Basic Family Definition
In
the most basic definition, a group of people who share a legal bond or a blood
bond is a family.
·
Legal Bonds: Families are legally bound through marriages, adoptions,
and guardianships, including the rights, duties, and obligations of those legal
contracts. Legal bonds can be changed, expanded, or dissolved to change the
composition of a family.
·
Blood Bonds: Individuals who are directly related through a common
ancestor are part of a family. This includes both close and distant relatives
such as siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and
cousins. Researching a family tree or genealogical records can reveal familial
blood bonds.
Despite
the apparent simplicity of this definition of family, the idea of family goes
far beyond just legal or blood relationships for many people.
Types of Families
There
are many different types of families, each of which is equally viable as a
supportive, caring unit.
·
Nuclear Family: Also called a conjugal family, this is the parents and
their children living in the same residence or sharing the closest bonds.
·
Extended Family: This type of family includes all relatives in close
proximity, such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. In a family
household that is extended, these relatives typically live together and all
share daily household duties. This type of family is also called a joint family
or multigenerational family depending on which members are included.
·
Complex Family: This type of extended family has three or more adults plus
their children. This type of family may be formed through divorce and
remarriage, or it may be formed through polygamy in societies where that
practice is acceptable. Some families may be complex even without formal legal
bonds between the adults.
·
Step Family: This is a family where the adults have divorced and
remarried, bringing children from other unions together to form a new nuclear
family. The children may come from several different parents or be on one or
both sides of the new union.
·
Traditional
Family: This is a family
unit defined in the classic sense as the father working outside the home to
support the members financially, while the mother remains at home and tends to
domestic duties and child-rearing. This strict definition of family is less and
less common in modern society.
·
Family members must live together in peace and harmony. To
achieve this, each member of the family must be aware of the duties and
responsibilities expected of him. He should be able to do his work and at the
same time be willing to do it. The distribution of household chores depends on
the age, sex, and health of every member.
· Role of a Father
·
The father is the breadwinner and chief provider of
the family. He makes the major family decisions together with mother and with
the help of other members. This is the traditional role of the father. Today,
this role has been changed as to include other responsibilities. Aside from
being a breadwinner, he also participates actively in managing the household
and helps caring for the children like bringing them to school, attending
school meetings, and shopping with them. He does gardening, do home repairs, and
even help mother marketing and preparation of family meals.
· Role of a Mother
·
The mother is the manager and treasurer of the
family. She supervises and coordinates the household tasks, takes care of the
children, prepares the family budget, plans and prepares the family meals.
Today, mothers also help earn a living to increase the family income.
· Girl Siblings roles
·
The girls help the mother in doing the household
chores. These include dusting and sweeping, preparing the meals, setting and
clearing the table, doing errands, and going to the market with mother. The
older girls attend to additional shores, like washing, ironing clothes and
taking care of younger brothers and sisters.
· Boy siblings roles
·
The
boys are usually assigned the heavy work in the house. This includes
scrubbing the floor, fetching water, planting and watering the plants, cleaning
the yard, and doing errands. Carpentry work is assigned to older boys who can
help father in making repairs in the house.
THE
IMPACT OF SOCIOECONOMIC, FAMILY BACKGROUND, FAMILY SIZE AND PARENTAL
ENCOURAGEMENT ON SOCIALIZATION OF A CHILD
There is a positive
and convincing relationship between family involvement and student success,
regardless of race/ethnicity, class, or parents’ level of education. To put it
another way, when families are involved in their children’s learning both at
home and at school, their children do better in school. The report also points
to specific types of involvement as being especially beneficial to children’s
academic success.
The more parent and community involvement activities focus on improving student learning, the more student learning improves.
The more parent and community involvement activities focus on improving student learning, the more student learning improves.
Speaking up for children protects and promotes their
success.
Children whose parents are advocates for them at school are more confident at school and take on and achieve more. The more families advocate for their children and support their children’s progress, the longer their children stay in school and the better their children do.
Children whose parents are advocates for them at school are more confident at school and take on and achieve more. The more families advocate for their children and support their children’s progress, the longer their children stay in school and the better their children do.
In every society for
which we have data, people’s educational achievement is positively correlated
with their parents’ education or with other indicators of their parents’
socioeconomic status. This pattern has fascinated many scholars, with early
seminal contributions in sociology by, for example, James Coleman (1966) in the
so-called Coleman report, and in economics by, for example, Gary Becker (1964).
The topic has also arisen frequently in policy debates, and most democratic
societies have adopted policies aimed at reducing the impact of family
background on educational attainment.
Education is seen as a means of
cultural transmission from one generation to another in any given society.
Society is defined as the whole range of social relationships of people living
in a certain geographic territory and having a sense of belonging to the same
group.
The relationships between the two
concepts are so strong that it is no not possible to separate them because what
happens to one affects the other.
Educational institutions are
micro-societies, which reflect the entire society. The education system in any
given society prepares the child for future life and instills in him those
skills that will enable him to live a useful life and contribute to the
development of the society.
Education as a social phenomenon
does not take place in a vacuum or isolation; it takes place in the society and
this normally begins from the family, which is one of the social institutions
responsible for the education of the child.
Many sociologists have observed
that there is a -strong relationship between education and society.
This observation is borne out of
the fact that it is not possible to separate or draw any line of demarcation
between the two concepts. This is because of the fact that what happens to the
educational system undoubtedly affects the society, and whatever occurs in the
society influences or shapes the educational system in all its ramification.
Durkbeim (1956) was one of the
first sociologists to appreciate the relationship between education and
society. He saw education as a social phenomenon through which a society
assumes its own continuity by socializing the young in its own image. The
components of the educational system that constitute perfectly defined facts
and which have the same reality as another social fact are inter-related. They
are inter-related internally, so that a given education system has unity and
consistency, and also externally so that the education system reflects a
society's moral and intellectual values.
Family is the first social
environment the child finds itself. According to Clifford
(1981) family remains the primary
environment of the child. The author emphasized that family environment has
more chances of increasing or decreasing the intellectual achievement of the
child.
Family background
Family background refers to all
the conditions and circumstances in the family which influence the child
physically, intellectually and emotionally Muola (2010).
Children coming from different
family backgrounds are affected different by such family conditions, that is
why some children have good family background while some have poor background.
FAMILY SIZE
Families are of various sizes.
Family size has to do with the total number of people in a single family which
may include the father, mother, children and even the extended members – all
living in one hamlet. According to Alio (1995) family size has implication for
education. The author emphasized that the size of the family determines to a
great extent the relative amount of physical attention and time which each
child gets from his parents. Large families are more common among the lower
class of the society. Children in large families may suffer poverty and lack
parental encouragement and stimulus which motivate their academic achievement
(Eamon, 2005).
Similarly, smaller family size has
been linked with high academic achievement (Majoribank 1996) Majoribank further
stressed that students with fewer siblings are likely to receive more parental
attention and have support that leads to better school performance.
Family (small or large size)
remains the primary environment of every child. The families begin the process
of education and provide physical and psychological needs of the child.
The economic implication of large
family size is better explained in Okunyi (2004) who observed from his study
that as families get larger, parents cannot give their children the same amount
of individual attention. They could not afford to provide them with so many of
the things which will help them to make the best possible use of their years at
school such as educational aids, and quiet comfortable rooms in which to do
home work undisturbed by the television, outings to places of interest, leisure
time pursuits, and opportunities for traveling.
GOD BLESS YOU.
HAPPY FAMILY
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