ALTIN AİLEMİZ

Family in the West

Family arrangements in the United States have become more diverse with no particular household arrangement representing half of the United States population.^[1]

The different types of families occur in a wide variety of settings, and their specific ********s and meanings depend largely on their relationship to other social institutions. Sociologists have a special interest in the ******** and status of these forms in stratified (especially capitalist) societies.

Non-scholars, especially in the United States and Europe, use the term "nuclear family" to refer to conjugal families. Sociologists distinguish between conjugal families (relatively independent of the kindreds of the parents and of other families in general) and nuclear families (which maintain relatively close ties with their kindreds).

Non-scholars, especially in the United States and Europe, also use the term "extended family". This term has two distinct meanings. First, it serves as a synonym of "consanguinal family". Second, in societies dominated by the conjugal family, it refers to kindred (an egocentric network of relatives that extends beyond the domestic group) who do not belong to the conjugal family.

These types refer to ideal or normative structures found in particular societies. Any society will exhibit some variation in the actual composition and conception of families. Much sociological, historical and anthropological research dedicates itself to the understanding of this variation, and of changes in the family form over time. Thus, some speak of the bourgeois family, a family structure arising out of 16th-century and 17th-century European households, in which the family centers on a marriage between a man and woman, with strictly-defined gender-roles. The man typically has responsibility for income and support, the woman for home and family matters.

Philosophers and psychiatrists like Deleuze, Guattari, Laing, Reich, explained that the patriarchal-family conceived in the West tradition (husband-wife-children) serves the purpose of perpetuating a propertarian and authoritarian society. The child grows according to the Oedipal model typical of capitalist societies and he becomes in turn owner of submissive children and protector of the woman. ^{[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]}

According to the analysis of Michel Foucault, in the west:

the [conjugal] family organization, precisely to the extent that it was insular and heteromorphous with respect to the other power mechanisms, was used to support the great "maneuvers" employed for the Malthusian control of the birthrate, for the populationist incitements, for the medicalization of sex and the psychiatrization of its nongenital forms.

—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality vol I, chap. IV, sect. Method, rule 3, p.99

In contemporary Europe and the United States, people in academic, political and civil sectors have called attention to single-father-headed households, and families headed by same-sex couples, although academics point out that these forms exist in other societies. Also the term blended family or stepfamily describes families with mixed parents: one or both parents remarried, bringing children of the former family into the new family.^[8]