FORGOTTEN HISTORY: Funny wholesome family life - The Untold Story

The main emotion in these pictures is reflected in quantitative findings, too.

In 2025, Gallup and the Aspen Ideas Festival surveyed more than 2,000 American adults about how they prioritize different things in life.

Half (49%) said family is the most important value to them, a nearly 20% lead from the next most important value, freedom (30%).

When presented with a list of 23 values and asked to choose all that they consider important to them, more than 8 in 10 Americans selected respect, family, trustworthiness, and freedom as important values to them, and at least three-quarters said the same about kindness, health, integrity, happiness, and knowledge. However, when asked to identify the most important values, family ranked first across virtually all demographic groups.

The circle that you consider to be your family might look different from that of your friend’s.

Dawn O. Braithwaite, Ph.D., is a professor of communication emerita at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies families and close relationships. To determine who you include in your definition, she suggests considering:

1. A person who is not a blood or legal relative
2. Romantic partners who are cohabiting and unmarried
3. The adopted child of LGBTQ parents
4. Children who were once stepsiblings after the remarried couple's divorce
5. A married couple without children
6. A brother or sister who married outside the family’s religious faith
7. A beloved family dog or cat

You might be surprised to learn how others respond to these different family types—but that’s the beauty of it. We choose our families ourselves.

“It is not unusual to hear ... calls to return to ‘traditional’ family values,” Braithwaite says.

“Perhaps family scholar Stephanie Coontz put it best in her book, The Way We Never Were. She stressed that an idealized view of the ‘American family’ we should return to never existed in the first place.”

Unsurprisingly, the same encouragement is going around in other countries and cultures as well.

“In reality, there are multiple ways to be a family,” Braithwaite says. “It is easy to see those with biological ties (blood, birth) or legal ties (marriage, adoption) as family. However, this would leave out many ... [important] relationships.”

We should be very mindful about how we talk to people who want us to have a very specific understanding of who is allowed and who is prohibited to be our faimly.

“Private and public debates over what is a legitimate family has the potential to rob certain families of acceptance and support and can put them in danger as well.”

In addition to our own personal reasons for defining family, Braithwaite highlights that there are also very practical policy-related issues to consider.

For instance, after the September 11 destruction of New York’s World Trade Center and other sites, who should have been counted as family of those who perished and given financial support?

Who should be regarded as family and allowed to visit a person in hospice or a nursing home? Who is entitled to receive a gift during Christmas?

How we interact with, show empathy for, and treat our families is an important life choice.

Braithwaite is one of the current authors of the original family communication textbook. It uses a broad and inclusive definition of family as “networks of people who share their lives over long periods of time, bound by ties of marriage, blood, law, or commitment, legal or otherwise, who consider themselves as family, and who share a significant history and anticipated future of functioning as a family.”

This definition is guided by a simple principle: If people consider themselves a family and function as one, then they are a family. And looking at the pictures on this list, it’s hard to argue with that.