Let's take a step back and consider the historical purpose of the family: to ensure that a woman was not impregnated by a man other than her husband, by restricting her sexual freedom, so that he could pass property on to his legitimate heir. That's why when the familia originated in ancient Rome, for example, it was only for rich people.
Then there is the division of labor involved, between women who (according to conservative institutions' descriptions of a healthy family, and based on strong social pressure sometimes historically enforced by vicious sexist discrimination) did unpaid reproductive work in the domestic sphere, and men who did productive work in the public sphere and got paid, allowing them financial leverage over their wives and children.
Move on to the introduction of the family among poor people, and the use of the family to break up traditional bonds of tribal solidarity in order to make it easier to control the poor, and to make people depend on toeing the line of the ruling rich in order to have the protection of a family from the gay-bashing, sexual harassment and assault, social neglect, ostracism, and economic pressure used to punish people who don't conform to the "traditional" heterosexual ideal. Which could mean going to church, voting Republican, or joining the Klan to make sure your family is "respectable" to the local powers that be. Or not voting (as a Black person). Or not hiding Jews in your attic because you don't know whether your spouse will tell and you are too afraid to ask. Or wearing toxic makeup.
Consider next the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that happen most often within the family. Yes, these are toxic families and not the idealized ones, but the point is that the family as an institution tends to encourage this type of behavior by being a major prop of men's domination over women and children, as well as encouraging neuroses such as the Oedipus complex.
The family also becomes a tool for propping up the power of the state, which exploits family feeling to coerce people, as terrorists do also; of the corporations which market to the insecurities of men, women, and children who need to fill an institution that is based on commerce with detritus that creates the illusion that it is a bond based on love; of monarchy; of caste privilege; and of course of the moneyed families, whose nepotism and inherited fortunes perpetuate their unjust free ride at the public expense.
The loving filial bonds of the slave, the common-law spouse, the homosexual, the tribal member, the trans person, the person of color, the follower of a minority religion, the atheist, the polyamorous person, the poor person, the immigrant, the employee, the radical, the foreigner, or the incarcerated person, on the other hand, has seldom been respected by the bourgeois society which creates the hypocritical cult of marriage ... while the ruling rich have working-class nannies to raise their kids and meanwhile be seduced by the family father whose role as head of the family makes his word privileged over hers, in between his seducing his business partner's wife, while she can't leave while he makes the money ... whether formalized via legal or religious marriage or not.
There's not a more "normal" family than the First Family, which includes so much of the ugliness that society accepts to make the family both possible and privileged. A healthy family is one from which socialism, or simply poverty, has removed the commercial relationship that is at the capitalist family's heart.
