Families control members

The argument

This argument identifies control as the characteristic activity of a family, and takes that activity rather than any structure of blood or marriage to be what a definition should track. The claim is strongest in childhood. As is often noted by behaviourist psychologists, families have a profound power over the behaviour and development of children — not merely influence, but the sustained, daily shaping of habits, expectations and conduct during the years in which those are formed. D. Russell Crane notes that parents are "empowered with the responsibility, authority and duty to teach children positive and prosocial behaviour." The word empowered is doing work there: this is an authority granted and expected rather than merely exercised, which is what distinguishes a family from other adults who spend time with a child. The adult case is where the argument tests itself, because there the formal ties of a family may be absent. Often the distinction between a group of close friends and a 'found family' is that the latter has some control over aspects of one's life, giving advice which is informed by a long-standing understanding. Two things are combined in that: standing, which licenses the intervention, and knowledge accumulated over time, which gives it weight. While close friends can offer support and empathy, only a family member can have a meaningful level of control over the decisions someone makes. That is what makes the definition functional rather than structural. A group with no biological relation can be a family if it exercises that control, and a biological relation that does not exercise it is a family in name only. Because exercising control over members is what families characteristically do, in childhood and adulthood alike, this argument holds that families are defined by what they do.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The extent to which a family exerts authority over its members is dependent on the type of family. Some research has suggested that single-parent and stepfamilies have more equalitarian parent-child authority roles, meaning they control the children less, but these families should not be excluded from the definition of family. Moreover, some people are very resistant to direct control from others but still have mutual support with family members. Therefore, family should be about support rather than control.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The quotation supports responsibility and authority to teach, which is not control, and it concerns parents and young children — so the premise generalises a developmental relationship into a defining feature of families as such. [Rejecting P2] Control also fails to distinguish the category, since employers, schools and religious communities exercise more of it than most adult families do, while many families exercise almost none and are still families; and the argument's own example of a found family points the other way, since such relationships are chosen and sustained precisely without the standing to compel.