Parent

Lore & Background

A parent can be elaborated as an ancestor removed one generation. With recent advances in medicine, it is possible to have more than two biological parents, including instances involving surrogacy or a third person who has provided DNA samples during an assisted reproductive procedure. A female can become a parent through surrogacy, and some parents are adoptive parents who nurture and raise an offspring but are not related to the child. Orphans without adoptive parents can be raised by their grandparents or other family members. The extent to which it is socially acceptable for a parent to be involved in their offspring's life varies from culture to culture. A parent who exhibits too little involvement is sometimes said to exhibit child neglect, while one that is too involved is sometimes said to be overprotective, cosseting, nosey, or intrusive. A child has at least one biological father and at least one biological mother, but not every family is a traditional nuclear family; variants include adoption, shared parenting, stepfamilies, and LGBT parenting.

Reader's Guide

The concept of a parent encompasses biological, adoptive, and legal roles, with rights and responsibilities that include guardianship and the process of parenting. Most countries and states have laws that provide that the parents of a minor child are the legal guardians of that child. Parenting refers to the aspects of raising a child aside from the biological relationship. Social science literature mostly rejects the notion that there is an optimal gender mix of parents or that children with same-sex parents suffer developmental disadvantages; family processes, such as the quality of parenting and relationships, contribute to determining children's well-being rather than family structures per se. In Europe, parents are generally happier than non-parents, with happiness increasing most in the year before and after the first childbirth.

Did You Know?

• A parent can be an ancestor removed one generation.
• With recent medical advances, it is possible to have more than two biological parents.
• A paternity test is conducted to prove whether a male is the biological father of another individual.

The Discipline's Core Question

Anthropologists have long grappled with what kinship truly means, and the discipline's internal debates reveal just how central this concept is to understanding human society. Robin Fox framed the inquiry as examining what people do with fundamental biological realities—mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship. His key insight was that humans share the same biological raw material as the animal world yet possess the unique capacity to conceptualize and categorize those facts to serve social purposes. Those purposes span the socialization of children and the construction of basic economic, political, and religious groups. Over time, the field has accumulated a rich vocabulary of related concepts—descent, descent group, lineage, affinity, consanguinity, cognate, and fictive kinship—each carving out a different slice of the social web. The term itself operates on two levels: it can name the patterns of social relationships as they exist, or it can refer to the academic study of those patterns across one or more cultures.

Organizing the Household

The family serves as the principal institution for raising children in most societies, yet its structural form varies enormously across cultures. Anthropologists broadly classify family organization into several types: matrifocal arrangements centering a mother and her children; conjugal or nuclear units pairing a husband, wife, and their offspring; avuncular configurations built around a brother, his sister, and her children; and extended family structures in which parents and children co-reside alongside other members of one parent's family. Crucially, child-rearing is not the family's sole function. In societies characterized by a sexual division of labor, marriage and the resulting partnership between two people become necessary for establishing an economically productive household. The family, then, is a group bound by consanguinity, affinity, or shared residence and consumption—a flexible institution whose shape reflects the economic and social demands of the culture that builds it.

Naming the Web

How a society names its relatives reveals deep structural choices about how it organizes social life. Different cultures classify kinship relations in fundamentally different ways, producing distinct terminological systems. Some languages draw a sharp line between affinal and consanguine uncles, while others deploy a single word to cover both a father and his brothers. Terminologies fall into two broad camps: descriptive systems, where each term maps to one specific relationship, and classificatory systems, where a single label absorbs many different relational types. English, for instance, uses "brother" descriptively to mean only a son of one's same parent, whereas in many classificatory systems a person's male first cousin—regardless of which parental line connects them—may also be called a brother. Lewis Henry Morgan identified six major patterns in his 1871 work: Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, Inuit, Hawaiian, and Sudanese. A seventh, Dravidian kinship, was later recognized as a distinct classificatory type.

Beyond the Bloodline

Kinship extends far beyond the biological or the familial. In biology, the term typically denotes the degree of genetic relatedness between individuals of a species, a concept central to kin selection theory, and when applied to humans it approximates consanguinity or genealogy. In a more general register, kinship can describe a perceived similarity or affinity between any two entities based on shared characteristics—whether a common ontological origin, a historical or cultural connection, or other features that link them. A linguist investigating etymology might ask whether the English word "seven" and the German "sieben" share kinship. In everyday usage, the word takes on an even more diffuse, emotional quality, as in a headline suggesting a celebrity feels kinship with a historically vilified figure, implying a felt empathy or resemblance. In anthropology, kinship relationships may stretch to encompass people with whom an individual holds economic or political ties, or in some cultures, descent groups traced back to divine or animal ancestors, conceived on varying degrees of literalness.

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