ABSTRACT
However its life spreads into the wider community, there is a sense in which a family is a bounded universe. The members of a family— parents and their young children—inhabit a world of their own making, a community of feeling and fantasy, action and precept. Even before their infant’s birth, the expectant couple make plans for his family membership, and they prepare not only a bassinet but a prospect of what he will be to them. He brings his own surprises, but in time there is acquaintance, then familiarity, as daily the family members compose their interconnection through the touch and tone by which they learn to know one another. Each one comes to have a private transcript of their common life, recorded through his own emotions and individual experiences.
