Nuclear family

Common Definition

What can be described as a nuclear family can be explained in terms of a family consisting of a) one mother, b) one father, c) one or two or even more children, d) and a status of being able to provide itself with material and/or monetary goods. In Opposition to the extended family, the nuclear family has to share the goods and resources only between a small group of individuals. On the other hand sharing resources with a close knit family network (see also extended family) would contradict the conditions of being defined as a nuclear family.

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Late Eighteenth Century

At the beginning and also during the Industrial Revolution, which was a long-term process during which technical changes and changes in production, family structures also had been changing: the bourgeois nuclear family came to be the dominant form of family structures.

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Sources:

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/6-23-2004-55793.asp

Ariés, Phhillipe and Duby, Georges: A History of private Life, Harvard College 1991, p. 504.