In this module, you learned about the marriage, family, and the role that families play in social development. The first and most important socializing agency a person encounters in life is the family. As a primary group, it teaches children how to navigate their culture by serving as the first agent of socialization. While this helps individuals to develop a sense of identity, we also learned to view family from the various sociological perspectives and saw that the family can sometimes reproduce societal inequalities or be a place of abuse or neglect.

While the nuclear family is considered the “traditional” family and consists of a mother, father, and the children, the two-parent nuclear family has become less prevalent, and alternative family forms such as, same-sex couples, single-parent households, cohabitating couples, blended families, couples without children, and adopting individuals are more common. Families also have fewer children than in the past.