Publisher's Synopsis
Family Environment The word, Family‟ has been taken from the Roman word famulus'' meaning a servant. Family is an enduring association of parent and offspring's whose primary function are the socialization of the child and satisfaction of the members. However, to understand the influence of the family on the child, it is important to understand family and its functions. Family has been defined in the Oxford Dictionary as: (1) The body of persons who live in one house or under one head, including parents, children, servants etc. (2) The ground consisting of parents and their children, whether living together or not. (3) A person's children reared collectively. (4) Those descended or claimed descent from a common ancestry. A family is a child's first experience of relationships generally occurs within the family. It is a small intimate group of basic setting within which most children come in contact with society where they learn how to behave within a society and outside world. According to Burgess and Locke (1953, as cited at Mitchell, 1968), "A family is a group of persons united by the ties of marriage, blood or adoption constituting a single household, interacting and inter-communicating with each other in their respective social role of husband and wife, mother and father, son and daughter, brother and sister, creating and maintaining a common culture. The family has long been the backbone of every society. It is a group, which requires "people who are intimate and have frequent face-to-face contact with one another, have norms (that is, expectations regarding how members in the group should behave) in common and share mutually enduring and extensive influences. Thus, family members as members of a primary group have extreme influence upon each other. The second concept in the definition of family involves "obligations to each other." Obligations concern mutual commitment and responsibility for other members in the family system. The third concept in the definition entails "common residences." That is, to some extent, family members live together. Traditional anthropological definitions of the family which include aspects such as common residence, economic,
