
Across the country, nursing homes are easing COVID-19 restrictions and allowing visitors to return. This development marks a significant turning point in the fight against the pandemic. When the virus first emerged, senior care facilities raced to close their doors in an effort to keep their patients not just safe but alive. Now, with 75 percent of seniors having received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine, people are starting to think about going out and getting together with their loved ones. For many people, this means reconnecting with family, a group of people connected by blood, marriage, adoption, or agreed-upon relationship. While tips and suggestions on how to orchestrate these visits abound, let’s turn our attention to the issue of family from a sociological perspective.
The family in which you are raised and socialized is known as your family of orientation. Typically, this group consists of parent(s) and kids. Your family of orientation is not only an important primary group, small-scale, intimate face-to-face, long-lasting associations, it is also your first in-group, a social unit to which an individual belongs and feels a sense of “we.” This is the group that gives you your basic orientation to life and instills in you a set of beliefs and values.
For some people, visiting family in one of the aforementioned nursing homes is a chance to be with their mom, dad, or sibling, all of whom are part of their family of orientation. For others, it is a chance to be with their family of procreation, the family you choose to create through marriage, agreed-upon relationship, or the birth or adoption of children. The importance of visiting a spouse, partner, child, or dear friend can’t be underestimated. One woman in Florida got a job as a dishwasher in a nursing home so she could be near her husband, a resident of the home who has Alzheimer’s.

In addition to nursing homes, people are looking to just get out and visit. They are looking to go to the next town to visit with extended family, a family that has other kin such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins living in the same household or nearby, or the next state to reinvigorate other kinships, social relationship pattern based on blood, marriage or adoption. While one often assumes that nuclear families, consisting of one or more parents and children, were in constant contact during this ordeal, some families with essential workers made a concerted effort to stay away from each other as much as possible to reduce the likelihood of the disease spreading. A St. Louis doctor opted to live in an RV for a year so as not to infect her family with COVID-19. Humans are social creatures, and these relationships are an important part of the human experience.