Textbook for German Integration

We started working with a new textbook in our German integration class a couple of weeks ago. The publisher Hueber developed the Schritte series for use in the German Integration classes. The premise of the series is to present typical situations that an immigrant to German might experience and use the situations to teach German vocabulary and grammar.

There are 6 books in the series, each 2 books covers the information for one language level. Schritte 1 and 2 cover the A1 language level. Schritte3 and 4 cover A2. Schritte 5 and 6 cover B1.

Each pair of books presents a group of people that includes someone learning German. Each chapter (Lektion) begins with a story about the people that introduces the topic for the chapter.

So it was in the first chapter of Schritte 3 we met the group that we would follow though the next 10 weeks. Getting into a car to go to the airport was a man, his teenage son from a previous marriage, a woman and her her teenage daughter from a previous mariage. They were going to the airport to meet their new au-pair from South American. It seems that the man and woman are not married but are living together and are about to have a baby. The kids were trying to figure out what their relationship to each other was. And neither wanted to be bothered with a trip to the airport to meet this au-pair. The textbook used the word "family" to describe the couple and their kids.

But it started be thinking about a couple of things. First, here was a textbook for a government supported program that was presenting an unmarried couple living together and having a baby as a typical German family. Maybe, I'm jaded by a article that I recent read about  the Texas school board and the kind of pressure that they place on publishers to print the board's version of history. But I find it hard to image something like this in a US government supported program. Fox "News" would go crazy.

But, of course, if you step back a bit you can see what they are doing. I mean you have immigrants coming to Germany from all sorts of countries. Some of the countries having very narrow ideas about the relationship between men and women. In Germany, they are likely to be exposed to new things, and this course is an opportunity to begin that sort of exposure.

I also asked myself, "would I initially use the term 'family' to describe the couple and their children." This is not a question about judging their relationship, I'm just wondering if "family" is the term that I would use. Our teacher was quite convinced that the typical German would call this a family. Certainly, if they were people that I knew and they called themselves "family", I think I would used the term as well. But without such familiarity, I think I would more likely use a description like "living together like a family" or "a couple living together with their kids from previous relationships/marriages".

Quick check of Webster's on the web turned up this definition:

a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head

I think that applies to this situation. So calling this a "family" is certainly not wrong. I'm just not sure it is the terminology that I would initially use.