Nuclear Family Model Research Articles

The Impact of Tourism Development on Mosuo Marriage and Family

Tourism development has had a significant impact on the contemporary social transformation of the Mosuo people, especially on their marriage and family. Since the rise of tourism in the Lugu Lake area, the Mosuo society has gradually changed from a traditional agriculture-based livelihood to a tourism-based livelihood. The marital radius of the Mosuo people has also extended with the expansion of the scope of interactions. The previous custom of 'walking marriage' has gradually transitioned to the nuclear family model, and the traditional matriarchal extended family has also been slowly reduced to a smaller family size. The division of labor of the family members has been adjusted accordingly. Through the study of the Mosuo marriage and family changes under the tourism industry, not only can we find the path of change of the local traditional culture, but also can make some thoughts on the impact of the current tourism development in ethnic areas.

Familial genetic and environmental transmission of depression: A multi-informant twin family study.

The phenomenon of familial clustering in depression is well established, yet the mechanisms by which depression is transmitted within families remain poorly understood. In the current study, we investigate the familial genetic and environmental transmission of depression by incorporating data from both adolescent twins and their parents. A total of 987 twin families were recruited from the Beijing Twin Study. Depression assessments were conducted for both adolescents and their parents. Twins' depression was assessed through reports from both the twins themselves and their parents, while parental depression was assessed by parental self-report. We employed a nuclear twin family model to examine genetic and environmental influences on adolescent depression. Our results, based on both self- and parent-report, demonstrate significant additive and dominant genetic influences on depression. We also found mild yet significant sibling environmental influences, while familial environmental influences were absent. Notably, parent-reported depression showed higher heritability but lower unique environmental influences compared with self-reported depression. These results highlight the important role of genetic transmission and sibling environmental transmission in explaining depression. Our study delineates the underlying mechanism of familial transmission in depression and can inform early treatments to halt transmission during adolescence.

The cross-border legal recognition of parenthood under European law: current law and future prospects

ABSTRACT Historically, the issue of who were a child’s parents was in most instances settled as it was considered that the nuclear family was the (only) valid family formation and, as such, should be the (only) family configuration that should be protected and recognised under the law. Thus, traditionally there was an overall uniformity in the laws of different European States regarding parenthood-related issues. Although some European States continue to maintain a dividing line between nuclear and alternative families by offering legal recognition and protection only to the former, in other European States the law increasingly gives legal recognition and protection to parenthood in situations where the family does not fit within the nuclear family model. This diversity in the legal regulation of parenthood has given rise to the problem of non-recognition of parenthood: in some instances, parenthood validly established under the laws of one State is not recognised in some other States. The article considers the ways in which European law has responded to this problem to date and concludes that currently there is no comprehensive solution to it. Although recent years have seen a surge in efforts to find such a solution, the chances of this materialising appear grim.

Commitments beyond coupledom: Negotiating relational futures in Finnish small-scale communes

In this paper, I analyze the possibilities for organizing one's personal life around co-residing friendship and roommate relationships in the life course position of adulthood. The normative significance of coupledom and procreation as markers of adulthood has hardly diminished, although the nuclear family model has opened up in past decades in Euro-American countries. I argue that the close connection between coupledom and adult status sidelines communal living as a relational arrangement when persons age beyond the socially shared understanding of youth. Moreover, resisting this temporal order leads communal dwellers into a socially structured negotiation of their future trajectories, where personal autonomy in friendship and roommate relations poses an intra-relational obstacle to building a communal future. The paper is based on 31 interviews with residents of Finnish small-scale communes. Communal dwellers’ negotiations of future trajectories dealt with finding someone to build their life with, whether commitment could be expected in friendship and roommate relations, and whether long-term communal living is compatible with existing housing structures.

Parenting in the second generation. The changing family figurations of descendants of Pakistani, Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants in Norway

ABSTRACT This study explores how second-generation parents in Norway manoeuvre generational and institutional relationships and what consequences this may have for participation in ethnicity-based networks and majority society. The context is an advanced welfare state in which ideals of dual-earner, gender-equal and child-centred families are facilitated through provisions of care for the youngest children. We argue that second-generation families are moving towards a nuclear family model in which the dyadic bond between parents and children takes centre stage, strengthening dependency on institutions and networks in majority society and redefining dependencies on extended family and ethnicity-based networks. The transformed family and generational figuration become a means through which parents negotiate a position as established in Norwegian majority communities. The study contributes by highlighting parenting as a lens through which generational transformations and minority/majority relationships can be analytically bridged and by showing the relevance of Elias’ figurational sociology for understanding social integration processes.

