Family Forms: Who Counts as Kin

Ask a hundred people to draw their family and you will get a hundred different shapes — and almost none of them will be the one on the cereal box. Sociology treats family not as a picture but as a social institution: a durable arrangement for raising children, pooling money, and deciding who is obliged to whom. The arrangement takes wildly different forms across societies and across a single lifetime, which is the first clue that its shape is social rather than natural. Tap the kin map to learn the vocabulary, open each of the nine forms, then sort twelve real households.