nuclear familyalso called elementary familyin sociology and anthropology, a group of persons people who are united by ties of marriage partnership and parenthood or adoption and consisting of a man, a woman, pair of adults and their socially recognized children. This unit Typically, but not always, the adults in a nuclear family are married. Although such couples are most often a man and a woman, the definition of the nuclear family has expanded with the advent of same-sex marriage. Children in a nuclear family may be the couple’s biological or adopted offspring.

Thus defined, the nuclear family was once widely held to be the most basic and universal form of social organization. Anthropological research, however, has illuminated so much variability of this form that it is safer to assume that what is universal is a


“nuclear family


complex” in which the roles of husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister are embodied by people whose biological relationships do not necessarily conform to the Western definitions of these terms. In matrilineal societies, for example, a child may


be the responsibility not of his biological genitor

at all

but of his mother’s brother,

whom he calls father

who fulfills the roles typical of Western fatherhood.

Closely related in form to the predominant nuclear-family unit are the conjugal family and the consanguineal family. As its name implies, the conjugal family is knit together primarily by the marriage tie and consists of mother, father, their children, and some close relatives. The consanguineal family, on the other hand, typically groups itself around a unilineal descent group known as a lineage, a form that reckons kinship through either the father’s or lineage whose members are said to be blood relatives (see descent; lineage) the mother’s line but not both. Whether a culture is patrilineal or matrilineal, a consanguineal family comprises lineage relatives and consists of parents, their children, and their children’s children. Rules regarding lineage exogamy, and the children’s spouses, who may belong consanguineally to another familyor out-marriage, are common in these groups; within a given community, marriages thus create cross-cutting social and political ties between lineages.

The stability of the conjugal family depends on the quality of the marriage of the husband and wife, and this a relationship that is more emphasized in the kinds of industrialized, highly mobile societies in which people frequently must leave the residences of their blood relatives. In nonliterate societies, the perpetuation of the line has priority, and the that frequently demand that people reside away from their kin groups. The consanguineal family derives its stability from its corporate nature and its permanence, as its relationships emphasize the perpetuation of the line.