There is widespread fear among policymakers and the public today that the family is falling apart. Much of that worry stems from a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the family in the past and lack of appreciation of social and economic changes. The general view of the family is that it has been a stable and relatively unchanging institution through history and is only now undergoing changes; in fact, change has always been a characteristic of it. The famlily and Household in the Past In the last twenty years, historians have been re-examining the nature of thefamily and have concluded that we must revise our notions of the family as aninstitution, as well as our assumptions about how children were perceived and treated in past centuries. A survey of diverse studies of the family in the West,particularly in seventeenth-,eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century England and America shows something of the changing role of the family in society and the evolution of our ideas of parenting and child development. (Although many definitons of family are available , in this article I will use it refer to skin living under one roof.) a . family size; b .relations within the famliy; c .the definition of a family; d .the role of the family in society; e. different family customs; f.the family throughout the world; g. the economic role of the family; h.sex differences in family roles; i. the role of children; j. sexual relations 6 . What aspects of the text and your general knowledge help you to create this prediction?