Family-like? I don't know about that, depends on the family. I've heard it argued that families are primitive forms of socialism.
Speaking of dysfunctional, stifling families though, anyone read _The Corrections_ by Jonathan Franzen? The paperback's out and I'm a little ways into it. Pretty good so far. At one point a young, ex-college instructor is having a breakdown of sorts and is broke and is selling his books so he can continue taking his lover out on dates - a lover who's married to the Lithuanian ambassador to the UN. (Her husband goes into detail on how the IMF/World Bank's policies were disasterous for his country). Anyway, "Chip" here feels the used-book buyer is undervaluing his books:
"Try somewhere else, if you like," the buyer said, his hand hesitating above the cash register.
"No, no, you're right," Chip said. "Sixty-five is great."
It was pathetically obvious that he'd believed his books would fetch him him hundreds of dollars. He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society, and how happy he'd been to take them home. But Jurgen Habermas didn't have Julia's long, cool, pear-tree limbs, Theodor Adorno didn't have Julia's grapy smell of lecherous pliability, Fred Jameson didn't have Julia's artful tongue. By the begining of October, when Chip sent his finished script to Eden Procuro, he'd sold his feminists, his formalists, his structuralists, his poststructuralists, his Freudians, and his queers. To raise money for lunch for his parents and Denise, all he had left was his beloved cultural historians and his complete hardcover Arden Shakespeare; and because a kind of magic resided in the Shakespeare - the uniform volumes in their pale blue jackets were like an archipelago of safe retreats - he piled his Foucault and Greenblatt and hooks and Poovey into shopping bags and sold them all for $115. --- Who's Poovey? and here's the omniscient narrator discussing Chip's mother:
"Living under presidents as crooked as Nixon and stupid as Reagan and disgusting as Clinton, she'd lost interest in American flag-waving, and not one of the miracles she'd ever prayed to God for had come to pass; but at a Saturday wedding in the lilac season, from a pew of the Paradise Valley Presbyterian Church, she could look around and see two hundred nice people and not a single bad one. All her friends were nice and had nice friends, and since nice people tended to have nice children, Enid's world was like a lawn in which the bluegrass grew so thick that evil was simply choked out; a miracle of niceness."
Peter