by Karla Perry

Created on: October 23, 2009

The family unit is continually expanding and contracting according to cultural norms creating newly defined parameters every few years. Notwithstanding, the family unit has a heritage as ancient as human life itself.

Most cultures define a family as a multi-generational group often sharing living quarters and maintaining a high value of the elder family members. However, in America, people are much more individualistic and often divide family to being immediate versus extended family. The immediate family consists of some combination of parents and their biological or step-children. The extended family comprises the grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, etc.

The composition of an immediate family in America takes a variety of forms, all very much culturally accepted in modern society. It is exceedingly becoming obscure to find a family made up of a husband and wife with their children born of the marriage. More common are single parent homes with an estranged parent, usually the father, and children. Sometimes there is the blended family where a couple blends their children from past marriages or relationships together to form a family. The Brady Bunch in the 70's popularized the idea of a blended family, although in that fictional situation the husband and wife were both widowed.

Increasingly common is the family unit where the unmarried man and woman cohabitate as if married with their biological children. Or sometimes a woman with children from a previous relationship cohabitates with a boyfriend who is not the biological father of the children.

Moreover, America is having more and more grandparents raise their grandchildren as the parents were too young or otherwise incompetent to raise their children. This creates an entirely different family make up especially depending upon the age of the grandparents.

Children are growing up in America in all kinds of family situations, some better than others. Regardless of what is popular or culturally normal in America, the ideal situation for children and the stability of the nation is a return to traditional family values and structure. Children need the stability of two loving parents without divorce or extramarital relationships scarring their childhood. Sometimes, given extreme, circumstances, this simply isn't possible and grace ought to be given to such situations.

However, despite relational difficulties traditional marriage and the traditional family ought to be our highest ideal so that this nation can become stabilized for its security is not found in its government, but in its people. A return to the nuclear family would be a wonderful accomplishment for this great nation as we must live, not for ourselves, but for the future generations.

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