Being water: protest zines and the politics of care in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest, Hong Kong protesters invented, adapted, and deployed a variety of decentralized grassroots tactics of resistance. While understudied, the proliferation of protest zines during the Anti-ELAB movement contributed to an affective community among movement supporters and protesters, allowing them to engage in self- and communal care as they resisted state violence. We argue that protest zines foregrounded a grassroots community of care that encourages political change in the following ways: expand the emotional habitus among protesters and movement supporters to accommodate debilitating bad feelings; promote self-care and embodied emotional reflection as a form of resistance against state violence; contribute to voluntary kinship among protesters beyond the state-sanctioned nuclear family model; and articulate nuclear familial relations as a site of political resistance. By examining how protest zines articulate voluntary kinship among movement supporters, we illustrate how the zines challenge dominant paternalistic institutions to reimagine a more open political future.

Enabling: On the dispersion of the nuclear family model. New parameters of the boundary of living

Enabling: On the dispersion of the nuclear family model. New parameters of the boundary of living

International Constitution-making as a Technique of Gender Ordering: Considering the Role of the Family in Global Economic Relations

In “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-war Inheritance,” Anna Saunders highlights that the study and practice of constitutionalism exhibit a reluctance to consider the relationship between national constitutions and international economic relations. She argues that the prevailing epistemic boundaries of constitutionalism—understood as a self-contained project, separate from projects of global economic ordering—have largely insulated it from critiques raised by scholars concerned with the material and distributive implications of reshaping the global legal order through the making and revising of constitutions. This essay takes up Saunders's call to de-insulate constitution-making as a technique of international law from such critique by pointing to the family as an institution that is central both to constitutional ordering and to economic ordering, and thus can help overcome the epistemic boundary between the two. To this end, the essay brings together various strands of critical thought that identify one particular family structure—the nuclear family—as an exploitative institution that has (re)produced structural inequality both within and between states. Described as the “original sin” of modern constitutionalism and as an essential “instrument of colonization,” the nuclear family model represents an apt entry point to reconceiving constitution-making as Saunders suggests—in a way “that both acknowledges the discipline's past collaboration with forms of dispossession and exploitation, and that actively reconsiders its future boundaries.”

Die Grenzen der Beziehungen

Discourses and practices of relationship (and dating) among unmarried and married couples changed fundamentally in East and West Germany after 1945. As the bourgeois nuclear family model eroded, heterogeneous relationship forms began to emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. But how revolutionary was this change? Analyzing cohabitation practices in East and West Germany, this article argues that the pluralization and liberalization of partner relationships had clear limits. These will be identified by reviewing the socio-economic conditions and the political and cultural norms that shaped the relationships of couples and singles. This article thus aims to shed new light on the history of relationships and shifts in intimate lives in Germany.

The role of parenting in the intergenerational transmission of executive functioning: A genetically informed approach.

Deficits in executive functioning both run in families and serve as a transdiagnostic risk factor for psychopathology. The present study employed twin modeling to examine parenting as an environmental pathway underlying the intergenerational transmission of executive functioning in an at-risk community sample of children and adolescents (N = 354 pairs, 167 monozygotic). Using structural equation modeling of multi-informant reports of parenting and a multi-method measure of child executive functioning, we found that better parent executive functioning related to less harsh, warmer parenting, which in turn related to better child executive functioning. Second, we assessed the etiology of executive functioning via the nuclear twin family model, finding large non-shared environmental effects (E = .69) and low-to-moderate heritability (A = .22). We did not find evidence of shared environmental effects or passive genotype-environment correlation. Third, a bivariate twin model revealed significant shared environmental overlap between both warm and harsh parenting and child executive functioning (which may indicate either passive genotype-environment correlation or environmental mediation), and non-shared environmental overlap between only harsh parenting and child executive functioning (indicating an effect of harsh parenting separable from genetic confounds). In summary, genetics contribute to the intergenerational transmission of executive functioning, with environmental mechanisms, including harsh parenting, also making unique contributions.

