The Family Function And Destiny Analysis

|What is the family ? There are many ways of answering this question , Family is the bedrock institution of civilization. From the Christian perspective it was the first institution God created, according to perspective of sociology and social science discipline, the family is central to rearing children to personal well being and to a stable economy. G. K. Chesterton’s striking metaphor of family as ‘this frail cord, flung from the forgotten hills of yesterday to the invisible mountains of tomorrow’. In more prosaic terms, it is the chain of personal connections that gives meaning to our human notions of past, present and future, a mysterious genetic entity that binds us in our short span of individual existence to our ancestors and to

Paul Schrecker in his book "The Family Its Function and Destiny" tells us that the family played two social roles. First, when a child is born into a family it changes the child from a social biological entity into a human being. The values endorsed by his culture is instilled into the child preparing him to meet the demands that his society will make upon him. The second important role, that the family plays is that it passes on the cultures and values from one generation to another and thereby helps in the social continuation, it perpetuates the culture. So, the family is the social milieu in which the individual originates and receive principles and social values that guide his behavior in society. It is the source of morality and the first pillar of the framework in which individual acquires first social life lessons. Thus, the chief function of the family is to see that the child is accultured to the values of the society. However each society's method of acculturation may differ depending on where the society emphasizes its values (Manjusri, B a r u a h, p6). Through the last three centuries, it seems that diversity and change have been the only constants in the history of the American family and that recent changes in American family life are only the latest in a series of disjunctive transformations in American family structure, roles, functions

Colonial women shouldered many duties that would later be monopolized by men. The colonial good wife engaged in trade and home manufacturing, supervised planting, and sometimes administered estates. Women's productive responsibilities limited the amount of time that they could devote to childcare. Many childrearing tasks were delegated to servants or older daughters. Ironically, the decline of patriarchal ideology was accompanied by the emergence of a much more rigid domestic division of labor. In New England, there were profound differences in the family patterns, according to the division of the colonies. In New England, there were the Middle colonies in which the patriarchy conception of family life began to breakdown as early as the 17th century, in the other part in the Chesapeake and the Carolinas, a more stable structure of families with patriarchy system become more until the mid-eighteenth century. During the eighteenth century patriarchy structure of families pervaded society, it was the competition aspect of the capitalist economy that produced a very radical change in family structure. The increasing gap between the middle-lower class and the wealthy made social classes even more pronounced. Wealthy family members were always considered more independent of each other; many middle class family members were just as independent. In those wealthy and middle