Family is the basic unit of close knit people jointly exerting for a living and for prosperity in terms acceptable to them. These goals have to be sought with the means available in the society whether the means accrue to the family by hereditary rights or each family has to newly acquire them, the family has to function with them in the prevalent economy. The nature and potentialities of these means of livelihood that are available to a family really shape its composition. Family is a part of

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... ociety and its composition and structure are its adaptations to factors conditioning primarily its survival in the pursuit of economic goals. The composition of the family and its structure, therefore, may not be properly understood unless we relate them to nature and scope of the means of livelihood available to the family. This brings us to the consideration of occupation as a determination of the family composition. Family also convey the relationships of family members and how these relationships are manages and how they breakdown due to circumstances. Family is the basic and universal social structure of human society. It fulfils needs and performs functions which are indispensable for the continuity, integration and change in the social system. The forms and functions of family have undergone adaptive changes with changes in the technological and economic superstructure of society. One way to characterize this change is to associate conjugal or nuclear forms of families with relatively modernized or industrial society and extended or joint types of families with traditional agrarian and pre-industrial societies. The tradition from extended family-based society to nuclear family based society is thus, in essence, an example of structural change, since this involves systematic changes in role-structures through processes of differentiation. A Nuclear Family is itself an example of structural differentiation from the more composite social structure of an extended family. Usually such families were patrilocal and patriarchal; in such families women had relatively subordinate position; all members were guided in their activities by an elder family head and inter personal relations of all members were authoritarian. Family in such society was also the unit of economic, cultural, religious and political activities. Feelings of individualism and personal freedom were foreign to this type of family organization. Since the economic structure of such societies was closed and technological innovations were rare, the total volume of knowledge, which existed in the form of folklore, mythologies, riddles and folk songs, etc. could be handed down to the younger generation by the elders through the medium of oral tradition. As the industrial revolution progressed, the transition from the extended to conjugal forms of families became much more accelerated and the latter form became a predominant feature of society. The extended family changes into nuclear family, the socialization of children in the family takes on a new direction; the child has now to grow in a comparatively much smaller social universe. In a nuclear family the emotional universe of a child oscillates between degrees of attachment and alienation.