Some food for thought about the function of families.

A functional family.

How do we define a dysfunctional family? It usually gets associated with parents, who in a very visible way, don’t love each other. Typically children don’t cause a breakdown in the proverbial happy family, but its the often poisonous home atmosphere of parents who in some way seem hostile to one another that make it “dysfunctional.” 

I would argue it has almost entirely to do with the perception of parents loving each other, and when this perception is broken a lot of things spiral downward. Parents, after all, lead families.

Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” Dysfunctional alcoholics.

More to the point, it all has to do with love. A loving family is functional, and an unloving one is dysfunctinal. It seems like our modern idea of a functional family is one that produces love for everyone, and a family that falls short of this gets the cold, depressing label of a “dysfunctional family.” The dysfunctional family is almost a tragedy.

The real question is: Is the demand that a family consistently produce a loving atmosphere, perhaps for decades, realistic at all?

Anthropologists label the families of tribal societies (families for the vast majority of homo sapien’s time on Earth) as “corporate descent groups.” As the name implies, the families acted as a a type of “corporation” or a self-protecting group where members received access to certain resources. Families have a clear function here; they ensure survival.

Arranged marriages in India echo this “corporate” nature of families. Romantic love is not the factor in marriage; it is resources and strategic alliances. Again, family here provides the resources for survival.

Our modern Western families, however, are mostly based on romantic love and few people marry for any strategic advantage. Where marriage is not based on romantic love, no one harbors the expectation of a “loving” atmosphere at home, but our love and romance oriented society redefines what it means to have a functional family. Is this love-function sustainable? 

Given the near 50% divorce rate in America, and given the well known psychology studies about the near inevitable “burning out” of passion as a marriage progresses, it is realistic to think that our families won’t always produce love. The sad part is that children suffer perhaps an unnecessary sense of flawed family life because our culture– as the epitomized family on the cover of any board displays — sets warm love as the norm for a functional family.