Since the emergence of developmental psychology, theorists and researchers have stressed the family's role in shaping the child's emergent social style, personality, and cognitive competence. Psychologists in doing so adopted an "idiosyncratic definition of family" (Lamb & Sutton-Smith, 1982) where the focus is on the parents and mostly the mothers. It took time to realize that most families contain two parents and at least two children. Along with this realization it was seen that children develop in a context of different networks of social relationships within which each person may affect every other directly (through their interactions) and indirectly (through A's effect on B, who then influences C) (Lamb & Sutton-Smith, 1982).
A social network like the family is embedded in a broader network of relations with relatives, neighbors and social institutions. …
