Extended Families

The shape, purpose, and form of the family continues to be documented and debated, informing social policy, whether that be in policies that legitimize “new” family formations through, for example, the rights of lesbians and gay men to marry, adopt, and access new reproductive technologies, or in measures that supposedly alleviate the dual and gendered burden of combining employment and care. The family is variously represented as a state in crisis, a pessimistic portrayal that often points to the decline of somewhat mythical and romanticized familial ties, duties and obligations, as against the rise of individualism, single-hood, and childless, career-oriented women. In contrast, others view familial changes more optimistically, contesting notions of crisis, replacing such with a sense of positive agency, choice, and transformation as family formations disrupt traditional and endorsed nuclear family ideals. Many researchers have charted the changes to seemingly coherent and completed family [Page 268]units: members can enter and exit post-divorce and individuals may get a sense of who counts as family by combining and explaining across households, time and place, and their own life courses.

The term extended families highlights the changes and challenges to the often still promoted nuclear family ideal, as a difference between rhetoric and reality. Feminist theorists have long problematized the family as a site of gender inequality and exploitation, rather than as a site of social transformation. However, changes in family compositions and practices have resulted in some commentators viewing the extended, indeed ever-extending, family as a potential site of equality and change. Nonetheless, it is important to consider the historically and culturally specific nature of the family compared with supposedly new alterations; the nuclear family unit was created and consolidated via industrialization, as a site of securing labor. Actually, the idealized nuclear family has had a relatively short history.

Demographic figures collected by official bodies such as governments provide an administrative gauge on what families are and the ways that they are changing. Data often reflect, for example, the number of dependent children as well as other dependents, such as grandparents who increasingly and enduringly feature in everyday conceptualizations, even residences, of immediate family as a result of increased life expectancy. Parental separation and repartnering may mean that siblings do not live with their full, biological siblings and may instead co-reside with, for example, step-siblings and stepparents. Such technical facts and demographic possibilities, however, do not in themselves answer the social issues of family formation, the socially constructed nature of families beyond biological facts. The traditional view that blood is thicker than water, that family ties are obvious, inherent, genetic, and more binding than friendship ties is contested by many studies that highlight social bases underpinning relationships. Rosalind Edwards's account explores family transformations and reconstitutions through the eyes of children, revealing the ways in which understandings of the reality, worth, and validity of their family relations differed by degrees of certainty and uncertainty, as informed by social affirmation and denigration of specific family types. Specifically, children still referenced “proper” families—compared with seemingly depleted single-parent families, or excessive, disproportionate extended families, which were both classed and radicalized. An increasingly common phrase that points to more fluid family compositions is that of “families of choice,” used by Kath Weston and Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy, and Catherine Donovan.

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