I Am a Child of Gods

I Am a Child of Gods

Building America: The Life of Benjamin Henry Latrobe

Benjamin Henry Latrobe was one of those early American figures whose talents, outsized personality, and rises and falls reveal much about the new United States. Jean H. Baker argues that he ought to be considered “a founder of the republic—not of political ideas but of the neoclassical buildings and substantial internal improvements that expressed those ideals” (p. 1). Latrobe's work as an architect and designer had an indelible effect on the nation. And because of Baker's painstaking reconstruction of his life, we now know much more about the character behind those visions. As the author demonstrates, understanding Latrobe requires unpacking the man's many contradictions. Raised in a Moravian community in Fulneck, northern England, and initially intended for the church, he ultimately became a deist. Whereas the Moravians in Fulneck had raised children communally rather than under the control of their birth parents, he embraced the nuclear family model as an...

Mining and Masculinity in Indonesia

Coal mining brings to the surface new masculinities and gender roles in Kalimantan, Indonesia. The rising employment of men in the mining industry creates new possibilities and constraints for men and women alike. For miners, work in the pit is a marker of a positively connoted masculinity connected not only to physical strength but more importantly to technical know-how, being educated and earning a high salary. Wives of miners are increasingly economically dependent on their husband and the nuclear family model is reinforced. However, wives retain their traditional control over family finances and extend their activities in agriculture, while miners’ long absences from the village open up opportunities for women to assume new roles in the public realm. Generally, spouses in Dayak mining families tend to flexibly negotiate newly emerging gender roles and duties, thereby challenging all too rigid gender norms linked to the nuclear family model promoted by the state.

Changes to traditional family structure as reflected in the Danish language

The aim of the article is to analyze the status of the notion of nuclear family in Danish, as well as examine the extent to which the alternative family forms have been able to break through into the mentality of Danish speakers. The first two parts of the study, based on the most linguistically entrenched expressions, revealed that nuclear family can still be regarded as the ideal case, although alternative family forms are also clearly reflected in language. The second part of the study, dealing with a corpus of 50 contemporary texts, demonstrated that the above mentioned ideal is currently being under revision, and that the proponents of the nuclear family model are rather in a disadvantageous position in the Danish discourse. What stood out in both parts of the study, was the non-discriminating and embracive character of the Danish language with regard to the new family forms.

The domestic workers’ strike: migrant women, social reproduction and contentious labour organising

In recent decades, there have been major changes in the organisation of social reproduction. As middle-class women have entered the workforce in large numbers, and state provision of childcare and other welfare services has been scaled back under neo-liberalism, there has been an unprecedented outsourcing of household labour to the market. The resulting commodification of social reproduction has not liberated women from the demands of housework but has largely shifted this work away from women in the Global North towards migrant women workers from poor and heavily indebted countries of the Global South. At the same time, there has also been a huge increase in internal migration within Global South countries, as newly wealthy middle classes in the cities are being serviced by poor rural women. Commodified domestic labour relies on the existence of gendered and racialised migrant workers. This article examines the domestic workers’ strike as an effective and urgent mode of political action given the massive and growing concentration of migrant women in domestic work. This requires a reassessment of earlier feminist strategies based on a nuclear family model and current advocacy strategies that, influenced by foundations, have rejected the strike tactic in favour of limited legal strategies. This article draws on my empirical research on domestic workers’ movements in the USA and India in order to highlight emerging strategies of labour movements.

Purchasing Intentions toward Fast Food: The Mediating Role of Consumer Attitudes toward Fast Food

We highlight the role of fast food awareness and the features affecting the intentions of individuals buying it. The fast food industry is developing rapidly, opening new doors for various stakeholders. The objective of the study is to identify the impact of knowledge of fast food on the desire to buy fast food, study its impact on fast food purchasing intentions, and uncover the effect of fast food attitudes on consumers’ purchasing intentions and intention patterns. Several studies discuss the factors prompting fast food purchases, but convincing findings have not been reported. The previous research did not disclose some significant variables influencing consumers’ fast food-related decisions, namely, knowledge and uniqueness-seeking qualities. The existing studies are centered on connections between facts about fast food and unique consumer traits (independent variables), attitudes toward fast food (mediator), and fast food purchasing expectations (dependent variable). The mediator between attitudes toward fast food and fast food purchasing intentions is family structure. In previous studies, the variables and connections were examined from a different perspective. The study’s data were collected through a questionnaire, and 279 consumers frequenting well-known shops in Pakistan were sampled. To provide statistical evidence, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and multigroup moderations were performed. Knowledge of fast food and uniqueness-seeking characteristics were relevant both directly and through mediation when predicting fast food purchasing intentions. The hypothesized direction between attitudes toward fast food and fast food purchases was also significantly moderated by family structure. This study is the first of its kind and helps identify the fast food purchasing behaviors of consumers in developing countries. The shift from joint family systems to a nuclear family model is a particularly important change in the social experience of food.

