Family And Industrialization

Modern Family is affected by many of the changes originating in the West especially industrialism with the concomitant growth of scientific knowledge and extension of communications. Hence, the family is feeling in itself the effects of these changes. Owing to the inrush of people from the villages to the cities, the traditional joint family is disintegrating, creating thereby a number of psychological, social, and economic problems of a growing importance. There is weakening of joint family under modern influence.

Industrialization has contributed much towards family disorganization. As a result most of the important ties that bind all family members together in an agricultural society began to loosen. Again, the worker unaccustomed to the work life in the factory also becomes disorganized and in such a condition is not able to enjoy the richness of the family.

This condition affects his emotions also, leading him to seek pleasure through unnatural forces like alcohol, prostitution, etc. Factory occupation has made members of the same family economically independent. The joint family is gradually disappearing.

But so far as family life is concerned these tendencies do not seem to offer any serious problem-that is certainly so concerning juvenile delinquency. The problems affecting are not so much family as political and moral problems; traditional morality is vanishing and nothing seems to be there to take its place.

While the modern tendency to divorce has not yet spread so much that to birth control is being propagated among better classes in spite of the strenuous opposition against it by leaders. By comparing the various statistics available it is difficult to decide how far the birth-rate has been changing over the decades. Family planning reduction is felt more among the more educated classes which are precisely the most needed for the development and progress of the country.

Though the family, as being the germinal cell and firmest support of society cannot be treated as a simple set of dependent social variable as some sociologists contend its relations with society are obvious.

As a social institution the family is influenced not only by the social forces in general, but also-and particularly in modern times-by the state which is the supreme institution in every developed society. It is society which through custom, tradition, and public opinion, is able to control the forms and ways that the family may absorb-whether it is to be patrilocal, matrilocal, multilocal joint, nuclear, etc.

It also influences those practices or institutions such as courtship or the way of choosing a wife, and decides whether it has to be by capture, consideration, purchase, or by free contract.

It establishes the ways and rites of the marriage ceremony, which in many societies is a public event; and among other things, upholds the prohibition of marrying with certain degrees of consanguinity or affinity, and the observance of the rules of exogamy or endogamy between groups.