The Nature of a Family Life

What is a family? How do we know who is included in the family and who is not? At first glance these questions seem easy: everybody has an idea of what a family is. Yet when we begin to survey family life across a broad spectrum of the world’s cultures, we find many different types of arrangements. In some societies, a man may have several co-wives and many children, all of whom consider themselves members of a single family. In other societies, a couple lives with the wife’s relatives. The couple and the children are seen, not as a distinct family, but as a part of this large group.

Yet one needn’t travel to other cultures to find variations in family arrangements. Our own society includes large numbers of single-parent families, unmarried couples living together, married couples with no children, second marriages and stepfamilies, and multigenerational families. According to Russian legislation a family is defined as “two or more persons living together and related by blood, marriage or adoption”.

What structure does a typical modern Russian family have? The nuclear family consisting of husband, wife, and children has prevailed. The man is primary breadwinner. When the husband has the breadwinner role, the wife can devote herself to full-time care of the house and children. This choice also gives the husband job mobility. For their part Russian children are not usually required to share in many of their mother’s house-making duties. Instead, they are considered “dependents” until they are young adults.

In structuring their relationships, people can assign priority to either to marital ties or to blood ties. When priority is given to marital ties, the arrangement is called a nuclear family. The core family consists of the spouses and their offspring; blood relatives are functionally marginal and peripheral. This arrangement is the preferred form of family life in Russia. Normally, during the course of one’s life a person is a member of two different, overlapping nuclear families. The first consists of oneself and one’s father, mother, and siblings. The second consists of oneself and one’s spouses and children.

When the priority is given to the blood ties (those between parents and children or between brothers and sisters), the arrangement is termed an extended family. The core family in this large network consists of blood relatives, with spouses being functionally more marginal and peripheral. Family life revolves about the brother-sister relationship. Extended families have continuity across generations in a way the nuclear family does not.

Conventional wisdom holds that extended families are characteristic of traditional, agricultural societies, and nuclear families are characteristic of modern, industrial societies. In reality, the distinction is not so clear-cut.

As time passes by sons and daughters become fathers and mothers and later, when their aging parents need assistance, they become sons and daughters again, frequently taking on final responsibilities. During the transitional period prior to marriage, young adults often live in their parental households. And after they marry, it is not uncommon for young adults to continue to live for a time with their spouses in the family home. Thus life in an industrial community offers many opportunities for family interdependence and for overlap among generations within the family.

Divorce is also common. Every third marriage ends in divorce in Russia. In recent decades, the Russian family has changed in a number of ways. Many people are marrying later, having children later, or having fewer children or none at all.

Exercise 4.Decide whether the following statements are true or false.

1. A family is defined as “two or more persons living together”. 2. In a typical Russian family a man is usually a breadwinner. 3. In Russia the priority is often given to the blood ties. 4. Children are considered part of both their mother’s and father’s kin groups. 5. Russian families seldom end in divorce.

Exercise 5.Answer the following questions.

1. What do you think a family is? 2. What does a “breadwinner” mean? 3. What does a core family with marital ties consist of? 4. What does a core family with blood ties consist of? 5. Is it possible for a man in our country to have several co-wives? 6. How long are children considered to be dependent? 7. Why do parents with aging become sons and daughters again? 8. Where do young adults usually live? 9. What are extended families and nuclear families characteristic of? 10. In what way has a typical family changed recently?

Exercise 6.Read and translate the following text. Use the dictionary when necessary.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 1482