ABSTRACT
The 20th century brought an acknowledgement of an increasing number and diversity in family types, such as: same-sex relationships, single-parent families, kinship networks, post-divorce reconfiguration of families, cohabitation, living apart, adoptive families, fostering families and surrogacy. This diversity is further complicated with new reproductive technologies, such as sperm or egg donation and in vitro fertilisation (IVF) by donor. While the family is regarded as one of the basic building blocks of society, it also exists in tension with the State, the traditional privacy of the former conflicting to varying degrees with monitoring and managerial tendencies of the latter. Comparing life outcomes for children brought up in families with those raised in institutional settings, average families clearly confer important educational and other life advantages on their members. Positioning the child in relation to the family, the school and the wider community has been important within education and the other human sciences.
