Family and Community

Class 06 Social Science

Family is the foundation of human society. Ideally, members of a family support each other in their many duties and tasks.

Community, a bigger unit, also implies that people do their best to support each other. ‘Community’ can be defined in several ways and there are many kinds of community. Ultimately, communities are interdependent.

Family

The family is the fundamental and most ancient unit of any society. In Indian society today, there are several types of families - from joint families to nuclear families. A joint family has several generations living together - grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, brothers, sisters and cousins. A nuclear family is limited to a couple and their children, and sometimes one parent and children.

Roles and Responsibilities

Relationships among family members are based on love, care, cooperation and interdependence. ‘Cooperation’ means ‘working together’. Each member of the family has a role and responsibility towards other members. For example, parents are responsible for raising their children to become happy individuals and responsible members of the society. But also, as children grow up, they take on more responsibilities in the home to help other family members.

The family is also a ‘school’, where children learn important values such as ahimsa, dāna (giving), sevā (service) and tyāga (sacrifice). Individuals in the family often give up their own needs to take care of the family’s needs.

Community

Families are connected not only within themselves, but also with other families and the people around them. Such a group of connected people may be called a ‘community’.

Members of a community come together for various reasons, like celebrating festivals and organising feasts, weddings and other events. In some villages, people come together to support each other with agricultural practices like land preparation, sowing and harvesting. Over time, communities often agreed upon some practices on the use of shared natural wealth and resources such as water, grazing lands and forest produce.

New types of communities have also emerged in the last 30 or 40 years. Residents’ Welfare Associations in many urban areas are examples of communities that make their own rules and regulations. Those could be rules about waste management, cleanliness of common areas, taking care of pets, and so on. People living in the community participate in making such rules and regulations.

Communities are ultimately interdependent. For example, the same Residents’ Welfare Associations will depend on the trading community for supplies and also on municipal workers to handle waste. In the complex societies, everyone depends on a number of other people and communities.