations that place unique constraints on family relationships, producing greater stress or providing greater resources at the intersections of different statuses.

The changing landscape of families combined with population aging present unique challenges and pressures for families and health care systems. With more experiences of age-related disease in a growing population of older adults as well as more complex family histories as these adults enter late life, such as a growing proportion of diverse family structures without children or with stepchildren, caregiving obligations and availability may be less clear. It is important to address ways to ease caregiving or shift the burden away from families through a variety of policies, such as greater resources for in-home aid, creation of older adult residential communities that facilitate social interactions and social support structures, and patient advocates to help older adults navigate health care systems. Adults in midlife may experience competing family pressures from their young children and aging parents, and policies such as childcare subsidies and paid leave to care for family members could reduce burden during this often stressful time ( Glass et al., 2016 ). Professional help and community services can also reduce the burden for grandparents involved in childcare, enabling grandparents to focus on the more positive aspects of grandparent–grandchild relationships. It is important for future research and health promotion policies to take into account the contexts and complexities of family relationships as part of a multipronged approach to benefit health and well-being, especially as a growing proportion of older adults reach late life.

This work was supported in part by grant, 5 R24 HD042849, Population Research Center, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Conflict of Interest

None reported.

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Essay on The Role of Father in the Family

Students are often asked to write an essay on The Role of Father in the Family in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on The Role of Father in the Family

Introduction.

A father is a pillar of the family, providing support and guidance. His role is crucial in shaping the life of his children.

Provider and Protector

Moral guide.

Fathers are also moral guides. They teach kids about right and wrong, helping them develop strong values.

Emotional Support

Fathers offer emotional support, showing love and care. They help children cope with life’s challenges.

Lastly, fathers are role models. Their actions teach children how to behave, inspiring them to be good people.

250 Words Essay on The Role of Father in the Family

The significance of a father’s role.

The father, traditionally seen as the provider, plays a multifaceted role in the family dynamics. His responsibilities extend beyond financial support, contributing significantly to the cognitive, emotional, and social development of children.

Emotional Development

Fathers play a crucial role in the emotional development of their children. They provide a sense of security, instilling confidence in their children to explore the world fearlessly. Their love and attention shape the child’s self-esteem and interpersonal relationships, influencing how they perceive and interact with others.

Cognitive Development

The father’s role in cognitive development is often underappreciated. Through play and interaction, fathers stimulate curiosity and problem-solving skills in children. Their involvement in education, whether helping with homework or encouraging academic pursuits, fosters intellectual growth and a love for learning.

Social Development

Fathers serve as role models, teaching children about societal norms and values. They guide children in understanding their roles within the family and society, shaping their social skills and behaviors. The father’s interaction with the mother also sets an example of gender roles and respectful relationships.

In conclusion, a father’s role in the family is integral to the holistic development of children. They provide emotional support, stimulate cognitive growth, and guide social development, shaping the future adults their children will become. Recognizing and appreciating this role is key to understanding family dynamics and child development.

500 Words Essay on The Role of Father in the Family

The importance of a father figure.

Traditionally, fathers have been seen as the primary breadwinners and protectors of the family. This role has evolved with societal changes, but the core essence remains. Fathers strive to provide a secure environment and ensure the family’s needs are met, fostering a sense of safety and stability.

Fathers are crucial role models for both sons and daughters. Through their actions, attitudes, and behavior, they set an example of what it means to be a man, a partner, and a citizen. This modeling is pivotal in shaping children’s character, their understanding of gender roles, and their future relationships.

Discipline and Guidance

The changing role of fathers.

In recent years, societal shifts have led to an evolution of the father’s role. More fathers are now involved in day-to-day child rearing tasks, challenging traditional gender roles. This shared responsibility not only promotes equality but also strengthens the father-child bond.

The Absence of a Father

In conclusion, the role of a father in a family is multifaceted and vital. As providers, protectors, role models, emotional anchors, disciplinarians, and guides, fathers shape the course of their children’s lives. The evolving role of fathers in the family structure underscores the need for societal support in empowering fathers to fulfill their roles effectively.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Happy studying!

