A nuclear family is just parents and their children. The nuclear family model.
It is treated as traditional and is in fact a recent and local arrangement. The word nuclear here means a core rather than anything to do with physics.
1nounnuclear familyJust parents and their children.
“The whole estate was built for the nuclear family and nobody else.”
nuclear family is a family.
Nuclear plus family, from Latin nucleus, a kernel; the term comes from twentieth-century sociology.
From nuclear + family.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Family & People