FAMILY CONCEPT IN AMERICAN SOCIETY 
By: Fita Fathurokhmah, SS, M.Si

Family is the first place to socialize oneself to the other members’ family, before socialize oneself to other neighborhood or to society. When the people perhaps know the word “family”, is most often in referring to a married couple with children. This is only one of the many types of groups in which people live. Actually, family is the roots of civilization. Therefore, if we want to understand society and social life, it is impossible to ignore the family. Most of us spend a major portion of our lives in one form of family or another. Family can consider as a group, a social system, and a social institution. For most of us, the family serves as a primary social group. Family is the first agency of socialization. Family is considered as a social system because it is composed of interdependent parts, it has a characteristic organization and pattern of functioning, and it has subsystems that are part of the large system. The family is considered a social institution because it is an area of social life that is organized in discernible pattern and because it helps meet crucial societal goals. Family describes daily reality life of someone in its social surrounding. Family can also expressed through literature. Family is very interesting to discusses and expressed in literary work. Family is a simple human civilization but it has important function to determine human civilization.
American family has a concept about family as social group that characterized by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. The last time before 1940-s American family live together with the members family from many generations. But in the 1940-s era the whole was changed. American family live in same place with only nuclear family, father, mother and children. American family style experiences change according to American society condition itself. In American society never present three generations together live in one roof that is dominant term. Condition of American society very much determinate by American family. American Family has close relation with literature because literature is a part of art branch that present always in human civilization, because literature is a part of social-cultural reality. The presence of literature in human civilization cannot rejected, literature was presented according to human necessity to expresses themselves, to expresses problems of human in society. 
In 1940-s, American Family has different social class, there are included in high social class, middle social class, low social class, that is the result of the impact of modernization. In that era the only area in which important change has probably occurred is the economic one, with now playing a less significant role than previously. Literary work is society expression and a part of society. Literary work has reciprocal interrelatedness with system networks and values in its society. Literary work has much form such as a poem, drama, short story, novel, that are part of literary work. Literature can be used as a media to express social culture conditions in certain society. Variety of literary work implicates its social culture background. Literary work contains socio-cultural aspects, the author all right produces literary work, but the problems that told are society problems. Generally, the author is a society representative. The author as Tran individual construction does not itself.   
AMERICAN FAMILY
I. Family Concept
Among the whole of change that went in the world, there is not more important than which happened in our personal life, such as in sexuality, personal relation, marriage, and family. Family is a basic civilization. The family is considered the primary agency of socialization. It is within the family that the first socializing influence is encountered by most children and these influencing factors affect them for the rest of their lives. Families give children their geographical location, as easterners or westerners, for example, and their urban or rural background. The family also determines the child’s social class, race, religious background, and ethnic group. Each of these factors can have a profound influence on children. Family is a single social system that provides some specification of the goals of life. The family has the responsibility of producing human replacements and that in some societal setting the family is an important organizational means for managing the economy, the polity, etc.
Family also performs the three functions:
1.	Sexual regulation: People are likely to become nervous when contemplating the prospect of extreme sexual promiscuity. Most of us could not cope effectively with a society where everyone was permitted to have sexual intercourse with everyone else. The universality of incest taboos demonstrates the importance that all cultures place on keeping sexual activity carefully controlled and limited. 
2.	Economic activity: In modern societies, families generally no longer produce food, clothes, housing, and other basic subsistence items. Instead, men and women work for organizations and buy the essential items formerly produced by the united activity of the family unit with the money they earn.
3.	Socialization: Social norms compel parents to provide socialization for their children, whether or not they wish to do so. However, there is wide variation within all societies in the effectiveness and types of socialization provided. Socialization is usually a major function of all families, but it has been partially removed from this institution by some modern societies.
Functions of family are two: first, the primary socialization of children so that they can truly become members of the society into which they have been born; second, the stabilization of the adult personalities of the population of the society. (Talcott Parson 1955: 16-17). According to Parsons, the family is an effective part of society, providing the socialization necessary to transform amorphous neonates into functioning members of the society.
