Answer: A speaker's definition of a family (resource unknown):
Step-by-step explanation:
Actually, sociologists don't agree very much about how to define family, but probably the vast majority of sociologists don't always bother to ask that question directly – they tend to sidestep it. I think anthropologists are a bit more careful here because anthropologists almost always are focusing on comparing one culture to another, and too often sociologists – not all sociologists but many sociologists – work within their own countries and tend to take for granted the definition of family that they presume is most widespread there. There are sociologists who challenge the definitions, and there certainly are some interesting conversations about what counts as a family. What's really interesting is that the public does tend to agree more on what counts as a family than sociologists probably do or that most politicians do. Most people today when they are polled will tell you that a family are people who love and take care of each other, which is actually a worldly revolutionary definition of family, because historically family has always been defined much more by issues of social obligation and reproduction and economic interdependency and religious constraints and things like that. So, our families have changed dramatically and I'm not sure that sociologists have always been able to keep up as well as maybe even people who are living their lives are able to.
Classroom eText definition of a family (Chapter 4: Socialization and the Life Course (page 85)
For most people, the family is the first source of socialization. Through families, children are introduced to the expectations of society. Children learn to see themselves through their parents’ eyes. How parents define and treat a child is crucial to the development of the child’s sense of self.
What children learn in families is certainly not uniform. Even though families pass on the expectations of a given culture, families within that culture may be highly diverse, as we will see in Chapter 13. Some families may emphasize educational achievement over physical activity; some may be more permissive, whereas others emphasize strict obedience and discipline. Within families, children may experience different expectations based on gender or birth order (being born first, second, or third). Living in a family experiencing the strain of social problems such as alcoholism, unemployment, domestic violence, or teen pregnancy also affects how children are socialized. The specific effects of different family structures and processes are the basis for ongoing and extensive sociological research.
Sociologists have also found that there are significant class differences in how children are socialized in families. By observing families in different social classes over an extended period of time, sociologist Annette Lareau found that children raised in upper- and middle-class families are given highly structured activities, such as music lessons, organized sports and clubs, language instruction, and other activities that both fill the family calendar and give children little free time. Cultivated childhood is the result as children in the upper and middle classes learn to navigate institutions and interact with authority figures in ways that will benefit them later in life. Working-class children, on the other hand, have much more unstructured childhoods, allowing them to create their own activities, but leaving them without the same skills to successfully navigate social institutions, such as school and work, later in life. In this sense, childhood socialization in families reproduces a system of inequality that advantages those who already have resources and disadvantages everyone else (Lareau 2011).
As important as the family is in socializing the young, it is not the only socialization agent. As children grow up, they encounter other socializing influences, sometimes in ways that might contradict family expectations. Even parents who want to socialize their children in less gender-stereotyped ways might be frustrated by the influence of other socializing forces, which promote highly gender-typed toys and activities to boys and girls. These multiple influences on the socialization process create what sociologist Emily Kane has called “the gender trap,” meaning the expectations and structures that reproduce gender norms, even when parents try to resist them (Kane 2012).