Family and Society: The Legal Concept and Social Functions of the Family

The family as an institution is protected by the Russian state and is the object of its policy. In the background of the aggravated demographic crisis, when implementing it and developing legislation, it is necessary to take into account the essential features of the family and its functionality, the implementation of which is one of the most important factors of social dynamics. In this perspective, on the basis of the sociological, economic and legal approaches presented in academic publications, the author dwells on the problem of the social purpose of the family and its legislative definition. Since the semantic content of the sociological and legal concepts of the family are not identical, the author criticizes a legal definition proposed for legalization, which essentially fixes the legal construction of legal relations. In the current Family Code of the RF, the term «family member» is already used to determine the range of sectoral family legal relations, and the introduction of a legal feature into the definition of a family leads to a distortion of its social nature. In addition, not all relations in the family are regulated by law, which means they have the form of legal ones, and, conversely, not all relations between family members assume that they live as one family in its sociological sense. The work explains the social functions of the institution of the family: economic, demographic, cultural and informational, implemented in their relationship. Particular attention is paid to the economic function; the family is presented as a fundomental social good, an objectively necessary sociocultural factor of the national economic system, as well as its independent special structural element.