The family can be described as a group that is structured around kinship ties and designed to control sexual behaviour and copy, to protect and socialise the children. Families are inclined to be made up of people who are related by blood and marriage. Traditionally in our society kinship plays an important part in passing on people's social identity and roles. The family is an institution that's surrounded by many traditions. The most important would be that of the nuclear family that is made up of two parents (one male and one female) and their children this is the natural family unit. Nonetheless in actuality there is a number of forms of family. In conventional society the extended family consists of wider kin relations and is regularly regarded as a cultural idea. The nuclear family is regularly seen as natural on the basis that it symbolizes what is thought of as traditional family values. In actuality, traditional family values symbolizes a specific opinion of the family based on a gender division of labour in which the male assumes to be the breadwinner in the family, working outside the home in the market economy and the female takes on the domestic role by staying home and caring for her partner and their children. .
The household feature of family life involves living together on a daily basis and refers to the basic method of living from day to day with others and involves behaviour such as eating, sleeping, companionship and experiencing emotional ties with those we feel close to.
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There are several different sociological explanations from different perspectives: Functionalism, Marxism, Interactionism and Feminism.
2. Functionalism.
The best part of the work carried out in the Functionalist perspective comes from Talcott Parsons who studied the family in the 1960's and made many links between the nature of the family and the structure of the economy. 1. functionalist look at what contributions the family make to the maintenance of the society .