The small family unit of parents and children. ‘The institutionalization of the nuclear family household…emerges in interaction with the processes of capitalism, as well as in relation to existing (patriarchal) processes’ (Lier (2007) Geog. Compass 1, 4). D. Lal (1998) claims that ‘capitalism is not inevitably connected with the nuclear family or even individualism, although its genesis depended on both’. Phillips (2009) Canad. Geogr./Géog. canad. 53, 2, 230, writing of colonial Canada, argues that ‘though they often seemed natural, universal, and inevitable, colonial nuclear families were in fact produced through a series of laws and customs that regulated sex and marriage’.