Lesbian and Gay Parents, Heterosexual Kinship, and Queer Dreams: Making Families in Twenty-First Century Taiwan

Abstract This article analyzes ways that legal and social understandings of kinship intersect for Taiwanese queer parents and prospective parents. Parents in this research experience varying degrees of legal and cultural intelligibility within the existing household registration system and the familial contexts in which they reside and carry out their daily lives. Many are rearing children in multigenerational, extended family households and are juggling a variety of gendered family roles and responsibilities that shape their parenting practices. Their experiences highlight the limits of rights discourses that treat marriage and parenthood as largely class- and gender-neutral institutions and presuppose a nuclear family model. Such uncritical approaches to marriage and parenthood leave the normative power of these systems intact even as they provisionally open to greater numbers of people. The article foregrounds pathways to parenthood and struggles for legal recognition among queers in a variety of family arrangements, including those that do not fit within the conventional representation of a cohabiting and marriage-desiring same-sex couple with children.

Introduction: A family systems approach to promote maternal, child and adolescent nutrition.

In all cultures, women and children are embedded in family systems that determine roles, relationships, patterns of communication and authority between family members. Especially in non‐western societies, maternal and child nutrition practices are determined not only by the biological parents but also by other influential family members. Most maternal and child nutrition research and interventions do not consider the constellation of family roles and influence on women and children and continue to focus on the mother–child dyad and individual knowledge, attitudes and practices. There is growing agreement on the need to adopt an ecological framework to address public health issues, including those dealing with maternal and child nutrition. This special issue presents examples of research from a variety of settings that employed an ecological, family systems approach either to investigate maternal, child or adolescent nutrition issues or to design interventions that engaged various actors within family settings. These 11 articles contribute to a growing body of evidence supporting the relevance of a wider family systems perspective for nutrition research and interventions. Key themes across studies include the limitations of using a nuclear family model for research and intervention design, the need for formative research that comprehensively explores family systems, increasing recognition of the extensive involvement and support provided by grandmothers, and the importance of engaging men in culturally appropriate ways based on community dialogue and women's perspectives. Future maternal and child nutrition research and interventions can be strengthened by systems thinking that acknowledges that individuals are situated within family and community systems.

Genetic and environmental sources of familial resemblance in anxiety: a nuclear twin family design.

A dominant feature of anxiety disorders is familial aggregation. However, the underlying mechanisms of between- and within-generational anxiety resemblance remain poorly understood. By disentangling the genetic v. environmental sources of familial resemblance in anxiety, we can help prevent within-family transmission of anxiety disorders. Therefore, data from both parents and twins are needed to obtain unbiased and detailed estimations of genetic and environmental sources of similarity between family members. We examined data from 991 families with same-sex twins. Trait anxiety in twins was assessed via self-report and parent report, while parental trait anxiety was assessed via self-report. We established a nuclear twin family model and estimated genetic and environmental variances using two survey waves. The results suggested that additive genetic (A), dominant genetic (D), and non-shared environmental (E) influences significantly contributed to trait anxiety, whereas familial environmental influences (F) and passive gene-environment correlations (rGE) did not. Sibling environmental influences (S) were only found in self-report data, and increased when genetic influences decreased from Wave 1 to Wave 2. Our study highlights the important role of broad heritability in intrafamilial trait anxiety similarity. Parent-child resemblance occurred primarily due to shared genetic makeup rather than direct environmental transmission. Sibling-specific environments, as the only source of shared environments, need further investigation. These findings have both theoretical and practical significance for anxiety disorders. Future research can expand our understanding by examining the gene-environment interplay and sex differences.

Agency, Gender and Development in Oromia, Ethiopia1

This paper argues that the postcolonial revolution in knowledge about gender and power relations has not touched the agricultural sector nor literature. Using the validation data from a medium-n qualitative data study in Amhara and Oromia, Ethiopia, the paper presents a case study on farm gate selling to show how a nuclear family model is shaped by power relations that are seeded in the colonial past and yet are reproduced in the present. Ethiopian men do not share resources equally with their wife/family. So, women need to ‘help themselves’ to the stored harvest to manage the household’s needs. The paper shows how food security projects, and even those that aim to reduce post-harvest loss can be socially and economically disruptive.