Families and Households

A family is a network of individuals tied to each other by blood, marriage, adoption or fostering and comes in many forms and sizes. There is no singular or universal type of family. Some common family types or structures include a single parent and children, a ‘nuclear’ family comprising two parents and children, or extended families consisting of one or two parents, children and other relatives. However, a range of different family types exist within this spectrum. A household is a commonly used term or unit of analysis to describe a group of people’s living arrangements and relationships to each other. What comprises a household can vary across cultures, social contexts and even seasons. While family and households are often conflated in the literature, in reality they are different. Families refer to specific kinship structures, whereas not all members of a household are necessarily kin but instead are tied to each other through co-residence and roles and responsibilities around the production and consumption of food and labour. One key reason we see so much variation in families and households is because people usually tend to live with other people - although, of course, living alone is also a type of household. Thus, family and household size, structure and composition can vary for multiple reasons across cultures including the number of children a parent/couple have, child and adult survival rates, the types of marriage which form the family and the post-marital residence systems which influence the generational configuration of households. This chapter underlines how flexible and context-specific human family systems are, and how the vast diversity present in humans leads to endless types of families and households.