What exactly is a nuclear family?
A nuclear family is commonly defined as a family unit consisting of a mother and a father and their children. Controversy arises when stipulating if stepchildren are allowed to maintain the "nuclear" family or if only biological children are granted the name. Extended family is not considered nuclear regardless the definition you choose to believe. The ideal nuclear family originated from hunter/gatherer communities where the women and children were known to gather berries and herbs while the males contributes to hunting wild game. This "teamwork" within a family, bringing them together and reliable on one another, sprouted the first picture of the nuclear family.
Media Representation of Nuclear Families
The media favors displaying nuclear families for many reasons:
Stable Environment: Children raised in family with two parents are more likely to develop a better relationship with them and stronger emotional bonding.
Behavioral Stability: With both parents children get a better understanding of whats acceptable and unacceptable including behavioral expectations within both sexes.
Sense of Consistency: A nuclear family builds a foundation supporting the feeling of being a part of a wider whole. It brings children closer to their families.
Learning Skills: Your family helps teach life skills. A complete family provides more teaching potential. There are certain skills only the mother or the father can pass on.
Sharing Responsibility: Splitting up responsibilities throughout a family gives more time to each individual to spend nurturing off one another.
Physical/Emotional Support: Nuclear families tend to offer the most availability of physical and emotional support. This helps to regain the "whole".
Stable Environment: Children raised in family with two parents are more likely to develop a better relationship with them and stronger emotional bonding.
Behavioral Stability: With both parents children get a better understanding of whats acceptable and unacceptable including behavioral expectations within both sexes.
Sense of Consistency: A nuclear family builds a foundation supporting the feeling of being a part of a wider whole. It brings children closer to their families.
Learning Skills: Your family helps teach life skills. A complete family provides more teaching potential. There are certain skills only the mother or the father can pass on.
Sharing Responsibility: Splitting up responsibilities throughout a family gives more time to each individual to spend nurturing off one another.
Physical/Emotional Support: Nuclear families tend to offer the most availability of physical and emotional support. This helps to regain the "whole".
Are nuclear families flawless?
Although nuclear families offer many favorable advantages, life isn't perfect. There are cons to being in nuclear families as well. Current family theory postulates that the family unit in American society is a relatively isolated social unit (Sussman, 1959). The downfall to the ideal nuclear family is the sense on an outcast. Being too close and covered up in a nuclear family has an isolation factor on the younger children in society. This can cause tough times for kids when they don't have opportunities to interact publicly and make new friends. Marvin B. Sussman has much more on the negative effects of nuclear families. To visit more on his work click here.
Human and Animal Parenting
Ideal definition of parenting- Parenting involves protection and transfer of energy, information, and social relations to offspring (Geary and Flinn, 2001). Natural selection has fine-tuned the mechanisms that serve these ends for the specific demands of each species' ecology (Clutton-Brock, 1991). We share certain parenting techniques with some primates such as internal gestation, lactation, and attachment mechanisms involving neuropeptides such as oxytocin. Humans have intense parenting over long developmental periods unlike many other organisms who display brief parenting methods. To take a better look and learn more on these human and animal parenting mechanisms click here. Along with different mechanisms of parenting, natural and sexual selection play a major role. Sexual selection affects the mates choice on whom they will produce offspring with and the fight to pass on the best alleles. Natural selection is an attempt to pass on biological traits from parent to offspring.
Sources
- http://www.edu.pe.ca/southernkings/familynuclear.htm
- http://family.lovetoknow.com/definition-nuclear-family
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707622538
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707640713
- http://www1.appstate.edu/~kms/classes/psy2664/Documents/trivers.pdf
- http://philoscience.unibe.ch/documents/educational_materials/Trivers1973/Trivers1973.pdf
- http://primate.uchicago.edu/1999NBR.pdf
- http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/799367.pdf?acceptTC=true
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