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Photograph of a nuclear family in Maryland, Sgt. Samuel Smith, Mollie Smith, and their daughters Mary and Maggie, c. 1863–1865 A nuclear family (also known as an elementary family, atomic family, or conjugal family) is a term for a family group consisting of parents and their children (one or more), typically living in one home residence.
The nuclear family consists of a mother, father, and the children. The two-parent nuclear family has become less prevalent, and pre-American and European family forms have become more common. [2] Beginning in the 1970s in the United States, the structure of the "traditional" nuclear American family began to change.
The system emphasizes the nuclear family. Members of the nuclear family use highly descriptive kinship terms, identifying directly only the husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister. All other relatives are grouped together into categories. Members of the nuclear family may be lineal or collateral.
Family values, sometimes referred to as familial values, are traditional or cultural values that pertain to the family's structure, function, roles, beliefs, attitudes, and ideals. Additionally, the concept of family values may be understood as a reflection of the degree to which familial relationships are valued within an individual's life.
Many sociologists used to believe that the nuclear family was the product of industrialization, but evidence highlighted by historian Peter Laslett suggests that the causality is reversed and that industrialization was so effective in North-western Europe specifically because the pre-existence of the nuclear family fostered its development. [34]
Historically, for generations South Asia had a prevailing tradition of the joint family system or undivided family. The joint family system is an extended family arrangement prevalent throughout the Indian subcontinent, particularly in India, consisting of many generations living in the same home, all bound by the common relationship. [14]
As the basic unit for raising children, Anthropologists most generally classify family organization as matrifocal (a mother and her children); conjugal (a husband, his wife, and children; also called nuclear family); avuncular (a brother, his sister, and her children); or extended family in which parents and children co-reside with other ...
Before nuclear family systems became the order of the day, there used to be joint family system, consisting of all the family members of two or even three generations, living together. Then, as also now, several families like to identify a particular person as the keeper of the family traditions and assign a particular name to the keeper.