The generation game

I spent last Sunday with my extended family. This consisted of my parents, brothers and sister, grandfather, one uncle, his wife and their three children. Several hours, one turkey, many potatoes and a lot of excitement over a toy zoo got me thinking about family.

These days it's become difficult to define family because it means so many different things to different people. These are the elements that make up most of the definitions that I read online: a social unit living together; a primary social group - parents and children; class/ collection of things sharing a common attribute; people descended from a common ancestor; kin; a taxonomic group containing one of more genera; syndicate; an association of people who share common beliefs or activities.

Strictly speaking, the primary functions of the family are reproduction, orientation and socialization and the formation of an economically productive household. I had considered family life to be a biological fact but this is not necessarily the case. Ethnography, history, law and social statistics suggest that the human family is an institution rather than a biological fact. Family life is a product of evolution, rather than being in existence since time immemorial. Some researchers, including Friedrich Engels contended that economical factors led to the formation of family groups.

The term family, when applied to humans is often used to mean people related by blood lines without specifying that these people actually live together or share their lives in any way. In other cases we describe a group as a family because they are close, rather than because they share the same gene pool.

But what does it mean to be a family? I think that that's one of the questions that each of us will provide different answers to, depending on our experiences of family life. In my case, I grew up in a very traditional family - mother, father, four kids, grandparents, aunts, uncles and multitudes of cousins. We're a motley rabble, but there are few rifts amongst the lot (which, come to think of it, is probably quite unusual) and we are generally very close.

To me family means the people who will love you even when they don't like you and who will support you through whatever life throws at you. The word 'unconditional' floats in the background of any of my thoughts about family. My family members don't necessarily know me inside and out, but they're the people with whom I can act deplorably and come back the next day with my tail between my legs, safe in the knowledge that (eventually) they will forgive me. My family have taught me most of what I know about how to survive in this world, both physically and emotionally.

I've always thought as a family as being a hierarchically structured school system, by which elder generations pass on their skills and knowledge to the younger members. On Sunday as I interacted with my young cousins I couldn't help but think that the channel is open at both ends and that although my uncle and aunt are passing on invaluable life skills, from good hygiene to how to care for another person, they are also learning from their children. Our education never truly ends and certainly, it would appear that rearing children and interacting with grandchildren is a living grind school in self knowledge and self discovery.