My Role In The Family (Essay Sample)

Table of Contents

Essay Samples on My Role in the Family

Families are an integral part of society. Families have an important role to play in shaping the cultural and ethical norms of a person’s life. I am also blessed with a beautiful family of six people. It comprises four siblings, mom, and dad. I feel even more blessed to be the eldest daughter in the family as I am now destined to rule over my younger brothers and sisters. Being the eldest daughter I also have some family responsibilities. You can say that my roles in the family are more like second in command and in charge when parents are not around. No matter how good it sounds, my role is more like being a nanny for my younger siblings. In this essay, I will share everything about how I managed to keep everyone happy at the same time.

Get your own unique and professionally written one’s role in the family essay from Essay Basics. Order now and get your plagiarism-free essay.

Essay Sample on My Roles In the Family As a Daughter

Family is the most important and basic unit of society in which each member plays a vital role. Family members work together to raise enthusiastic, productive, law-abiding citizens. Foundation laid by families and communities helps build future generations that define a nation’s fate. I am blessed to have a family of six people. I am the eldest daughter and I have three other siblings, two sisters, and one brother. Being firstborn and second in command, I have various responsibilities towards my family.

Image Source: Vlada Karpovich from Pexels

My Role in the Family

Let’s move on and talk about my role as a member of the family. Being the eldest means taking the role of childcare to some extent. When my parents are focused on shopping, I do not let my siblings be out of my sight. I take care of little household chores. I look after my siblings’ well-being when we play. I make sure my siblings don’t get into trouble when we are home alone. My responsibilities based on my role also include helping my siblings eat breakfast and get ready for school. I also take care of them in the school by helping them against bullies. After returning from school I also help them with their homework and teach them how to play different group games.

Even after all that mother and father scold me the most if something goes wrong. You can now understand that I am more like a nanny for my siblings and a helper for my parents.

Benefits of My Role in The Family

Being the firstborn also comes with a lot of benefits and not just duties. I think my parents love me the most and always agree with what I say. I have mastered the art of manipulating my immediate family members. I like ordering things like, fetch me a glass of water, walk the dogs, attend the main door, etc. I also have the first say on who gets the best toys, who gets the best dresses. Some other benefits include

They only get things that I get first
No one in my family ever pushed me around.
I am a role model for my other siblings and they only do what I do first.
With more responsibility, I also had more power over my siblings.

Most importantly, I show them what it means to be a good child. I serve as a role model by being obedient to our parents, teachers, relatives, friends and respectful to the elderly. Likewise, I exhibit the characteristics of a good student. I do my assignments before playing with my toys or doing sports.

I am not saying that I am a perfect older sibling by any means. I also have many flaws including being impatient, being an introvert, and keeping my own company as much as possible. But they never complain about my habits and accept me as I am. This is what families do and my family is always working toward bringing the best in me. I want my family to become the coolest, kindest, loving, and caring. I just love them like they are and this is the reason why I love my family.

200 Words Short Essay on What is Your Role in Your Family As a Son (Short Essay Sample for Children and Kids)

Family is indeed one of the most valuable gifts. Family plays the most crucial role in evolving our lives and helps us become who we are. My family members always stand by my side, good or bad. My parents have four kids. Our family comprises a mother, father, younger sisters, and a younger brother as the final child. We all live under the same roof. All of us have different responsibilities at home in our family and we do enjoy fulfilling them. In this essay, I will talk about my role in my family and how I get along with my parents and siblings. Here I am going to write an essay about the importance of the roles of each member of the family.

Now you know that I am the eldest son in the family. Like every other thing, being the firstborn has its own pros and cons. As the eldest son, most of my duties mirror those of my parents. Especially the responsibilities that involve looking after younger siblings and carrying out some household chores. Most of the time when my mother is sleeping after her call canter job, I am in charge of the house. I help siblings with eating breakfast, getting ready for the school bus, and helping them with their homework. I am more like a nanny for my siblings and a little helper for my parents.

I also enjoy giving orders to other family members. I always get every good thing first because my parents listen to me the most and no one pushes me around. My brother is also my best friend. I love my brother, sister, mother, and father the most in this world. I want them to become the coolest and kindest family in the world.

FAQ’s About My Role in My Family Essay

How to write an essay on my roles in the family.

Start the essay by introducing your family. Move on to explain your role in the body section and end it by telling how you feel about your role.

What is the role of a child in the family?

Children also perform different roles like taking care of siblings, doing household chores, and getting stuff from the market.

What is my responsibility towards my family as a child?

You should be caring towards younger brothers and sisters and respectful towards the elderly. Despite your young age, you should help your mom with household chores.

