[jonlong]

> you're not going to be able to cover all valid families that way

In fact the emoji committee backpedaled on family permutations for exactly this reason, and now recommends (exactly as you suggest) "symbolic" family glyphs and juxtaposition of existing people-emoji to describe families in detail.

You can read about it here: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22276-family-emoji-guidelin...

[jandrese]

Even the new proposal still has problems. It still has all of the variations between 1 and 2 parents and 1 and 2 children. IMHO it should all be collapsed down to just two Emoji:

1. Two people without children

2. Two people with children.

The former being short for "just the parents" or childless couples and the latter encompassing all families with kids regardless of the numbers. This is a compromise answer, but I think it serves the purpose best given the intended use of emojis.

And even better solution would be to figure out some iconography that would denote "family" without explicitly depicting the people, but I'm at a loss on that one. I mean the people are what families are all about, it's hard to divorce the concept.