Teresa wanted a sound and happy family more than anything else she could imagine. Her parents had divorced when Teresa was just reaching her teen years. Her mom had thereafter struggled to care for Teresa and her younger brother. Those times had been hard on Teresa but, she could painfully see, harder on her little brother. Teresa had tried to shelter and help him but didn’t feel as if she’d been able. Now, Teresa so badly wanted her own family with her own two little kids to do better than she, her mom, and her little brother had done, that she sometimes felt as if she dove into family life just to do it over and better. Yet in the chaos of young family life, Teresa began to realize that she didn’t have a clear idea what a family even was. She could tell that she needed to give it some thought if she was indeed going to do any better.
Definition
Some things can improve with a little definition. You may never have asked yourself just what a family is. It’s like asking a fish to describe water. When you’re living in it, it’s just there, like air or water. A family, though, is definitely something that can improve with a little definition. A clearer picture of what a family is can help you see its purpose and thus its goals. A family has both shape and direction to it, referring to both its members and its purpose. Sometimes, it’s the members who are prominent, like when you’re thinking of marrying or having your first child or another child. Yet other times, it’s your family’s purpose and direction that are prominent. You see and experience your family not so much as a collection of members but instead as a movement toward something having a powerful effect on you, whether in the moment a bastion and balm or a wilderness struggle. Explore a family’s definition first, before other help.
Members
Ask someone what a family is, and they’ll probably first name members, particularly a mom, dad, and children. Fair enough. Sociologically, a family is a procreative unit, even if it is other things, too. And although technology has given us unnatural ways to procreate, the natural way implies a mother, father, and children. For the moment, we’re not exploring family boundaries. Definitions instead discern norms. Meaning accrues around a core. Boundaries sharpen definitions by pointing to the core. Whether your family procreates or not, it can help to think of a family as a social unit facilitating the tenderness and vulnerability that makes fruitful procreation possible. As God’s image, we are deeply and essentially creative. We are makers of worlds, not alone but with others. And the family is the living entity through which we make worlds. Whether your family currently has one, two, three, or more members, families have moms, dads, and children, considering that every one of us is either a potential mom or dad, and every one of us is also definitely a child.
Procreation
So already, simply from examining a family’s members, we see one of a family’s purposes, which is procreation. To procreate is, of course, to bring forth offspring, to bring new life. Procreation, especially human procreation, is stunningly wondrous. If it were not so natural, we would best call it an absolute miracle. Yet it’s also stunningly vulnerable, from conception through pregnancy and delivery, right up through the child’s teen years. Keep those two attributes, wonder and vulnerability, at the core of your definition of a family. They’ll serve you well. But don’t get worried if you’re not currently procreating, capable of procreating, or in a position to procreate. A lot of us aren’t. Procreative capability can be a relatively slim slice of life. Indeed, social norms and individual preferences generally try to keep procreation limited. And families are procreative in other ways, bringing forth many other kinds of offspring, if you’ll allow some liberty in use of the terms. The general lesson to draw from procreation is that the family fosters the wonder and vulnerability of new life. It’s your choice whether to construe that conclusion biologically, socially, philosophically, or spiritually. But the wonder and vulnerability of new life is all good, embedded at the core of our universe.
Purposes
To help your family, know and promote your family’s purpose. While procreation is a family’s core sociological function, without which neither humans nor human society would exist, families have other purposes. Those purposes gather around that thread of human persistence. Purposes define things. Meaning adheres through purpose. You won’t know what your family means to you and its other members unless you have a sense of its purpose. Not knowing their family’s purpose, and not committing to pursue it, are generally why family leaders fail. You can’t lead unless you know the destination. Without knowing the destination, your leadership has no direction, and leadership without direction doesn’t lead. It instead confuses, distracts, and dissipates. Look at struggling families, and you’ll see some challenged by external or internal causes, things that you can pinpoint and on which you can go to work. But you’ll also see some families that struggle without apparent cause. Those are the families that lack purpose. Those are the families whose leaders don’t know what a family is because they haven’t grasped and committed to its purpose. Watch throughout this guide for the many ways that families express their purpose.
Care
If procreation is a family’s core purpose, care for the procreated must be a corollary purpose. Your family exists to care for its members, especially those members who cannot care adequately for themselves. Families house, feed, train, educate, and nurture the young. Yet they also house, feed, and meet the several other needs of the elderly, disabled, and diseased. Commercial child daycare and institutional adult and elder care are the corporate examples of the care that families provide their members who depend on others to meet their needs. Families organize their whole household around dependent members when their needs are critical, such as just after a newborn’s birth, when an adult member is recovering from a surgery, or when an elderly member slips into dementia at the end of life. Families, though, care for all their members, not just the dependent ones. Fully capable mom and dad get shelter, food, clothing, attention, and encouragement, too. Indeed, the care that mom and dad, as the providers and homemakers, show one another forms the foundation for the family’s care for all its members. Your family is a caring entity, and you help your family by caring for each of its members, whatever their needs.
