noun

• A nuclear family in which membership has remained constant, in the absence of divorce or other divisive factors.

  ‘As it turned out I ended up spending more quality time with my children than I think I would have had we remained an intact family.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Only a handful of prospective studies have compared behavioral outcomes for children experiencing a divorce to those from intact families while controlling for pre-divorce levels of the behaviors.’
  • ‘Second, stepfather families are more likely to divorce than intact families.’
  • ‘They're very representative of the typical poor white intact family in my area.’
  • ‘Isn't this what we hear from recreational drug users, who hold down jobs and have intact families?’
  • ‘Parents in intact families should indeed be free to speak to their children - but not primarily because of their self-expression rights, or their children's interests in hearing the parents' views.’
  • ‘Because older children were less likely to be living in an intact family, this would have, if anything, worked against the direction of the between-clinic difference that we obtained.’
  • ‘An intact family consisting of well-educated, professional parents and socially responsible children, the show's fictional Huxtable family served as a model for more enlightened, racially-balanced programming in the 1990s.’
  • ‘The data from this primarily white, upper-middle class, intact family sample are consistent with findings from samples having other demographic backgrounds.’
  • ‘And the children themselves are in a state of post-divorce mourning over the loss of an intact family and full-time connection to a parent.’
  • ‘And he found no significant difference in adjustment among children in shared custody and those living in intact family situations.’
  • ‘The remarkable development here is that Caleb, deep down, obviously longs for an intact family, no matter how vile or vicious they appear to be.’
  • ‘They wanted an intact family - one 5-year-old girl asked her mother to get two daddies in case one died.’
  • ‘Ministries that have assumed a two-parent, intact family structure may not work well for people who did not grow up in such families.’
  • ‘Society's only function would be to protect and support the child's family as its whole, intact family.’
  • ‘Marie grew up in an intact family living in a large urban area of Western Canada.’
  • ‘Irish pupils coming from a ‘broken family’ have a stronger association between their drug use and their connection to drug-using friends than do pupils coming from intact families, whereas the Bremen pupils show no such difference.’
  • ‘Still, the difference between the two groups in their discrepancy scores may indicate that adolescents from nonintact families have more ‘unfinished business’ with their parents than do adolescents from intact families.’
  • ‘It was estimated that in 1954, 80% of children in the United States lived with both biological parents whereas in 1997 only 50% had intact families.’