The family is an inexhaustible topic in many scientific and professional fields. This paper deals with the exploratory ways in which the family is defined. In addition, the paper analyzes attitudes towards marriage, cohabitation, divorce, having children and same-sex families. In modern societies, the traditional (nuclear) family, due to the ever-present globalization and the aspiration to create a system of new values based on a new way of understanding interpersonal relationships, is changing and becoming so-called "modern family" based on the settings of modern and postmodern societies whose characteristics include the freedom and unfetteredness of all its members. Thus, the term "family", in modern and postmodern societies, acquires new meanings, forms and new definitions. The aim of this paper is to establish what social formations students perceive as a family and what attitudes they have towards marriage, cohabitation, divorce, having children and same-sex unions. The paper is based on the findings of a quantitative research on a sample of students of the Republic of Croatia through an online survey (N = 170). The research presented and analyzed the way in which the family is defined, and gained new insights into students' attitudes about marriage, cohabitation, divorce, having children and same-sex unions.