nuclear family

plural nuclear families

1. The traditional western family unit, consisting of two parents (traditionally a mother and a father) and their children.

   1 more example

   The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.

   2020 March, David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake”, in The Atlantic, →ISSN, archived from the original on 26 Mar 2020

   Antonyms: nontraditional family