The Family We Imagine: Tradition, Identity and Care in a World in Motion

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When “family” becomes a moral badge, who gets to belong—and who is pushed outside the story?

What makes a family? The question seems simple, yet it touches something delicate: the point where the past insists and the present rearranges itself. In Bergson’s terms (1977), human experience unfolds in “duration”, where what has been lived does not fall away like an archive, but remains active, shaping how we feel, judge and decide today. So when we speak of “family”, we are not only describing a household form; we are speaking of a social memory that still operates in everyday language, in politics, in schools, in the media, and—most of all—in what each person feels is worthy of belonging.

Within this frame, family works as a symbolic map of belonging. Valsiner (2014) analyses how human beings organise life through signs: words and images loaded with value that orient what is considered right, possible and desirable. “Family” is one of these dense signs. At times it names care and refuge; at other times it becomes a moral boundary. Its force comes from the way it does more than describe reality: it also prescribes a way of living. That is why the diversity of family arrangements is not merely a social fact; it is a cultural movement that puts pressure on how a society decides who counts as “us”.

This prescriptive power has deep roots. Vico argued that societies create institutions through a “poetic fantasy”: a human capacity to craft shared forms that help us bear uncertainty and give order to life (Tateo, 2017). From this angle, the ideal of the “traditional family” appears as a symbolic construction that offers emotional stability when the world changes too quickly. In times of polarisation, that image is used as a moral lighthouse: it promises clarity, it promises security, it promises a single story. The trouble begins when that story turns into a device of rigidity, able to translate real differences—reconstituted families, lone mothers or fathers, same-sex couples, child-free households—into reasons for suspicion, correction, or exclusion. Politics does not only debate laws; it contests imaginaries, and “family” often becomes the perfect emblem for that struggle.

Life, however, refuses to be contained so easily. In every transition—a separation, a bereavement, a migration, a birth, adolescence—people look for cultural resources to hold themselves and find their bearings. Zittoun (2006) analyses how, in moments of change, we turn to stories, images, memories and practices that allow us to cross life-thresholds and project ourselves towards what we are not yet. That projection is not a luxury; it is a human necessity. At the same time, the environment pushes and channels. Tateo (2016) reflects on how cultural frames orient development, marking directions that sometimes widen—and sometimes narrow—the space of possibilities. In that intersection, family operates as a field of forces: identity is negotiated there, legitimacy is disputed, belonging is learned and, at times, silence is learned too.

This becomes decisive when we speak of life projects. In some contemporary approaches, a “life project” appears as a sociocognitive task of organisation: setting goals, planning, building a coherent narrative in order to move through the world (Coscioni, 2022). That perspective helps us observe how people order priorities and make decisions. Yet from a cultural-semiotic view, a life project appears as something broader and more alive: a construction of meaning that unfolds over time, embodied in feeling, altered by each experience, even before it can be put into words. Boulanger (2021) describes this dimension as a “shadow trajectory”: a way experience silently organises itself while we live, and only later becomes tellable. In practice, this means many decisions do not emerge from a perfect plan, but from small re-organisations of meaning: a conversation that shifts direction, a loss that reshapes priorities, an unexpected act of care that redefines what matters. When the idea of family is used as a rigid norm, it interferes with that movement: it narrows the possibilities for those who need to invent forms of life that fit their realities.

If public debate is to match the demands of human development, it needs an ethic of symbolic co-existence. Hermans (2001) proposes thinking of identity as an inner dialogue of voices: a polyphony that cannot be reduced to a single definition of the self. Seen from there, a family looks less like a mould and more like a relational system of positions: voices, generations, agreements, tensions, repairs. Marková (2016) argues that our humanity is sustained through dialogue; applied to family, this means recognising that care and mutual recognition matter more than the “correct” household form. When a society privileges a single family model, it weakens its capacity for dialogue and dulls its sensitivity to people’s lived experience.

The issue, then, is not about defending a single image of family. It is about strengthening the conditions that make care possible in multiple forms. That calls for cultural change across beliefs and economic levels: policies that protect those who care, public language that does not humiliate difference, media that represent diversity without turning it into an exception, and educational spaces that teach people to read critically the symbols that organise life. A mature society recognises itself in its flexibility to sustain real bonds, not in its rigidity to impose an ideal.

In the end, to speak about family is to speak about the future. And the future is better built when the symbol “family” stops being a moral border and becomes a shared promise: that every life deserves a place where care can take shape, even when that shape differs from the one nostalgia tries to fix.