In order to make sure that your verbs correctly refer to their subjects, it is important to determine the tense and verb form based on the subject of the sentence.
Verbs used in the present tense take the base form of the verb.
I am eating. I have eaten. Often, verb form is hard to determine due to the ambiguity of the subject. In the first sentence, family is plural because it denotes the members, the individual parts of the family. The second sentence, however, uses the word family to refer to the singular collective unit.