Tradicional is over, love is up!

3 min readJul 2, 2021

Since the past centuries, much has been said about the “traditional Brazilian family”, which is a model of a family composed of a father, a mother, and children, in which generally, in this context, the highest position in the hierarchy is concentrated in the hands of the father figure.

The years passed, other necessary familiar molds surfaced and they started to have more and more voice. The traditional ends up being so poor next to the richness of the plurality that we find in this gigantic and vast country. It is not possible to treat the family formation with a single model, since in society more and more different types of formation coexist, and this existence, as the years progress, also advances in not following the old patterns.

Today we see them, because, in fact, they have always existed, but they were still silenced and said as “non-standard”, families with separated parents, headed by women, headed by men, grandparents, uncles, cousins, friends; families of two fathers, families of two mothers, adoptive families, families without any of them, families of friends, who do not have blood ties, but whose ties have grown inside the heart.

That’s what family is. Love makes a family. The family is made up of love, affection, understanding, acceptance, and all of this can come from where one already knows or expects, or it can be formed and molded throughout life. Family is home.

The Brazilian writer Fabíola Simões, in one of her texts, says that two things are essential in life: a ceiling and affection. And the ceiling with affection is home. The ceiling can be divided daily or not. The family can be seen every day or once a year. It can be found at weekend lunches or at a bar table for an after-hours chat. The fact is that affection makes the home, and home is where we are with the people we love, whether inside raised walls or in the heart.

And all this with love, form what we can call a family.