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FamilyA family consists of a domestic group of people (or a number of domestic groups), typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships — including domestic partnership, adoption, surname and (in some cases) ownership (as occurred in the Roman Empire). Although many people (including social scientists) have understood familial relationships in terms of "blood", many anthropologists have argued that one must understand the notion of "blood" metaphorically, and that many societies understand 'family' through other concepts rather than through genetics. Article 16(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says: "The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State". According to sociology and anthropology, the family has the primary function of reproducing — biologically, socially, or in both ways. Thus, one's experience of one's family shifts over time. From the perspective of children, the family functions as a family of orientation: the family serves to locate children socially, and plays a major role in their enculturation and socialization. From the point of view of the parent(s), the family serves as a family of procreation with the goal of producing, enculturating and socializing children. Producing children, however important, does not exhaust the functions of the family. In societies with a sexual division of labor, marriage (and the resulting relationship between a husband and wife) must precede the formation of an economically productive household. In modern societies marriage entails particular rights and privileges that encourage the formation of new families even when participants have no intention of having children. The structure of families traditionally hinges on relations between parents and children, on relations between spouses, or on both. Consequently, four major types of family exist: patrifocal matrifocal consanguineal conjugal Note: this typology deals with "ideal" families. All societies tolerate some acceptable deviations from the ideal or statistical norm, owing either to incidental circumstances (such as the death of a member of the family), to infertility or to personal preferences. A patrifocal family consists of a father and his children. It occurs in societies where men take multiple wives (polygamy or polygyny) and/or remain involved with each for a relatively short time. This type of family, not common from a worldwide perspective, occurs in Islamic states with considerable frequency. In some emirates the laws encourage this structure by allowing a maximum of four wives per man at any given time, and automatic deflection of custody rights to the father in the case of a divorce. In these societies a man will often take a wife and may conceive a child with her, but after a relatively short time put her out of his harem so he can take another woman without exceeding the quota of 4. The man then keeps his child and thus a patrifocal structure emerges. Even without the expulsion of the mother, the structure may become patrifocal because the father removes the children (often as infants) from the harem structure and places them in his own family. Check out the following recipes that are tagged "Family":
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