Families physically care for members

The argument

On this account what makes a relationship familial is not blood, law or residence but an exchange of care between the people involved. A familial relationship is one where care is exchanged between family members, and the definition looks to that exchange rather than to any formal status the parties might hold. The clearest case is the relationship between parents and children, which runs across a lifetime in two directions. Parents care for children while they are young and wholly dependent, supplying what the child cannot supply for itself. In exchange, the child will care for the parent in its old age, when dependence returns and the direction of provision reverses. Neither half is a transaction completed at the time: the first is given long before the second can be returned, and what links them is the expectation that it will be. This transaction is at the heart of the family dynamic and is what defines familial relationships. The same structure appears between the parents themselves, who maintain a similar contractual exchange with each other, each supplying what the other needs, with the balance settling over time rather than in any single instance. The pattern is the same whether it runs between generations or within one, which is what allows a single criterion to cover the whole unit rather than requiring a separate account of each relationship inside it. Defining the family this way makes it a matter of what people do rather than of what they are to one another on paper. A household in which care is exchanged reciprocally is a family, and one in which it is not has the form without the substance, whatever the formal relationships within it. Because families physically care for their members, families are defined by what they do.

Context

Exchange theory dictates that all relationships can be measured by the giving and receiving of goods or services. This can be applied to the sociological definition of a family.

Premises

Counter-arguments

To reduce familial relationships to an exchange of care is too restrictive. When wealthy parents pay others to care for their children while they work, are they negating on this exchange of services? Would this mean that they no longer have a parent/child relationship with their offspring? Few would argue that this "outsourcing" of child care would lead to an erosion of legitimacy in the family unit any more than putting an elderly family member into a nursing home does.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] This definition excludes parents that use child care services to help care for their children or adults that put their parents in nursing homes.