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‘The Traitors’ Season 3 cast is revealed — and it’s the most ‘treacherous’ yet

A group of celebrities have descended upon a Scottish castle where they will “murder” each other for money, which can only mean one thing: Season Three of “The Traitors” is on the way.

The hit Peacock reality competition series will soon return for another season and fans now know the 21 famous faces who will battle to be the last “Faithful” or “Traitor” standing.

On June 5, host Alan Cumming revealed exclusively on TODAY the names of the Season Three contestants while he sat next to a blazing fire presumably in the Scottish castle where the show is filmed.

“The new season of ‘The Traitors’ cast is unlocked at last,” he said mischievously before unfolding a parchment similar to the ones the contestants receive.

So which celebrities were tapped for the upcoming season? Well, a few “Survivor” legends, some fan-favorite “Real Housewives” stars, a British royal and one of Britney Spears’ exes made the cut.

The full cast of “The Traitors” Season Three is…

Rob Mariano — “Survivor”
Dorinda Medley — “The Real Housewives of New York City”
Chrishell Stause —“Selling Sunset”
Britney Haynes —“Big Brother”
Danielle Reyes —“Big Brother”
Bob the Drag Queen —“RuPaul’s Drag Race”
Wells Adams —“The Bachelorette” and “Bachelor in Paradise”
Chanel Ayan —“The Real Housewives of Dubai”
Gabby Windey —“The Bachelorette”
Dylan Efron —“Down to Earth with Zac Efron”
Tony Vlachos—“Survivor”
Jeremy Collins —“Survivor”
Dolores Catania —“The Real Housewives of New Jersey”
Robyn Dixon —“The Real Housewives of Potomac”
Bob Harper —“The Biggest Loser”
Ciara Miller —“Summer House”
Lord Ivar Mountbatten — British royal
Carolyn Wiger —“Survivor”
Sam Asghari — Model and actor
Tom Sandoval —“Vanderpump Rules”
Nikki Garcia — Former professional Wrestler

“Well there you have it, dearies,” Cumming said. “This is sure to be the most treacherous season yet.”

Of the 21 cast members, at least three of them will be chosen by Cumming to be a “Traitor” while the rest of the contestants will be “Faithfuls.” Fans will find out the identity of the Traitors in the season premiere.

On the reality game show — which has versions in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and more countries around the world — the Faithfuls and the Traitors compete together in missions to earn money for the group prize fund. In between missions, the Faithfuls try to determine the identity of the Traitors and vote to banish them at the Round Table. Meanwhile, the Traitors meet in secret at a turret every night to discuss which Faithful to “murder” and eliminate from the game. Every player is hoping to make it to the end and collect the cash prize.

Since launching in the U.S., “The Traitors” has become a phenomenon and constantly trended on social media platforms during its second season.

While Season Two was airing in February, Variety reported that Peacock renewed “The Traitors” for Season Three. The streamer has not announced when new episodes will arrive.

In Season One, “Survivor” alum Cirie Fields successfully deceived the other contestants while playing alongside fellow celebrities and a group of reality television fans. She left the show as the sole winner of $250,000.

Last season, fans watched Traitors Dan Gheesling (“Big Brother”), Parvati Shallow (“Survivor”) and Phaedra Parks (“The Real Housewives of Atlanta”) fail to outlast the Faithfuls. “The Challenge” stars Chris “CT” Tamburello and Trishelle Cannatella were crowned the winners and split $208,100.

(Disclosure: Peacock is owned by NBCUniversal, TODAY’s parent company. Shop TODAY independently determines what we cover and recommend. When you buy through our links, we earn a commission. Learn more .)

Traitors is exclusively on Peacock and right now you can get Peacock for an entire year for only $19.99 – a 67% savings! But hurry, the deal ends 6/30.

Ariana Brockington is a trending news reporter at TODAY digital. She is based in Los Angeles.

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Walnut and Me

By Sam Anderson Illustrations by Gaia Alari

Listen to Episode 1 of the series, where Sam Anderson explains his love for his dog, Walnut. Find all episodes of ‘Animal’ at nytimes.com/animal .

Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio. Try listening here.

Photo credit: Ryan Carll/Upstate Images

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine. He has written about rhinos, pencils, poets, water parks, basketball, weight loss and the fountain of youth.

Gaia Alari is a self-taught illustrator and animator, specializing in a traditional frame-by-frame style of hand animation.

