Describing a ‘Family’ by Function, Not Form

As evidence of how drastically the California family has changed in the last three decades, the state Joint Select Task Force on the Changing Family, issuing its first report in June, did not attempt to define “family.”

Rather, it chose to define the functions of a family: To care for the emotional and physical needs of its own; provide them with love and security; shape their values and social skills, and provide a haven from outside stresses.

A family today is not necessarily related by blood or marriage.

Only a minority of Los Angeles households include mom, dad and the kids. “Fifty-five percent of adults in the city (of Los Angeles) are not married,” observes Thomas F. Coleman, a lawyer and member of the state task force.

Coleman is executive director of the Family Diversity Project, which grew out of the city’s Task Force on Family Diversity. Privately funded by the nonprofit Spectrum Institute, it promotes public awareness about diverse family structures in America, researches issues and problems affecting these newly defined families, and helps find solutions.

In 1989, a “family” may be a gay or lesbian couple with a biological or adopted child or it may be a group of unrelated singles who live separately but function as a family, sharing holidays, triumphs and tragedies.

In other words, a family is being defined by the commitment of its members one to the other, a concept with which society and the legal system are only starting to grapple.

There now are, for example: step-families; commune-type families who choose to live an ecologically gentle way of life in nonsmoking, vegetarian homes, sharing rent and chores; immigrant families, whose values are centered in another culture; interfaith families, and ethnically mixed families.

But the family, in whatever form, remains central to American life, studies show.

The challenge of the ‘90s will be to cope with the pressures that threaten family stability--including wrenching conflicts between responsibilities at home and workplace demands and the growing gap between rich and poor.

In a city like Los Angeles, where many families do not have traditional support systems, such as grandparents and neighbors, the challenge is enormous.

There is a recognition of the need for public support programs, and, at the same time, public apprehension about the government “undermining families by doing it for them and preventing them from developing, growing and strengthening their own relationships,” Coleman says.

He emphasizes that “both government and the private sector must bridge the gap between outdated policies and notions of what families are, and the reality.”

The perfect example, he says, is the need for employers to be more flexible in defining dependents in determining eligibility for benefits. Shall they include foster children, adult children who have returned home? A domestic partner in a stable gay or lesbian relationship?

No one constituency can bring about needed family policy change, Coleman says, “because every constituency is a minority. The only way to bring about the changes is to find what issues and what solutions cut across these constituencies to form a coalition” to persuade both private and public sectors that change is in their best interests.

Using a “fair and nondiscriminatory definition of family,” he says, both sectors must “find ways to update the policies that are out of match with the present demographics . . . that’s the politics of the ‘90s. That’s what’s going to work.”