Nuclear Family Values, Extended Family Lives shows how the current emphasis on the nuclear family - with its exclusion of the extended family - is narrow, even deleterious, and misses much of family life. This omission is tied to gender, race, and class.

This book is broken down into six chapters. Chapter one discusses how, when promoting "family values" and talking about "family as the basic unit of American society," social commentators, politicians, and social scientists alike typically ignore extended kin ties and focus only on the nuclear family. Chapters two and...