The smallest units are called conjugal families, which must include a husband and wife but may or may not include children. Nuclear families may or may not include a husband and wife; they consist of any two or more persons related to one another by blood, marriage, or adoption who share a common residence. In the world as a whole, conjugal and nuclear families as isolated and independent units are rare. In most societies, the norm is the extended family, which goes beyond the nuclear family to include other nuclear families and relatives as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Family is wrestling place between tradition and modern, but also that is lesson to both of them. There are several of family type and kinship system in society and culture that different. Family also teaches children values they will hold throughout life. Children frequently adopt their parents’ attitudes about the importance of education, work, patriotism, and religion. Event a child’s sense of worth is determined, at least in part, by the child’s parents. A Family is traditionally defined as a social unit composed of two or more people who live together and are related by blood, marriage, or adoption. However widely it may differ in form, it is generally agreed that the family as an institution for regulating sexual relations and rearing children is found in all human societies.  There are others that may be noted as relevant to the operation of the family. One of these functions derives from the family’s structure, the fact that the family is usually a rather small collection of human beings and is called the functions of emotional gratification. 
In American society, the husband-wife relationship frequently carries this function. In some societies, this function of emotional gratification is more likely to occur in the parent-offspring relationship, or even among unrelated individuals, as in the village coffee shop. Another function that is frequently associated with the family is that of position conferring. When a new child is brought into the world, the problem arises as to what is his position in the society. By virtue of the fact that the family has the function of replacement, there exists a corollary that it has the function of placing the children it produces within the total social system.
The family was critical importance in conferring position. There was really no rival social structure in this matter. The emphasis of emotional gratification does not seem to have been placed as heavily upon the family as upon the same sex-age group; thus, the involvement of the family became more a fortuitous ecology matter. The characteristics of Family are family has variation function in social system.  Those are; the economic function, the political function, the socializing-education function, the religious function, the function of replacement, and the function of position conferring the function of emotional gratification. The Pervasiveness of the family may be seen in cross-cultural perspective. Although many societies have been described as having no formal market system, legal system, or even political system, all have formally recognized family structures. In all societies the social placement of children is determined by their positions in specific families; they are socialized and fed there; and all members socially control each other. Thus, textbooks speak of the tasks of the family as these:
1.	Reproduction of the young
2.	Physical maintenance of family members
3.	Social placement of children and adults
4.	Socialization and emotional support
5.	Social control
In family there are the dynamics of households. When the people marry, they bring with them an accumulation of family information and sills as well as norms about how they should act as spouses or parents, what to expect from each other and their resources of character, energy, or skill. Typically, they find that living together in marriage is different either from living together unmarried or from dating: a lifetime of observing and acquiring the internal roles of parent and spouse, along with expectations from others, leads people to behave differently in marriage.
 Unanticipated problems are likely to develop. For example, some parents are appalled to perceive that in conflicts with their children they are acting just as their own parents once did, although they had intended to be warmer and more understanding. The supportive, seemingly equalitarian date may begin to assert his husbandly “right” to be cared for; or the sweet, attentive woman becomes a mother who ignores her husband in favor of her children. The complexity of all these processes of adjustment and conflict is too great to be encompassed within a brief section; there are some aspects of family dynamics; family statistics, Size of household, marital adjustment past and present, external influences on adjustment, the effect of women’s employment, parents and children, socialization. In the world as a whole, conjugal and nuclear families as isolated and independent units are rare. In most societies, the norm is the extended family, which goes beyond the nuclear family to include other nuclear families and relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Generally, we may define the family as a group of kin united by blood, marriage, or adoption who share a common residence for some part of their lives and assume reciprocal rights and obligations with regard to one another. The family is the principal source of socialization, especially of the infant, and factors such as those in the definition tend to differentiate the family from other social groups. 
