This definition was however scrutinized when the issue of the permanence of the family was questioned and whether the father’s presence or absence mattered when it comes to the rearing of kids. Another thing that was put the old definition under scrutiny was the fact that families were not bound by blood and could include unrelated members and that children do not bring any stability to the notion of reproduction. This is what birthed the Production concept of family (J.T Peterson, 1994, Anthropological approaches to the household).
The concept of Production:
The concept of production strives to eradicate the fact that families are based on blood-ties and puts an emphasis on how unrelated people could form a family or in their words a ‘household’.
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Times are changing and so are households. Amongst the different types of households, we find lately, there are child headed ones who, like others are functioning in their own unique way. Different people and research institutions have described them differently. (Germann, 2005) said that a child headed household is a household where both parents or caregivers were absent and the person responsible for the day-to-day management of the house is less than twenty years of age. (Baquele, 2007) says it is when everyone in the household is eighteen years or younger and one of them is the one providing leadership (S.M Mokgotlane, M.E Chauke, G.H Van Rensburg, S.P Human, C.M Kganakga, 2012, A situational analysis of child headed households in South …show more content…
When looking at child headed households, none of those areas describe their family or house hold as they are brothers and sisters, living in the same house, taking care of each other. So according to the anthropologists, this would not be considered a family as it has no components that are said to make up a family. One other thing that they stressed were kinship ties but then in the case of South Africa, what happens when the neighbours have left their younger kids with the older kid next door who is also taking care of his/her family? Are they not a family? Or even the aunt or uncles wouldn’t be considered a family according to this