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Who is Hunter Biden's mom? A quick look at Neilia Biden and her role in the Biden family

Hunter Biden’s felony gun trial has brought together several members of the Biden family, with first lady Jill Biden seated each day directly behind the defense table.

The president's son refers to Jill Biden as "my mother" in his memoir of drug addiction, but the Biden family's public story really begins with the tragedy of Joe Biden's first wife, Neilia Hunter Biden.

Neilia, Hunter's biological mother, was killed in a car crash in 1972 at age 30 with her 13-month-old daughter Naomi Christina, known as "Amy."

Hunter Biden , who was just three, and his brother Beau , who was four, survived the crash with serious injuries. Joe Biden , who had recently won election to the U.S. Senate, was sworn into office inside the boys' hospital room.

More: Judge sends jury home early in Hunter Biden trial after his daughter Naomi Biden testifies

While Neilia Biden is mostly remembered for the accident in which she and her youngest child were killed, Joe Biden has recalled her as "the brains" behind his political ascent and "a more instinctive pol than I was."

"She came around to the thought that there would always be pressure on me to run for something," Biden told the News Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network. "What she said was, 'I suppose you have to try it once, win or lose, or you'll never be happy with yourself.'"

Here’s a quick look at Neilia Biden and her role in the Biden family.

More: Hunter Biden's addiction memoir climbs the charts as prosecutors use it as a weapon in court

What role did Neilia Biden play in Joe Biden’s rise?

Joe Biden met Neilia Biden in 1964 on a beach while he was on a spring break trip in the Bahamas. The couple married in 1966, and were together for six years before her death.

Neilia Biden, a Republican, registered as a Democrat as her husband joined politics. Joe Biden initially was a criminal attorney in Wilmington, and later handled civil cases. At one point, the couple came to a decision that Joe Biden would run for Senate.

"There were only two people who made important decisions in the campaign. Myself and Neilia," Joe Biden told the News Journal in a 1972 interview. "She was the brains. Also she prevented me from blowing my top when I got angry late in the going."

Joe Biden said he came to rely on Neilia Biden as his “adviser.” He unseated a Republican incumbent in a tight 1972 race.

After Neilia Biden died in December of that year, Joe Biden said at a memorial service that she “had a principle – she treated everyone the same and that worked both ways. Those who were poor, Black, minority, affluent or socially esteemed, she made no distinction among them."

Hunter Biden talks trauma from his mother's death

Hunter Biden told CBS News in an interview in 2021 that his battle with addiction began with a "feeling of never fitting in. It's that hole. And you don't know what it is exactly."

Former CBS This Morning co-host Anthony Mason asked him in the interview. "Where do you think that feeling came from?" Hunter Biden replied, "I am more convinced now that trauma is at the center of it."

"Which trauma – the loss of your mother?" Mason asked.

“Yeah. Absolutely. And I don't know why I had such a hard time ever admitting that,” Hunter Biden said.

More: Jill Biden spends an unusual birthday in court, watching as Hunter Biden's felony trial begins

In 2022 on the 50th anniversary of his mother’s death, Hunter Biden and other family members attended a private memorial Mass for Neilia in Wilmington, Delaware.

Now, as Hunter Biden sits in a courtroom for his trial, one of his main supporters includes his stepmother, first lady Jill Biden. Joe and Jill Biden married in 1977.

DOI: 10.31857/s0041377124010012
Corpus ID: 270305017

The role of the Rho family small GTPases in regulation of normal and pathological processes

D. E. Bobkov , A. V. Lukacheva , +1 author G. G. Poljanskaya
Published in Tsitologiya 5 June 2024
Medicine, Biology

118 References

Rac1: a regulator of cell migration and a potential target for cancer therapy, an unbiased proteomics approach to identify the senescence-associated secretory phenotype of human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells, editorial: rho family gtpases and their effectors in neuronal survival and neurodegeneration, impact of umbilical cord mesenchymal stromal/stem cell secretome and cord blood serum in prostate cancer progression, a passage-dependent network for estimating the in vitro senescence of mesenchymal stromal/stem cells using microarray, bulk and single cell rna sequencing, extracellular vesicles from mesenchymal stem cells: towards novel therapeutic strategies for neurodegenerative diseases, rho kinase inhibitor ar-12286 reverses steroid-induced changes in intraocular pressure, effective filtration areas, and morphology in mouse eyes, efficacy of mesenchymal stromal cells intraspinal transplantation for patients with different degrees of spinal cord injury: a systematic review and meta-analysis., rhoa therapeutic targeting in hematological cancers, role of a small gtpase cdc42 in aging and age-related diseases, related papers.

