The family in historical and psychological aspects

Bilateral descent is a form of kinship system in which a person's belonging to a family stems from both paternal and maternal lines. Maternal and paternal relatives are equally important for emotional connections or the transfer of property or wealth. This is a family agreement in which descent and inheritance are transmitted equally through both parents. Families that use this system track the lineage of both parents at the same time and recognize several ancestors, but unlike cognitive descent, it is not used to form groups of origin.

The growth of productive forces that led to the victory of the patriarchate, expressed in the rise of all branches of economic activity, the development of exchange, and the emergence of commodity production, caused the rapid disintegration of the primitive communal system. Along with the separate property of the family community, private property began to strengthen, the bearer of which became a separate (small, individual) family consisting only of parents and their children. The heads of individual families sought to become the sovereign stewards of their share in the common property, to stand out, to become independent. The disintegration of the patriarchal family, which freed private property from the communal and tribal ties that hindered its development, was at this stage an inevitable consequence of the law of mandatory conformity of industrial relations with the nature of productive forces. Having separated from the patriarchal family, the individual family became the main economy, the unit of society, and at the same time the first form of the family, which was based not on natural, but on economic conditions – namely, the victory of private property over the original, naturally grown common property. In the new family, the monogamous order found its further and final expression: the husband became the sole and uncontrolled ruler. In this form, the family as a unit of society enters into a class society – the slave-owning system.

It is traditionally found in some groups in West Africa, India, Australia, Indonesia, Melanesia, Malaysia and Polynesia. Anthropologists believe that a tribal structure based on two-way ancestry helps tribal members live in extreme conditions because it allows individuals to rely on two groups of families (phratries) scattered over a large area.

The concept of family

A family is a group of people connected either by consanguinity (recognized by birth) or intimacy (marriage or other relationships). It forms the basis of the social order. The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its members and society as a whole. Ideally, families provide predictability, structure, and security as their members mature and learn to participate in community life. Historically, most human societies have used the family as the primary place of attachment, upbringing, and socialization. Anthropologists classify most family organizations as matrilocal (mother and her children), patrilocal (father and his children), conjugal (a married couple with children, also called a nuclear family), paternal (a man, his sister and her children) or extended (in addition to parents and children, may include grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins).

The field of genealogy aims to trace the family's lineage throughout history. The family is also an important economic unit studied within the family economy. The word "family" can be used figuratively to create more inclusive categories such as communities, statehood, and the "global village".

One of the main functions of the family is to provide the basis for the production and reproduction of people biologically and socially. This can happen through sharing material goods (such as food); providing and receiving care and education (foster kinship); legal rights and responsibilities; and moral and sentimental bonds. Thus, a person's attitude towards his family changes over time. From the point of view of children, the family is an "orientation family": the family serves for the social placement of children and plays an important role in their inclusion in culture and socialization. From the point of view of the parent(s), the family is a "procreation family", the purpose of which is to produce, introduce culture and socialize children. However, the production of children is not the only function of the family; in societies with a sexual division of labor, marriage and the resulting relationship between two people, this is necessary for the formation of an economically productive household.

However, the Western concept of family is ambiguous and is confused with household, which manifests itself in the various contexts in which the word is used. However, this confusion is not accidental, but indicates the family ideology of capitalist, Western countries that adopt social legislation insisting that members of the nuclear family should live together, and those who are not connected by such ties should not live together; despite ideological and legal pressure, a large percentage of families do not correspond to the ideal the type of nuclear family.

Although early Western cultural anthropologists and sociologists believed that family and kinship were universally associated with "blood" relationships (based on ideas shared in their own cultures), more recent research has shown that many societies instead understand family through the ideas of living together, eating together (for example, dairy kinship) and joint care and upbringing. Sociologists are particularly interested in the functions and status of family forms in stratified (especially capitalist) societies.

Under certain specific historical conditions (the slow development of production, the dominance of subsistence farming, the peculiarities of land relations), the patriarchal family often persists in class society. In this case, it is imbued with class principles, in some cases it establishes the unlimited despotic power of the head of the family, who has turned into a private owner of all property. An example of such a family is the ancient Roman surname with its all-powerful father of the family. Along with the patriarchal family, other remnants of primitive communal family relations often persist in class society, undergoing a corresponding transformation: polygamy, levirate, cousin marriage.

The small monogamous family was the dominant form of the family in the slave-owning, feudal, capitalist socio-economic formations. Throughout history, the dominant position in the family of a man, who is engaged, as a rule, in productive work, and the belittled, subordinate position of a woman, resulting from her role in the household, remained unchanged. In the 18th and 20th centuries, the feminist movement was gaining strength: the desire for equal rights between women and men in all spheres of society.

The class position of the parties was of great importance in the conclusion of marriages. In the Middle Ages, marriage for a feudal lord was a political transaction through which they sought to increase their power and strengthen or establish new political ties. It was not so much personal sympathies that were crucial in the conclusion of marriages, but rather political and economic interests. Even in the family of townspeople and artisans in the Middle Ages, when marrying, the interests of the family, limited by various guild rules, were mainly taken into account. In the era of capitalism, marriage, especially among the bourgeoisie, often became dependent on the economic situation of the future spouses. According to the works of scientists Max Weber, Alan MacFarlane, Stephen Ozment, Jack Goody and Peter Laslett, the huge transformation that led to modern marriage in "Western democracies" was fueled by a religious and cultural value system represented by elements of Judaism, early Christianity, Roman Catholic canon law and the Protestant Reformation. Historically, the most common type of family was one in which grandparents, parents and children lived together as a unit. For example, a household may include the owners of a farm, one (or more) of their adult children, the spouse of an adult child, and the adult child's own children (grandchildren of the owners). Extended family members are not included in this family group. Sometimes families of the "missed" generation are included, such as grandparents living with their grandchildren.

In the United States, this order declined after World War II, reaching a low in 1980, when about one in eight U.S. residents lived in a family of several generations. Since then, their number has increased, and as of 2016, one in five people in the United States lives in a multigenerational family. The growing popularity is partly due to demographic changes and economic shifts associated with the boomerang generation.

In Soviet times, it was argued that in the USSR marital relations based on the mutual inclination of those who marry are more common among working people, mainly proletarian strata of the population. And the family in a socialist society was the cell of the communist education of people. Relations between family members were based on the principles of mutual love, equality of men and women, unity of interests of the individual and society, labor cooperation and mutual assistance. The family in the Soviet state was surrounded by comprehensive attention. Taking care of the family and strengthening it has always been one of the most important tasks of the Soviet state. The State provided families with comprehensive financial assistance: the maintenance of a huge network of maternity and child protection institutions, benefits for mothers and other numerous types of assistance.

The term "nuclear family" is usually used to refer to married families. A "married" family includes only spouses and unmarried children who have not reached the age of majority. A single-parent family consists of a single parent with their children, where the parent is either widowed, divorced (and has not remarried), or has never been married. The parent may exercise sole custody of the children, or separated parents may have a co-parenting agreement in which the children divide their time (possibly equally) between two different single-parent families or between one single-parent family and one mixed family. Compared with sole custody, the physical, mental and social well-being of children can be improved by co-parenting and by having children have greater access to both parents. Most single-parent families are headed by the mother, but the number of single-parent families headed by the father is growing.