Definition is the problem.

In 1980, then U.S. President Jimmy Carter called a conference to deal with the problems of the family. Before the conference got underway there was a major brouhaha over definition. The alternative lifestyles lobby refused to have the Family." The name was changed to the "White House Conference on Families." Opening the conference, Jimmy Carter said that: "We find the essence of family life in the universal need for mutual support, for nurturing a safe haven for children and for old people, and for love: a love that doesn't always ask questions or impose qualifications on others before it is given, a kind of unselfish love ... That love can be found, obviously, in many different circumstances."

Jimmy Carter is a devout Christian and he tends to believe in the power of love. But, love and good intentions couldn't save his conference from disintegrating into squabbling.

It seems an apt metaphor for families. They are, for most of us, our wellsprings of love; they are also a source of friction and tension. Finding a balance between these competing forces is the trick to making a family work. And, there's no Golden Rule to help us find the right balance, because each family is unique.

Many people have tried to define "the family." Jimmy Carter and his experts ran into trouble when they tried.

One very broad definition is a household of persons related by blood, marriage, or adoption. But, that doesn't help us much.

Paul Vitz, a New York University psychologist, tried to define families by how we picture them. He carefully reviewed social studies textbooks to see how families were depicted. Here's what he came up with: No explicit, objective definition of family is given; instead an implicit subjective definition is provided by the pictures and stories referring to family life. In these cases, the definition provided by the images is that a family consists of those people, whoever they might be, that the child lives with. Families are often shown without a father, sometimes without a mother, and sometimes as a couple without children.

"Still more importantly, basic ideas with respect to the nature of family are entirely excluded from these texts. There is not one reference to marriage as the foundation of the family. Indeed not even the word marriage or wedding occurs once in the 40 books,... It is clear that marriage is not seen as having any relevance, much less a central one, to the definition of family..."

Canada's respected Vanier Institute of the Family sees families defined by their function rather than by who's in them: "Family is the principal means through which we care for one another; the primary unit of learning, education, and socialization; a source of emotional sustenance and support; a significant unit of both economic production and consumption."

And, that's probably the best approach. We can no longer define families by who belongs to them because they are all so different. However, we can define families by what they do, because most of them still must handle the same tasks they have handled for many, many generations.