Family and Community Resources
This domain covers how households mobilise what they have - people, time, skills, money and facilities - to meet their goals. The exam asks you to classify resources, name family functions and life-cycle stages, and identify which community agency supplies a stated service.
Classifying resources
- Human resources: time, energy, knowledge, skills, attitudes, interest. They live in people and cannot be permanently transferred.
- Non-human (material) resources: money, land, house, durables, savings, and community facilities such as schools, primary health centres, banks, panchayats and Anganwadi centres. All resources share three features: they are limited, usable in alternative ways, and often interchangeable (a grandmother's time can replace a paid crèche).
Family functions
Reproduction; economic (production and consumption); socialisation; protection; emotional support; conferring status; care of dependants and the elderly.
Family types and life cycle
Nuclear (parents and children), joint (two or more generations sharing a hearth and property), extended (relatives beyond the nuclear unit). Life cycle: beginning/establishing → expanding → launching → middle years → aging. Each stage changes the resource mix: the expanding stage is heavy on time, energy and money; the launching stage is heavy on money.
Worked example
A rural family's income falls and the mother considers leaving her 2-year-old alone at home. Reasoning: identify the shortage (money), list alternatives (paid crèche, neighbour, grandmother, Anganwadi), then weigh cost, safety and availability. The Anganwadi under ICDS gives free day care and supplementary nutrition, so a community resource substitutes for a scarce human resource - a textbook example of substitution.
Traps
Resources are not only money. Joint family is not the same as extended family. Community services are resources, not vague "help" - name the specific agency (ICDS, PHC, panchayat, cooperative) rather than saying "the government".