Parents in the context of "Family unit"

Family (from Latin: familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). It forms the basis for social order. Ideally, families offer predictability, structure, and safety as members mature and learn to participate in the community. Historically, most human societies use family as the primary purpose of attachment, nurturance, and socialization.

Anthropologists classify most family organizations as matrifocal (a mother and her children), patrifocal (a father and his children), conjugal (a married couple with children, also called the nuclear family), avuncular (a man, his sister, and her children), or extended (in addition to parents, spouse and children, may include grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins).

In Greek mythology, Theia (/ˈθiːə/; Ancient Greek: Θεία, romanized: Theía, lit. 'divine') also called Thea, Thia, Euryphaessa, Aethra or Basileia, was one of the Titans, the children of Uranus (Sky) and Gaia (Earth). She is the goddess of minerals and gemstones.

Her brother-husband is Hyperion, a god of the light, and together they are the parents of Helios (the Sun), Selene (the Moon), and Eos (the Dawn). She seems to be the same figure as Aethra, who is the wife of Hyperion and mother of his children in some accounts. Like her husband, Theia features scarcely in myth, being mostly important for the children she bore, though she appears in some texts and rare traditions.

The immediate family is a defined group of relations, used in rules or laws to determine which members of a person's family are affected by those rules. It normally includes a person's parents, siblings, spouse, children, and parents-in-law after marriage. It can contain others connected by birth, adoption, marriage, civil partnership, or cohabitation, such as grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, siblings-in-law, half-siblings, cousins, adopted children, step-parents/step-children, and cohabiting partners. The term close relatives is used similarly.

The concept of "immediate family" acknowledges that a person has or may feel particular responsibilities towards family members, which may make it difficult to act fairly towards non-family (hence the refusal of many companies to employ immediate family members of current employees), or which call for special allowance to recognise this responsibility (such as compensation on death, or permission to leave work to attend a funeral). It is used by travel insurance policies to determine a set of people on the basis of whose health someone might need to cancel a journey or return early. The concept is used by some countries' inheritance laws.

The parents' rights movement is a civil rights movement primarily interested in human rights affecting parents related to family law, including child custody. Parents' rights are connected to parental responsibility and right to family life.

Parenting time is the amount of time each parent spends with their children when parents separate. Disagreements about how to measure it and how to divide it often cause controversy between the parents.