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Importance of Family in Society
Get a custom Essay on Importance of Family in Society. Family values, in their essence, have several elements necessary to create a strong foundation of mutual understanding and dialogue within the group. The central family values include, for example, internal ones: the unity of culture and faith in the family, mutual understanding, love, and ...
Importance of Family Relationships: [Essay Example], 515 words
Family relationships hold a central place in individuals' lives, serving as a cornerstone for personal development, emotional well-being, and societal cohesion.This essay delves into the multifaceted importance of strong family connections, discussing their role in providing emotional support, nurturing healthy development, fostering communication skills, preserving cultural heritage, building ...
Essay on Importance of Family for Students and Children
A family is a group of people who are related by blood or heritage. These people are linked not only by blood but also by compassion, love, and support. A person's character and personality are shaped by his or her family. There are various forms of families in today's society. It is further subdivided into a tight and extended family ...
Essay about Family: Definition, Topics & Sample
Here are some easy-to-follow tips from our essay service experts:. Focus on a Specific Aspect: Instead of a broad overview, delve into a specific angle that piques your interest, such as exploring how birth order influences sibling dynamics or examining the evolving role of grandparents in modern families. Share Personal Anecdotes: Start your family essay introduction with a personal touch by ...
Essay on Importance of Family For Kids & Students
Short Essay on Importance of Joint Family in English 150 words. The role of the family is not limited to giving birth to offspring. The family performs the role of a social coordinator in an individual's life. A child learns about his identity in the family. Parents usually understand enough to give adequate freedom to their children.
Essay on Importance of Family in 500 Words
Here are 10 lines on the importance of family. Students can add them in their essays on the importance of family or similar topics. Our family is our world. Family always comes first. Our family lays the foundation of our growth. Our family is our first hope. Our family provides us with emotional, moral, and financial support.
The Importance of Family: a Foundation for Life
Family plays a pivotal role in shaping our personal development and identity. From the moment we are born, our family environment exerts a profound influence on our values, beliefs, and behaviors. Our early interactions with family members help form the foundation of our character and worldview. Parents, in particular, serve as our first ...
Family Values And Their Importance: [Essay Example], 702 words
In this essay on family values, we will explore the multifaceted nature of this concept, examining how it can be defined and interpreted in various ways. ... One of the most significant impacts of family values is their role in shaping the dynamics of familial relationships. Families that uphold values of love, respect, and open communication ...
The Importance of Family (10 Powerful Reasons)
A loving family and healthy relationships are strongly linked to a successful and happy life. 5 Influence future relationships: According to the attachment theory theorized by psychiatrist John Bowlby and psychologist Mary Ainsworth, family plays an important role in establishing children's attachment styles. This early attachment influences ...
Essay on My Family: 8 Selected Essays on My Family
Essay on My Family - For Children (Essay 2 - 300 Words) The family is a valuable god gift which plays a most crucial role in every individual's life. I love my family very much because all of my family members stand in my good as well as bad times. From moral teachings to love and support, my family has always helped me without any demand.
Importance Of Family Essay
Essay on Importance Of Family - Read and learn about the Importance Of Family Essay in English 100, 200 and 500 words for the students and kids is shared from subject experts on careers360.com. ... 100 Words Essay on The Importance of Family. Family plays a crucial role in shaping our lives and provides us with love, support, and identity.
Essay on the Importance of Family (200, 350, 450, 600 Words)
Essay on the Importance of Family (600 Words) Family is the foundational institution where we acquire our first life lessons. Our family members are the most precious assets that will remain by our side forever. Family holds immense importance as its members are always there to support and stand by each other, regardless of the circumstances.
Importance of Family in English: Essays for Children and Students
Importance of Family Relationships. In order for a family to be strong, the bonds amongst them need to be strong. Relationships are the bonds that keep a family together. If the family has a good relationship with its members, they will have a stronger commitment to each other. Family unity will be important.
Family, Culture, and Communication
Introduction. Family is the fundamental structure of every society because, among other functions, this social institution provides individuals, from birth until adulthood, membership and sense of belonging, economic support, nurturance, education, and socialization (Canary & Canary, 2013).As a consequence, the strut of its social role consists of operating as a system in a manner that would ...
11.3: Sociological Perspectives on the Family
