The family does not just play the role of primary socialization and moral education of children; it has historically also served as a source of stability, permitting a division of labor and shared resources. Is a family without children still a family? Of course. At least…I think so. Is the dog my wife and I love and care for a member of our family? I would say yes—do family members have to be humans? If dogs count, what about goldfish, or chickens? I mean to suggest that, regardless of theoretical approach, the definition of family is a bit more slippery than it first seems to be. For example, some would define a family as a group who share a common bond and live together. Divorced parents and their children (more on this in the next section) don’t live together; are they still a family? What about “commuter marriages” where a couple are married but live in different states? You’re still a family even if you live apart, right? Are you still a family if you live alone? Others would define “family” more broadly—are not, for example, your great-grandparents or your third cousins are still family, even if you have never met them, or they passed away before you were born, right? Go back far enough, and all human beings, and ultimately, all living things, are related to one another. If we are tempted to define family in terms of biology, then biologically speaking, every form of life on earth that lives or has ever lived, is a family member.

The interaction is the basic unit—the atom—of sociology. Economists study the economy; chemists study chemicals; sociologists study interaction.

If I left society and became a hermit, living in the woods and detached from all other human contact, I would still be a product of society, because everything I take with me, knowledge-wise, came from someone or somewhere else. I probably didn’t learn it on my own; it was taught to me. Even the words I speak, and the thoughts I think in those words, are the product of the social environment in which I was raised, schooled, taught how to be a person. This is the fundamental lesson of sociology, I think: socialization. People learn how to be people from other people, through the process of interacting with them.