The subject of family is an interesting topic, as it is familiar to nearly everyone on the planet. Whether or not we recognize issues of family matters from other parts of the globe, we share a basic understanding of what family is, and it's effects on individuals.  That being said, there is by no means a common family, that is, a standard family structure that people across regions countries all share.  It is even more interesting, then, that society tends to have an expectation as to what a family should look like.

            In America, we expect a family to consist of a mother and a father and one or more children.  We probably all realize that this is just a snapshot, in no way indicative of how all families look and function (for one thing, a the mother and father are likely part of their own individual families, which then becomes a combined family), but this is still the image that the American culture recognizes as a family.  This image relies on two parts: the children, and the parents (specifically a mother and a father).  Without both of these parts, the American culture of a family looks incomplete or wrong from a technical perspective.  However, we can see that this perspective is practically irrelevant for many reasons, the first being that unless the mother and father were created in a vacuum, the family in question is likely connected to another family in some way.  There may be some circumstances that generate an isolated nuclear family, but considering these only serves to proof that a family is much more complex than the cultural image would suggest.

            This leads to the question, why is the portrait of the family the way it is?  Clearly the image is a social construction, validated by countless generations of families, but by breaking down this construct, we see that the institution of family is strongly connected to other social norms of culture.  We can first look at parenting and gender roles.  In class we talked about motherhood and fatherhood, and in most discussions, we were inclined to link both to the separate female and male genders.  This makes sense, since specific definitions traditionally assign the position of mother and father to female and male respectively, but I believe this has interesting and largely unintended consequences.  For one thing, if we recognize the importance that both a mother and a father figure have for a child's development, we then subscribe to the idea that a child should have a female and a male as parents, which is certainly not true.  Additionally, by separating the roles of a mother and a father into gender niches, we perpetuate ideas about what is appropriate for a woman and a man to do as parents.  In the case of family, I believe that assigning particular and separate roles to either gender in the position of a parent may be especially dangerous, as this is the first institution where children learn how they will behave as they grow.

            Of course, different cultures all have different institutions of family, and the structures may vary, but it is important to recognize that all across the globe, even the most intimate cultural institutions are effected and influenced by other social constructions.