Family

How the Human Need for Belonging Shapes Our Lives

Meredith F. Small

From the acclaimed author of Our Babies, Ourselves comes an illuminating and thought-provoking look at the nature of family across time and cultures.

Family is the most ubiquitous and persistent human social group. Everyone across the world has a family, even if that family has been lost, broken, or transformed. Acclaimed anthropologist Meredith Small, author of Our Babies, Ourselves, examines the very roots of the family and why this particular type of connection is so fundamental to all cultures and all people—and how this understanding can help us navigate our rapidly changing world.

Previous books about family are self-help books designed to start, build, or repair broken families. Family: How the Human Need for Beloning Shapes Our Lives is something different. Small seeks to understand why this particular form of social organization is the bedrock of human interaction. Why do we form families? Why do people place such importance on their family relationships? And what is the reality of family life—does it live up to our expectations? What do families provide for each of us at all the stages of our lives?

Small takes the reader on a journey from the evolutionary roots of family three million years ago to its present-day varied expression. We read that there is fossil evidence of human groups that could be called families, and extensive archaeological finds that when humans settled down and started to grow their own food and build villages and cities, they did so as families.

But within this common framework of a family, there are also complex iterations of the way families are formed and operate. Across the globe, various forms of marriage, parenting, and types of family differ from the Western template of a family of Mom+Dad+kids. People have developed families of all stripes, adapting the notion of family to their own worldview, religious beliefs, and economic necessities.

In a narrative that is both sweeping and intimate in scale, we see how family is not a fixed notion, but something has evolved with us as a species, as varied as the human experience itself. Illuminating and though-provoking, Family shows how our innately human need for belonging can be drawn upon to navigate the uncertainties of today's world.

Meredith F. Small is a professor of anthropology at Cornell University and the author of Our Babies, Ourselves; What's Love Got to Do with It?; and Female Choices. She writes frequently for Natural History Magazine, Discover, Scientific American, and is a commentator for National Public Radio's All Things Considered. She lives in Ithaca, New York.

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Endorsements & Reviews

Praise for Meredith F. Small

"In elegant, engaging prose, Meredith Small shows the mother-child relation to be a microcosm of society."
Frans de Waal, New York Times bestselling author

"Nothing less than a liberation. For too long parents have agonized...that there is one 'right' way to raise an infant. With engaging wit and profound scholarship...Small opens our eyes to the variety of child-care practices in other cultures." James Shreeve, author of The Neanderthal Enigma

"So packed with compelling information about parenting practices around the globe that the reader may have trouble putting it down." Salon