ADVERTISEMENTS:
Some of the main features of family are: (i) universality (ii) emotional basis (iii) limited size (iv) formative influence (v) nuclear position (vi) responsibility of the members (vii) social regulation and (viii) permanent and temporary.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Besides the characteristics mentioned above, a family is possessed of several distinctive features. It influences the entire life of people in numerous ways.
(i) Universality:
Family is the most universal group. It is the first institution in the history of men. It has existed in every age and in every society and is found in all parts of the world. No culture or society has ever existed without some form of family organization. Each one of us is a member of some or the other family. No other group is so universal as the family is.
(ii) Emotional basis:
The family is a fundamental unit of human society. It is based on our impulses of mating, procreation and parental care. It is a close-knit group which fortifies these emotions.
(iii) Limited size:
The size of a family is of necessity limited for it is defined by biological conditions which it cannot transcend. Other groups may be smaller than a family, but they are not so because of biological conditions.
(iv) Formative influence:
ADVERTISEMENTS:
The family exercises the most profound influence over its members. It moulds the character of individuals. Its influence in infancy determines the personality structure of the individual. From its initial units the father and mother, the child receives his physical inheritance.
Freud and other psychologists have proved that a child exhibits the same character and mental tendencies in adult age which he acquires in the family. Confucius rightly remarked that if you want to improve society, improve family. “To be well born is to possess the greatest of all gifts. To be ill born there is nothing which this world can afford that will be adequate compensation for the lack of good heredity.”
(v) Nuclear position:
The family is the nucleus of all other social groups. The distinctive characteristics of marriage parental obligations and sibling relations make family the primary institutional cell of a society. The whole social structure is built of family units.
(vi) Responsibility of the members:
In the family the child learns the meaning of social responsibility and the necessity for cooperation. As MacIver aptly describes, “In times of crisis men may work, and fight and die for their country, but they toil for their families all their lives.” In it the child develops his basic attitudes and ideals. It is a great agency of the socialization of the child.
(vii) Social regulation:
The family is peculiarly guarded by social customs and legal regulations. It is not easy to violate them. Family is the group in which the consenting parties may freely enter but which they cannot easily leave or dissolve. Marriages are not trivially taken.
(viii) Permanent and temporary:
Family as an institution is permanent and universal, while as an association it is temporary and transitional. When the son marries he goes out of the family and starts another family which again may give rise to more families.
All this tends to show that although the family is one of the most limited groups of the society, it differs from all of them in being a distinct type of group. It is the smallest kinship group. It usually begins when the partners marry; it changes when the sons marry, it ends when one of the partners dies.
When the children are small and entirely dependent upon parents, the family looks like a compact human group. When children begin to grow in age, this compactness begins to become loose and when they marry the old family disintegrates and new families rise up. The original relations are reversed, the parents become dependent upon the children.