Family Problems and Prospects around the World

Abstract

There is no better way of understanding your own family life and family patterns in your own culture than by seeing them against the background of world-wide human culture. Historically the family is over a million years old but there have been few attempts to study the family in the past. One example is Westermarcks work The History of Human Marriage in which he stated that marriage is rooted in the family and not the family in marriage. Marriage is the means by which the family provides for the development and socialization of the young so that they may take over their cultural heritage and carry it on in the future. It is dangerous to characterize marriage and the family in terms of narrow cultural groups. In fact every individual family is a unique constellation of human beings with no other family in the world exactly like it. On the other hand the small tribal groups with which this world began joined themselves into larger groups which amalgamated finally into civilizations. Civilizations occupied whole continents. Now we are in a leveling process in which great civilizations must either end in mutual extermination or merge into one vast common group. It is believed that they will merge into one group as a result of our modern communication and transportation and sense of the need to belong together if only for common survival. (excerpt)