page_title: Family
section_title: Degrees of kinship
hierarchical_section_title: Family / Kinship terminology / Degrees of kinship
caption_attribution_description: English: Albumen photograph of an Indian family with children.
context_page_description: In human society, family is a group of people related either by consanguinity or affinity. The purpose of families is to maintain the well-being of its members and of society. Ideally, families would offer predictability, structure, and safety as members mature and participate in the community. In most societies, it is within families that children acquire socialization for life outside the family. Additionally, as the basic unit for meeting the basic needs of its members, it provides a sense of boundaries for performing tasks in a safe environment, ideally builds a person into a functional adult, transmits culture, and ensures continuity of humankind with precedents of knowledge.
  Anthropologists generally classify most family organizations as matrifocal; patrifocal; conjugal; avuncular; or extended.
  Members of the immediate family may include spouses, parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. Members of the extended family may include aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and siblings-in-law.
context_section_description: A first-degree relative is one who shares 50% of your DNA through direct inheritance, such as a full sibling, parent or progeny.
  There is another measure for the degree of relationship, which is determined by counting up generations to the first common ancestor and back down to the target individual, which is used for various genealogical and legal purposes.
caption: Family in India, 1870s
exif: {"Image Software": "Google", "Image ExifOffset": "46", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "421", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "570"}