Imagine a world without families. How would that be? Life will seem too scattered and spread out and chaotic. Mamma, dada, grandma, grandpa, uncles and aunties all will disappear in one go. Children especially won't know where to go or whom to look for guidance or what to do under different circumstances.

The ancient man was nomadic. Moved from one place to another. There was community living then and everything belonged to everyone else. Therefore there was no need for families. It was just communities.

But it is clear that man is social animal and need company to be happy and fulfilled in life. Families started when man began settling for cultivation of land.

As man and woman bonded for sociological, political or emotional reasons, they made children together and raised them as part of a family.

Families give a sense of shared experiences to man and woman as they live day after day. When they solve problems together, when they cook, earn, eat and sleep together, it is like sharing a world together. This makes man and woman feel safe, loved and happy.

When within this family, children arrive and grow up they feel protected, they feel they are unique and they feel they belong. Families are important so that children grow feeling loved and secured and in turn spread their goodness to the world and raise loving families themselves when they grow up.

For children families are very important. They feel valued, they feel they have nothing to worry about, they can abandon themselves into play, and nurture their talents, do what makes them happy. Children can narrate and express the happenings with them in the outside world, when they go to school, or play with other children, or they have a question, or if they observe something, with the members of the family, especially mom and dad. Thus families give a chance to ventilate feelings which otherwise may remain bottled up inside.

Families also give members feeling of historical depth, with long lineage of grandmas, grandpas and uncles and aunts. Families give children role models and an opportunity to understand what grown-ups are like.

Every family has conflicts and points of strain within it, but there is also warmth, support, affection and understanding. Children and adults together can vent out their feelings and communicate their opinions. It is within families that children can learn to tolerate different points of views.

Families also help in inculcating certain values in children which lay the foundation for their future. They internalize certain codes of conduct during the growing-up period and absorb personal values which become guiding stars for them for the rest of their lives.

Also, families are a support for old age. Sociologically speaking, families help society arrange itself in neat comprehensible units. This makes society function in an orderly manner.

And lastly, families can solve the problem of inheritance of property belonging to a family by bequeathing it from one generation to another.

But the main purpose of family is not passing on of the wealth from generation to generation, but nurture love, warmth, sense of belonging and security, to those who are together because of natural and mutual bonding.