Quotes & Sayings About Non Biological Families

In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educational relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood — Barry D. Adam

The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other. — Kenneth E. Boulding

proponents of this 'ancient commune' theory argue that the frequent infidelities that characterise modern marriages, and the high rates of divorce, not to mention the cornucopia of psychological complexes from which both children and adults suffer, all result from forcing humans to live in nuclear families and monogamous relationships that are incompatible with our biological software.1 Many scholars vehemently reject this theory, insisting that both monogamy and the forming of nuclear families are core human behaviours. Though — Yuval Noah Harari

Our ancestors are looking for us even if we're not looking for them. And by our ancestors I mean our bloodlines and the ancestors of the place where we live and our spiritual kin who go beyond our biological families. We could be walking around carrying an entire ancestral history of the wrong kind for us. — Robert Moss

Family' is not just a biological word, it's an an operative one. — Andrew Vachss

As is true in many families where children create enormously upsetting diversions from core family secrets, Elana's family fixed on her behavior as further proof that the secret should remain buried. When behavior is truly a distraction for the unspeakable, therapist after therapist may be brought in, each attempting to intervene at the wrong level, mistakenly addressing such signals at the biological, behavioral, intrapsychic, or interpersonal level, while completely missing the unimaginable maze of secrecy in which such actions are embedded. — Evan Imber-Black

Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool. — Laura Kalpakian

We are connected, like it or not, to the ancestors of our biological families, and their templates — Robert Moss

With biological and neurological complexity entirely new families of affectionate fears, devoted threats and dedicated displeasures are birthed, and then with socioeconomic and cultural complexity comes a fresh ocean of new and unique illnesses. — John Zande

By the late 20th century, the idea that parents can harm their children by abusing and neglecting them (which is true) grew into the idea that parents can mold their children's intelligence, personalities, social skills, and mental disorders (which is not). Why not? Consider the fact that children of immigrants end up with the accent, values, and norms of their peers, not of their parents. That tells us that children are socialized in their peer group rather than in their families: it takes a village to raise a child. And studies of adopted children have found that they end up with personalities and IQ scores that are correlated with those of their biological siblings but uncorrelated with those of their adopted siblings. That tells us that adult personality and intelligence are shaped by genes, and also by chance (since the correlations are far from perfect, even among identical twins), but are not shaped by parents, at least not by anything they do with all their children. — Steven Pinker