What does family characteristics mean

Family characteristics are those that characterize the relationships, frequency of interactions, group consciousness and norms, division of labor, and ability to act among family members.

Family (family) is a social unit based on blood and emotional ties, characterized by ****same residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction of offspring, and today there is an increasing variety of types of families. In addition to the traditional family characterized by a heterosexual blood kinship system, diverse family forms such as adoptive families, foster families, single-parent families, and same-sex families have emerged.

Under the functionalist viewpoint, the family serves the functions of economic production, reproduction, socialization and child rearing; under the feminist viewpoint, the family is one of the areas of high gender inequality, which is reflected in such phenomena as the unequal division of labor in the family and the high incidence of domestic violence.

According to existing research, the trend of change in the contemporary Chinese family is that the size of the family has become smaller, the number of generations has become fewer, the main family patterns have tended to be stabilized, but the forms of the family have become more varied, and the family relationships are both intimate and distant; due to the long inheritance of the concept of the family and the constraints imposed by the structural factors, the form of the traditional family is still predominant, and the functions of giving birth to, nurturing, and teaching and educating the child are still mostly carried out by the family.

Functions of the Family

Functionalism views society as a series of social institutions that play specific roles to ensure continuity and consistency of values. TalcottParsons, a leading sociologist at Harvard University in the U.S., argued that the two main functions of the family are primary socialization and personality stabilization.Parsons saw one adult working outside the home and another caring for the home and children as the smallest unit formed to meet the needs of an industrial society.

The functionalist view sees the family as basically consisting of four functions, economic production, reproduction, socialization and child rearing. With the advent of industrialization and the separation of family and work, the function of economic production became less important, and socialization was the learning by children of the cultural norms of the society in which they lived, and since this learning process took place in early childhood, the family was the most important place for the development of the human personality.