II. The Meaning of American Family 
The family is a social group characterized by common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes, at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and one or more children, own or adopted, of the sexually cohabiting adults. The family is to be distinguished from marriage, which is a complex of customs centering upon the relationship between a sexually associating pair of adults within the family (George P. Murdock’s). American family style experiences change according with American society condition itself. In American society there is never three generations together live in one roof that is dominant term. A great families only industry society legend and seldom found. The first of household and American families is a simple structure and not much different with Family organization period now. Such as the units of settlement family is nucleus family that consists are parent, and them children, not a big family. In colonial period, American family consists a far brother or a far sister, these households includes the system of the people who have not kinship relation. They are boarders, clerk, and servants. Those happened until the last 1920s. And now concept of American family only simple structure that consists the parent; father and mother, and the children itself. In industry era, family has function as work unit. The children in family has position as economic source to its family. The children considers as wealth asset to future family. In America there are three familial types have been distinguished:
1.	A nuclear family embedded in a network of extended kin.
2.	An Isolated nuclear family.
3.	A mother-child nuclear family, sometimes with matrilineal extension.
There have been many studies to show that most Americans live in communities where they have households of kin. These studies indicate that people interact with their kinsmen, enjoy such interaction, and rely on their kinsmen for help in time of crisis. American families typically have what is called a modified extended family structure, in which individual nuclear families retain considerable autonomy and yet maintain connections with other nuclear families to exchange goods and services. This type of family differs from the extended family in that its members may live in different parts of the country and choose their occupations independently rather than following the parent’s occupation. For well over a decade in the United States the age at marriage has been slowly rising, though it is still much lower than in most European countries. In 1974 in the United States the average age at first marriage was twenty-one years for women and twenty-three years for men. The percentage of single women aged twenty to twenty-four years has increased substantially since 1960, to about 40 percent in 1974. The trend toward later marriage is likely to continue in the near future. In the past, women with graduate school education or with a high salary were most likely to marry late and least likely to marry at all. While that relationship continues, the difference between this group and women with less education has been steadily dropping. It can also be noted that the 1960s witnessed an eightfold increase in the number of “household heads who live apart from relatives but shared living quarters with an unrelated adult partner (roommate or friend) of the opposite sex,” a cool, gray Census Bureau category that is more commonly described as “They’re living together now.” The divorce rate in the America has been rising for some years. It is now higher than ever and higher than that of any other major nation. For example, a woman of about thirty years of age has about one chance in three of either having already been divorced or of being divorced in the future. The divorce rate for people in the upper socioeconomic strata continues to be lower than in other strata, but recent data show that professional women in that group have exhibited a very slow increase in their rate of divorce (it was relatively high before). Men in the higher socioeconomic category have exhibited a very fast rise since 1960s. There is a wide myth in American society about family life in the past time that is assumes industrialization was dissolves national kinship relation and dissolves dependence of organic between family and society. But according the research that is doesn’t right. In the industry’s society, family has function as work unit. Each the member of family mutual helps to gets same works and in the same place in a hereditary manner.  The people of village life moves to industry life and to industry work forms. In the nuclear family still there is and still tied in network of kinship in outside household, with mutual helps. They still bring traditions of family in the new condition.
Although industrialization doesn’t express big changes in family structure, industrialization was resulted changes in family’s function and in the values that influences family life. Since the beginning 1940-s century, family was change its function to functions of other social institutions that before centered inside. Families in era pra industry just no has function to educating children but also has function as institution that helps prosperity of society and has the public responsible in the society that more wide. In here the parent role also as social roles and economic roles. Children regarded as the member works force and as economic asset in family. In American, families perform many of the same functions. Among the more important are:
1.	Socialization: The family is one of the most important agents of socialization because it teaches its members the rules and expectations for behavior in the society.
2.	Affection and Emotional Support: In the members of family mutual need others who care, show affection, share joys and sorrows, and give support in times of need.
3.	Sexual Regulation: Family has the chief responsibility in sexual activity, and since they regulate sexual activity, it seems logical that they also control the function of reproduction.
4.	Reproduction: The family is the most widely approved social context for having children. 
5.	Social Placement: The social placement of children is a family function closely associated with socialization and reproduction. Social placement involves determining what roles and statues the child will occupy in society.
In American family, the nuclear family has been the dominant for. This is a two-generation family that includes a father, a mother, and their children living separately from other relatives. In many other societies, however, the extended family, involving three or more generations of people related by blood and living together or close to each other, plays a more important role. The extended family has prevailed in rural settings. As societies have become increasingly industrialized and urbanized, the nuclear family has assumed a steadily more significant part. American family in era 1940-s was happened a big transformation in American society. Society Industry in the world, its life accordance to material success. That change in basic of social life also signed bye presence change in social class. Social class that dominant is that can gets material success included. 

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