Sacrifice
Sacrifice also defines families, just as sacrifice defines love and care, and grounds and informs the universe. Sacrifice can carry sharply negative connotations for some people, especially in a culture that glorifies self and promotes self-realization as its highest ideal. Yet sacrifice still fuels families, in large and small ways. Families shine when they find the right balance of sacrifices among all their members. To sacrifice is simply to give up something of personal value or preference now for a greater whole and future, wrought in return from the ideal. To sacrifice isn’t to waste but to sow. It isn’t to destroy but to till, harrow, fertilize, seed, and water, all hard sacrifices to bring in the crop. Every family member sacrifices something, indeed many things. The sacrifices differ in nature, timing, and degree. Yet every family member grows through sacrifice. The child’s toil in cleaning up the room builds discipline, confidence, and character, while the many toils of the parents are their privilege, crown, and honor. Through sacrifice, each expresses love, while creating things of value and beauty. The sacrifice of each, in proper timing and measure, creates the conditions for security, comfort, recreation, celebration, pleasure, and joy. Families give their members a foundation of love and care through fitting sacrifice. Lead the way in showing your family members the power and purpose of sacrifice.
Balance
The balance of sacrifices among family members is key to a family’s healthy function, indeed key to carrying out its purpose. Families are not transactional. One family member doesn’t care for another purely in reciprocity, expecting to get equivalent care back. Some family members, particularly dependents, cannot reciprocate in anything approaching equal measure. An infant is pretty much all take, although an infant can give back a peculiar form of parental joy. Balance doesn’t mean equality. It instead refers to fitness. A family that requires one member to give up more than is fitting to the member’s capacity, station, circumstances, and role is out of balance. The family that sacrifices the well-being of one member for the ease or preferences of other members is not only out of balance but isn’t functioning as a family. That resonant balance or rhythm of care is what distinguishes a family. Institutional daycare and eldercare providers pay their workers in an obviously and necessarily transactional manner. Families don’t pay their members. Families don’t rely on reciprocity and transaction but instead on balanced, proportional, beautiful, and beneficial sacrifice. Help your family maintain its beautiful and bounteous balance of sacrifices.
Love
Love is indeed what makes the family go round. Family love doesn’t focus on sentimental, brotherly, or erotic love but instead on sacrificial love. Sacrificial love is the kind that shows others how deeply you care for others by giving something up for them. Families are, indeed, a constant flow of sacrificial care and concern. When a close workforce, sports team, school class, or other body of unrelated individuals declares that they are like a family, they describe that rich flow of sacrificial care characteristic of a family, where each member thinks more of others while less fully and constantly thinking only of oneself. Within our family, we are not necessarily less selfish in our orientation. We don’t flip a love switch on and off when we enter and leave our home. But by living so closely and constantly with our family members, their interests become our interests, and we serve their interests as willingly as we serve our own. Love’s nature is to care for others as we care for ourselves. And that is the essential nature of a family. The literal meaning of the Latin familia from which the word family comes means household. A household constantly cares for each of its members, its love holding the house together.
Relationship
One other dimension, implied along with procreativity, distinguishes a family from any other close-knit and caring community group. Family members generally relate to one another by blood, marriage, or adoption. Again, we are focusing on the central definition of a family, not on its boundary issues. Unrelated individuals can certainly be significant contributors to a household, so significant that the family claims them as one of their own. But the claim remains figurative, marked by the contributor’s constancy and closeness, not the truer mark of blood, marriage, or adoption. Not so sure? Note, then, that families still count a non-contributing, uncaring, inconstant, and uncared-for blood relative as one of their own, even if they would rather that the member leave the household for distant parts. Blood is thicker than water, as the saying goes. We can say all we want about families being purposefully loving and caring, but many families are not so. And they’re still families because of blood and marriage relationships. Procreativity, not love, is the core. A child is part of the parents’ family, whether the parents like it or not. The same goes for the parents in the eyes of the child. Family thus has both a material dimension, rooted in the biology of blood union, and a spiritual dimension, rooted in the greater reality of love. Love your family, while caring for them whether they love you back or not.
Reflection
Does your family reflect the tenderness, vulnerability, and vitality of procreative potential? Or more to the point, do you see your family as essentially procreative in its meaning and purpose, whether or not children are present or in the offing? Does your family care adequately for its members, including especially its dependent members? Does your family care richly for all its members? Discern one small obvious courtesy that you could regularly include in your abundant other care for each of your family members, to highlight that you’re thinking of them. Then try doing that courtesy for each family member for one week, to see how it impacts both them and you in your care and concern for one another. Is your family out of balance in the sacrifices made by each member? Is your family, in other words, sacrificing one member for the ease or preferences of other members? If so, how could you, not other family members but you, begin to correct that imbalance?
Key Points
Sociologically, a family is society’s fundamental procreative unit.
Families hold the potential to include a mother, father, and children.
Procreation is a family’s organizing role, not a constant condition.
Families have several purposes beyond but related to procreation.
Family purposes include caring for members, especially dependents.
Families care for members through measured and balanced sacrifices.
The balance of sacrifices among family members expresses love.
Family members care for one another’s interests as their own, in love.
Family members traditionally relate by blood, adoption, or marriage.