In most societies, the family is the major unit in which socialization happens. Parents, siblings, and, if the family is extended rather than nuclear, other relatives all help to socialize children from the time they are born. Figure 11.3. One of the most important functions of the family is the socialization of children.
15.2 Sociological Perspectives on the Family
Summarize understandings of the family as presented by functional, conflict, and social interactionist theories. Sociological views on today's families generally fall into the functional, conflict, and social interactionist approaches introduced earlier in this book. Let's review these views, which are summarized in Table 15.1 "Theory ...
150 Creative Ideas for Writing An Essay About My Family
A family essay dives into the concept of family from various angles - think social, cultural, historical, and personal vibes. You can explore how families have evolved over time, the roles each family member plays, and the different types of families out there - like the nuclear crew, extended fam, single-parent setups, or blended units.
Family Relationships and Well-Being
For better and for worse, family relationships play a central role in shaping an individual's well-being across the life course (Merz, Consedine, Schulze, & Schuengel, 2009).An aging population and concomitant age-related disease underlies an emergent need to better understand factors that contribute to health and well-being among the increasing numbers of older adults in the United States.
Essay on The Role of Father in the Family for Students
250 Words Essay on The Role of Father in the Family The Significance of a Father's Role. The father, traditionally seen as the provider, plays a multifaceted role in the family dynamics. His responsibilities extend beyond financial support, contributing significantly to the cognitive, emotional, and social development of children. ...
My Role In The Family (Essay Sample)
Essay Sample on My Roles In the Family As a Daughter. Family is the most important and basic unit of society in which each member plays a vital role. Family members work together to raise enthusiastic, productive, law-abiding citizens. Foundation laid by families and communities helps build future generations that define a nation's fate.
Code of Ethics: English
The NASW Code of Ethics is a set of standards that guide the professional conduct of social workers. The 2021 update includes language that addresses the importance of professional self-care. Moreover, revisions to Cultural Competence standard provide more explicit guidance to social workers. All social workers should review the new text and ...
Attorney General James Announces Arrests of Alleged Crime Family
The individuals were charged in an 84-count indictment for their roles in an illegal sports gambling operation that handled more than $22.7 million in illegal bets and an illegal loansharking operation that brought in weekly loan payments on approximately $500,000 in usurious loans.
Obama family celebrates life of Marian Robinson, 86, who died Friday
Robinson, who kept a low profile in a residence with the brightest of spotlights, died on Friday. She was 86. Prep for the polls: See who is running for president and compare where they stand on ...
'The Traitors' Season 3 Cast Revealed: Exclusive
A group of celebrities have descended upon a Scottish castle where they will "murder" each other for money, which can only mean one thing: Season Three of "The Traitors" is on the way. The ...
The Important, Role, and Function of the Family in Society
Within the family, individuals learn essential life skills, such as problem-solving, communication, and interpersonal skills, that help them navigate their lives and relationships with others ...
What My Dog Taught Me About Mortality
She went down into the hole. Into this yawning vortex of doom. She dove into an alternate world: the secret infinite maze of the inside of our very old house. Now, Mango was a fat little golden ...
Who is Neilia Biden? Here's the role she played in the Biden family
A quick look at Neilia Biden and her role in the Biden family. Hunter Biden's felony gun trial has brought together several members of the Biden family, with first lady Jill Biden seated each ...
The role of the Rho family small GTPases in regulation of normal and
The review considers normal and pathological processes in human cells, which are regulated by the Rho family small GTPases, and their use in the treatment of various diseases is considered. Small GTPases are small (about 21 kDa) proteins that regulate many biological processes, such as vesicle transport, cell division cycle, cell migration, invasion, adhesion, proliferation and DNA repair ...

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Family Values and Their Importance

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The Importance of Family (10 Powerful Reasons)

What is family?

What is the importance of family?

Provide emotional support

Foster belongingness and identity

Promote education

Foster cognitive development and academic performance

Facilitate socialization

Maintain physical health

Guide moral development

Preserve cultural and traditional transmission

Ensure economic support and security

Uphold continuity and legacy

Why do we need a family?

Is family the most important thing?

What is the importance of family in society?

What is the role of family in child development?

Why is family important to you?

How does family influence your life?

Why should we help our family?

How do families develop strong foundations?

Do I need a family to be happy?

Is it OK not to have a family?

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