System approaches to Indian Family System

"A family is a place where minds come in contact with one another. If these minds love one another, the home will be as beautiful as a flower garden. But if these minds get out of harmony with one another, it is like a storm that plays havoc with the garden."

— Buddha

Family as a System

Family is a system of interconnected and independent individuals, none of who can be understood in isolation. Each and every family member plays a particular role. There has to be set of rules about how it operates. Family tends to develop a pattern about these sorts of things. These sets of Pattern become unspoken rules. Each and every family develops their pattern and thus the rules. These rules and roles played by each member of family keep the system doing things as they have been done known in general as homeostatic or system’s equilibrium. The patterns are formed by various relationships between each element like the marital relationship parents or child relationship. The family system generally causes a phenomenon called circular causality which means each that each family member’s behavior is caused by, and causes the other family member’s behaviors in circular channels.


The Indian family system is rather complex and is highly partilineal in nature. The family formation is celebrated by marriage which is generally arranged opposite to the practice of rest of world. The families here are generally joint family, unlike that of the west. The marriage is Indian society are generally status oriented (social, financial status) not like than individual oriented. Each family value and culture helps in transformation of it into society as whole. Conceptualization of these structures of Indian family and residence oriented household is so necessary to have a great deal of analytical clarity. Unless the planner and policy maker understand whole gamut of issues, they may come-up with inappropriate policy frameworks.

The authoritative power in Indian family rest in the hands of male while women in background develop an attitude of compromise and acclimatization with the circumstances. While the males (either Husband, Brother, Father, Sons) are given preferential rights and carry the family name and tradition. In the background this has indirectly resulted in poor literacy and empowerment of the women. The decision makers are male who are internal to the system and who can change the performance of other entity of the system thus it is highly centralized. While interesting part of Indian family system is that the designer of the system is one who is concerned with the system is the same entity which is the decision maker. Thus conceptualization of family system ultimate lies in the hand of male counterpart of system.

Figure 1: A Family Control System (Indian Family)


The above diagram shows the highly centralized and dominant status of elderly male, in Indian family system, who plays an important role in making decision, rules and formulates goals of family. He who was the one who discriminate what is right and wrong to the family. While, in family women were passive players. As education is entering into the rural society; the polar orientation is shifting and which thus result in better detection of opportunity and threats in society. Consequently it would therefore result in appropriate relation and execution of chosen response.

Family is an open system which always interacts with the environment of the system or other system. For example, religion is a conceptual system which regulate the life any Indian family system. It is controlled by information and fuelled by financial, social and political stability.
While women as a sub system of Indian family system had a passive role to play in the core process of system. This incase always resulted in high amount Entropy. In present context lies has reduce seldom applicable but these ought to be laden into consortium.

Figure 2: Family System


The above (figure 2) shows the family system model, its boundary and various external factors which directly or indirectly affect the input and output of Family system.

Environmental Orientation

As family is a sub-atom of a whole social system there is profound interaction between system and environment. While the environment affects the system, the system in turns affects the society or result in formation of society. The boundary of family is so less than occurring that there is an intensity of interaction with the environment. The system should be highly conscious for averting the entropy by importing financial, informational energy source from the environment.

Hierarchy of Family

There is high level of hierarchy in the Indian family systems while the higher levels are been dominated by male member as father, husband, brother. This hierarchical structure helps the ability to learn, evolve and adapt to the environment in a dynamic way for goal seeking changes.

The hierarchy of Indian family systems always helps to understand the main three measures to how it contributes to society.

1. Effectiveness: There is need to analyze how a family will respond to the external environment, how well it can face the challenges to achieve its goal through transformation.

2. Efficiency: Since to achieve the sustainable parameter there is need to optimize the input of the family with a use of minimum resources to achieve the intended transformation.


3. Efficacy: It is measure of extend to which a family contribute to the society of which it is subsystem.

To achieve all the above their ought to be a proper feed-back mechanism with proper buffer regulation this feedback regulation can be the tool of ICT which can help to achieve a proper deviation correction mechanism to the family system it can be recognized in the event of population growth family health, Economic shabbily.

Process of the Family

The table shows various processes which are a set of interdependent and linked procedures which, at every stage, consume one or more resources to convert inputs into outputs to achieve the family goal. The processes are divided into the core process which are directly related to the goal of the family and the support process which will help in achieving these core processes.