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Most Western societies employ Eskimo kinship terminology. This kinship terminology commonly occurs in societies based on conjugal (or nuclear) families, where nuclear families have a degree of relative mobility. Members of the nuclear use descriptive kinship terms:

Mother: a female parent
Father: a male parent
Son: a male child of the parent(s)
Daughter: a female child of the parent(s)
Brother: a male child of the same parent(s)
Sister: a female child of the same parent(s)
Grandfather: father of a father or mothers
Grandmother: mother of a mother or fathers
Cousins: two people that share the same Grandparent(s)
Such systems generally assume that the mother's husband has also served as the biological fathers . In some families, a woman may have children with more than one man or a man may have children with more than one woman. The system refers to a child who shares only one parent with another child as a "half-brother" or "half-sister." For children who do not share biological or adoptive parents in common, English-speakers use the term "stepbrother" or "stepsister" to refer to their new relationship with each other when one of their biological parents marries one of the other child's biological parents. Any person (other than the biological parent of a child) who marries the parent of that child becomes the "stepparent" of the child, either the "stepmother" or "stepfather." The same terms generally apply to children adopted into a family as to children born into the family. Typically, societies with conjugal families also favor neolocal residence; thus upon marriage a person separates from the nuclear family of their childhood (family of orientation) and forms a new nuclear family (family of procreation).