Family
Related: marriage - father - mother - children
"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." --Anna Karenina (1877) - Leo Tolstoy
Interiors (1978) - Woody Allen [Amazon.com]
An entirely serious, rather too self-consciously Bergmanesque drama about a divorcing elderly couple and their grown daughters, it is slow, meditative, and constructed with a brilliant, painterly eye. --Richard Farr, Amazon.com
Family values
Family values is a term referring to a set of social norms for defining a family, its acceptable structure, and the proper roles of its members. Most often, the term connotes a conservative ideology that supports sexual morality and gender roles, and that opposes homosexual relationships, same-sex marriage, and abortion. The term may also refer to the promotion of censorship involving many forms of nudity, profanity, sexuality, and violence in the media which might be viewed by children.
While the term family values is used most often by the Christian right, there has been a recent effort to appropriate (or reappropriate) the word by commentators on the political left, who favor what they believe is a more inclusive historical definition of family values, which includes values in support of the family as a household unit of any kind. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_values [May 2005]
Nuclear family
A nuclear family is a household consisting of two married, heterosexual parents and their legal children (siblings), as distinct from the extended family. Whilst the family is a near-universal cultural phenomenon, nuclear families do not form the family unit in every society. Nuclear families are typical in societies where people must be relatively mobile -- such as hunter-gatherers and industrial societies. Although, as time progresses, the ideal family image is slowly shifting from the aforementioned to something like that of an amiably divorced couple with joint custody of their children. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family [May 2005]