ABSTRACT
The situation is different in the United States, due to a fundamentally different understanding and organization of family policy and family politics. The term 'family rhetoric', to my knowledge, first appeared in the 1980s. Rhetorical statements on the family very often contain 'prescription in the form of description'. The reference to nature is a rhetorical device serving to devaluate alternative views. The same is true for references to the origins of family, and defining the family and marriage as having been instituted by God. Social reporting on the family may be interpreted as an attempt to overcome the polarization of family rhetoric and to master – pragmatically – the 'contradictory openness' of processes of socialization, as well as the accompanying fundamental ambivalences of the family as a social institution. Family – and kinship generally – are the fundamental organizing facts of all human societies, primitive or advanced, and have been such for tens of thousands of years'.
