Functions of Families

1. Families are in charge of producing and satisfying the children with upright moods for fulfilling their biological and social requisites. Families that only produce children have no difference with animals.

2. Families are responsible for training the children to associate and identify the values and customs of societies.

3. Families are responsible for providing the children with means of personal composition in societies.

4. Families are responsible for securing settlement, security, protection, and sympathy to the children until they attain adulthood. Families are the most proficient body that can afford so because they receive the early children., while any other social association cannot replace them –the families- in this regard.

5. Families should take on the great portion of the children’s ethical, emotional, and religious education all over the various stages of childhood. They are fully responsible for the children’s religious education, whether the political regimes, such as the communists, directly or indirectly oppose religion, or neutral in the ethical and religious affairs, such as France. Thanks to the family life, the individuals receive the religious spirits as well as the other family emotions that prepare for associating in societies and homes.

Childhood requires a good deal of care and means of mental and physical maturity. It is quite unacceptable to hypothesize that families’ one and only role is affording the fiscal supports. Such a hypothesis neglects the various mental factors, such as emotion, affection, security, and tranquillity that are essential for composing the individuals. These factors are important for the children’s mental maturity..

Psychologists and educationists confirm that families play the greatest role in the process of education and the formation of personalities. This significant role becomes more manifest when we take in consideration the biological principal which affirms that the younger the human being, the more increasing formation and obedience. It is also possible to apply this principal to the mental powers in the variant levels of maturity. Families are responsible for all of the effects that early children encounter, since they are the basic factor of the children’s lives and the head source of their experts. Further, families are the genuine appearance of the children’s settlement. From this cause, the children’s personal settlement and maturity are totally dependent upon the variant quantitative and qualitative relations of families. Analysts find out that the children’s religious and moral values develop in the surroundings of families.

Adapted from the book: "The Educational System in Islam" by: "Baqir Sharif Al-Qireshi"