가족에 대한 법적ㆍ사회적 개념의 통합 필요성

The need for an integration of legal and social concepts on family

  Family, which is the standard unit of human society, has maintained its tradition and solidarity around marriage and blood in these changes of human civilization. By the concept from the dictionary, a family is a group of kindred or closely related individuals and adults with responsibilities of care of children. Also, to an individual it is the first experience of a group as the very first regulator; it gives continuous effects to one’s life more than any other things and at the same time it secures the continuation of the society. Therefore, a family is social system of everything made through the family including relations by marriage, parents-children relationship, birth, motherhood, and division of labor by gender and although there are differences in the form and function it still is the one of the most generalized systems. However, as a system of society, there are variety of families which breaches over the extent of traditional definition of family due to the magnification of individualism and the concept of equality following the changes of social structure and social acceptance caused by the following reasons: upward tendency of age of marriage, increasing population of unmarried people, divorce and remarriage, decreasing number of childbirth, and the aging society. Single parent family, remarried family, Same-Sex family, multicultural family, cohabitation and/or ba helor household, teen household, grandparents and grandchildren household and boarding houses are what called as the ‘alternative family’. Generally, the concept of a family presumes the support, raising and living community. From the same context, these people are treated as abnormal families by law and from society even though they are families in reality. These varieties of families are no longer a personal matter caused by individual choice but a social problem. The problem of varying families can not be solved with laws those are established upon the standard of pre-existing families. Which means that traditional and conservative concept of family can not accept the ‘alternative family’ as general family because of the insufficiency of the social recognition and law and institutional inertia. Therefore, to change the recognition of varying families which coexist as members of community, unification of legal and social concepts of family is inevitable. By doing so, we can prepare the ground for legal acceptance of variety of families followed by embodiment of reasonable family policy and also induce the change of social recognition.