Extended Family Vs Nuclear Family

In history, understanding the culture of a people is one of the most important factors in comprehending how certain historical events occur. To understand culture on it’s most basic level, a historian can look to understanding the family structure of a society in a particular time. Understanding the power dynamics of the family can lead to the understanding of the society and eventually the history of a certain people. This could be no more than the case of the Romans. There has been much historical debate over which two family dynamics prevailed in Roman times. These two family dynamics were the extended family and the nuclear family. The extended family would include the many relatives of a family which were ruled by an elderly patriarch …show more content…
As discussed in lecture, historians in the 19th century, such as Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play, believed that the extended family dominated societies until the French Revolution in 1789. Le Play believed that extended families were a stable, nurturing environment which allowed parents to work while grandparents and other relatives watched the children. Historians like Le Play thought the modern period marked a decline in family relationships with the emergence of the nuclear family, which was a family unit made up only of the parents and children. These ideas continued into the 20th century with Philippe Ariès, as Ariès believed that the Industrial Revolution created the idea of childhood and adolescence in the negative of sense of what children could not do. The perceptions of what these historians thought of the family unit in their lifetime affected their perspectives of the Roman family. Because 19th and 20th century historians thought negatively about the modern nuclear family of the Industrial Revolution, they thought positively of the extended family of the …show more content…
Garnsey and Saller, being two of these historians, looked at funeral inscriptions to prove that the Roman family was a nuclear family. Garnsey and Saller argue that if the extended family played a big role in the Roman family unit, their names would be included as commemorators on the funeral inscriptions. However, this is not the case. Garnsey and Saller state that if paternal grandfathers, uncles, and cousins lived in the average Roman household, it would be expected that they would play a significant role in funeral arrangements. Yet, evidence points to these relatives being entirely absent and unrelated friends playing a more important role than members of the extended family (Garnsey and Saller 154). This is significant because if extended family members hardly ever played role in the commemoration of deceased family members, it could not be expected that an extended family played a role in everyday Roman life. Instead, it is proven that the Roman family is nuclear family because only the immediate family members are present in funeral