Model Question and Answers for APSC | The life cycle of a joint family depends on economic factors rather than social values. Discuss.

Ans: The Indian family, wrote novelist VS Naipaul, was a clan that gave protection and identity and "saved people from the void". Not much has changed, as various recent research show.

The joint family is an extension of the nuclear family (parents and dependent children), and it typically grows when children of one sex do not leave their parents’ home at marriage but bring their spouses to live with them. Members of a joint family share all the tasks of food gathering, trade, food preparation, and child-rearing; and at times the social organization is so cohesive that the discrete nuclear families are barely visible in the daily chores, with children addressing all the adult women as “mother.”

The phases of a joint family can be explained by various factors, which were mostly cultural and at times, social, till now. However, as of late, economic considerations have been a major influencing factor.

Life Cycle of Joint Family:

The life cycle of a joint family denotes the different phases that a family goes through. A joint family evolves into a nuclear family and then goes back to being a joint family. For example, parents and their child live together till the child reaches marriageable age. Once the child grows up, he/she leaves home to start his/her own family. At this stage, the joint family evolves into a nuclear family. At a later stage, the old parents might move back in with their son/daughter for various reasons.

Size of families and Economics

• Sharing expenses on rent, food in costly cities basic cost of living led to joint family
• Joint families also reduce the burden of child-rearing and effectively make child-rearing affordable
• In agriculture increased cost of inputs makes the pooling of land labour machinery logical and keeps joint families intact despite the nominal distribution of land to new generations
• Rising property prices also make it difficult for people of the lower and working classes to afford a home of their own; which, again, makes a joint family an economic necessity.
• Indians continue to live in joint families because strong family bonds encourage family business and low employment of women which, in turn, strengthens family ties. For example, various trader communities like Jains and Aggarwals
• The economic challenges of the 21st century have been a major influence on the life cycles of joint families.
• It is easy to support parents with cohabitation than through remittance and transfers
• They became more nuclear because of non-family employment, rural-urban migration, and female employment which are economic forces in themselves

Other factors:

• Marriage is universal, the divorce rate is low, and there are few single-person households because of adults remaining single and childless. Demographic conditions for joint family households remain strong.

• One major reason why more young people continue to live with their parents is the increase in life expectancy - a 30- year-old man is more likely to live with at least one surviving parent in 2020 than in 1980.