ABSTRACT
The family (the small domestic group) is the most impressive, influential and important agency of what is now called ‘primary socialization’. The family provides an ‘introduction’, as it were, to the wider structure of society – to the knowledge of the wider pattern of kinship; the various groups and characteristics of the neighbourhood; the more detailed economic, governmental, educational, and religious organizations in society. The family is therefore integrally bound up with the life of all its members in the wider society. It is a community which reflects and, in its own particular way, digests, the experiences of its members in all their other forms of association, and it is in the context of this ongoing complexity of experience that children grow up into adulthood and into adult citizenship. The family therefore inhabits a common house, a ‘home’, in which, in conditions of relative privacy and security, this intimate and prolonged provision for the needs of its members takes place.
