The meaning of “extended family” varies depending on culture and personal interpretation. Generally, it refers to blood relatives who live outside one’s home, but can also include non-blood relatives or those with partial blood relations. The definition can be vague and differ between individuals and families.
The meaning of “extended family” can vary somewhat depending on the user of the term and the culture from which it comes. In general, however, it is usually used to refer to a household that lives outside a person’s home. For a boy who lives with his parents, sisters, grandparents, an uncle and a cousin, the meaning of extended family will be a little different than for another boy who lives with his mother. The term can also potentially be used to refer to any type of non-Orthodox family unit that lives together with different blood relationships in the same household, commonly due to polygamy or remarriage.
Extended family can potentially mean different things to different people, especially since the term seems to lend itself to ambiguity by its very nature. This is partly because the meaning of the word “family” can often be seen as a highly relative concept that is constructed individually by each person. As each person creates their own sense of what “family” means, their sense of “extended family” can also vary accordingly. In general, however, it can be easy to simply define the term as members of an individual’s family who are blood related but live outside that person’s home.
Even with this somewhat rigid definition, the meaning can still be quite vague. Someone living in the United States with their parents and siblings would therefore have an extended family which may consist of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and similar relatives. On the other hand, a person living in a tribal culture in another country may live with his grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts, and thus extended family may be very different or completely inapplicable in terms of actual meaning. This means that it is often easier for people to identify members of their extended family when using the term.
Within a single family, the term may also be used to refer to people who are part of the family but cannot be related by blood, or whose relatedness is only partial. For example, in a polygamous family, individuals may act like siblings even though they might have different mothers and only one common father. In other situations, two people might be married and have children from previous marriages, allowing multiple siblings to share no or only partial blood relations with each other. These types of internal extended families are even more complicated and will again often be recognized through the individual and personal identity constructions of family members.
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