The Problem With the Phrase “Starting a Family”
I appreciated this recent piece in Refinery29 asking people to rethink the phrase “starting a family.” Because anytime you have more than one person committed to each other, you have a family. A couple is a family. Three generations under one roof is a family. A single parent with a kid is a family.
Family is a surrogate term for having children: bringing in a new generation is ‘starting a family’; a focus of feminist liberation is that women shouldn’t have to choose between work and ‘family’ (aka having children); and questions about whether or not you’re trying to get pregnant are couched in the more indirect phrase: ‘When are you starting your family?’
She points out that once you pause and look at this idea — the idea that children are what makes a family — you are forced to consider all of the implications.
It also makes you wonder about another common phrase in our community — I know I use it all the time — “family building.” On one hand, you’re not implying a starting point or negating the family’s existence before kids. You’re adding on or expanding upon a foundation. But still in the same vein as “starting a family.”
Food for thought. What do you think?
4 comments
Pets are family too! It doesn’t have to be humans.
At the risk of sounding pedantic. . . the first and most commonly used definition of the word “family” (according to Webster’s Dictionary) is “the basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents rearing their children; also : any of various social units differing from but regarded as equivalent to the traditional family.” So I don’t think that a married couple who are childless — either by choice or not — technically meets the textbook definition of a “traditional family,” although they are certainly a social unit, which would meet the second part of the definition I shared.
I think most people who use the phrase “starting a family” mean “family” in the sense of the first part of the definition of that word: the basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents rearing their children. Doesn’t mean that there aren’t other definitions of the word “family” or other forms of family that don’t include children.
I actually have more problem with the use of the phrase “trying to get pregnant” because EWWW. For most folks first embarking on this effort, this is actually just a euphemism for “having sex without contraception,” and I don’t need to know that about anyone. 😉
Those of us who are CNBC have certainly had to consider this, some of us for years. The first question my mother used to ask about my friends, “do they have a family?” She meant, do they have children? But I winced, every single time, because the implication was that I did not have a family. Even though I do not describe my husband and I as a family. (But then I don’t usually have occasion to describe us as anything.)
However, what I find worst with the word “family” is how often it is used by politicians etc and held up as the ultimate, wholesome way of living, and how it excludes and isolates those without “families” in the traditional sense.
And a final point I would make. Accepting and justifying the most commonly used definitions means being unprepared to look at whether those definitions are appropriate, acceptable, or even accurate. I can think of plenty of words and their definitions that were in common usage in the past that are no longer used because they were offensive, exclusive, or outdated. I am impressed that the author examined her own use of the term when she realised how exclusive it can be.
Because anytime you have more than one person committed to each other, you have a family.
I feel that this statement erases families that are just one person