Structure of the handbook for the family

This structure is to highlight areas of work. I may be able to complete some areas quickly and have some skills for some others. However, I might be completely at loss in some others. There I would invite guest writers or try to "outsource".

Financial wellbeing
Psychological wellbeing
Physical fitness
Pursuit of happiness

Further break up as detailed below
Financial well being
A family should be well fortified against financial disasters, should have a robust current finance status and should be able to fund its dreams.
To this end following specifics emerge
1. Living within its means - the calculation related to lifestyle and income sources
2. Outlining goals, milestones and dreams - collectively - and prioritizing
3. Comprehensive planning and execution of the plan over time
4. Fortification - life and general insurance, indemnities, hidden risks and protection against them
5. Degrees of freedom - what all can a family do and how? The trade-offs into psychological wellbeing
6. Long term wealth building - creating assets for the next generation or large projects

Connected within family domain to
Psychological wellbeing: dreams, conflicts
Physical fitness: Diseases
Pursuit of happiness: Costs of leisurely activities, charity

Psychological wellbeing
This means the family needs to form an environment of security and comfort for its members. These are hygiene factors. The family where it can afford should also try to promote its members to transcend themselves.
On the other hand, the family also needs to ensure lack of mistrust, control of envy, management of dissent and conflicting aspirations. In a sense the family needs to have informal or formal institutions to address these. Hence the following elements seem to emerge
1. Conflict management - short term and deeper conflicts of aspirations and personality types
2. Environment building - security and comfort, development of support systems for members
3. Transcendental drive - ability of the family to enable its members to discover themselves
4. Institutionalization - mostly to manage conflicts but also to enable growth

Connected within family domain to
Financial wellbeing: dreams, conflicts
Physical fitness: Sex life, diseases
Pursuit of happiness: Impact of the pursuit on the environment


Physical fitness
The family members should be fit barring the congenital diseases. These should also be planned for appropriately. The family needs to be proactive in ensuring its members are free from diseases, disease-provoking lifestyles or habits and that its members build robust physical health. This can thus be listed as below
1. Healthchecks
2. Controlling destructive habits and building good ones - special reference to smoking and drinking
3. Exercise and maintenance of momentum
4. Managing diseases
5. Healthy sex lives of members

Connected within family domain to
Psychological wellbeing: Sex life, diseases
Financial wellbeing: Diseases
Pursuit of happiness: Constraints on activities, time allocation to physical fitness and pursuit

Pursuit of happiness
A family should promote its members to discover themselves. However, it should also promote collective activities and actions which will enable collective pursuit of happiness in addition to the individual projects of its members. This involves the following areas.
1. Leisure activities - short duration
2. Vacations and time off - few days
3. Daily life activities - routines which are delightful for all
4. Projects undertaken collectively
5. Ceremonies and functions
6. Charity and charitable activities

Connected within family domain to
Psychological wellbeing: Impact of the pursuit on the environment
Physical fitness: Constraints on activities, time allocation to physical fitness and pursuit
Financial wellbeing: Costs of leisurely activities, charity


The above attempt is of course deductive and analytical in nature and thus is not likely to capture the synthetic and inductive part of the discussion on wellbeing. In other words, the above analysis deals with parts of overall wellbeing of the family in isolation. At best there is an attempt to understand the interconnections amongst these basic elements. What this analysis will leave out is the interconnection of these elements with the social, economic, and political context of the family. On the personal side it also overlooks the individual aspirations and the tradeoff between these and the family's priorities. Lastly on a subtler level, it also ignores the effect the environmental stimuli have on the various sub-elements.

Thus the analysis will remain imperfect. Probably that is for the better. The handbook is not a prescription. It is a provoker and guide to structuring of thoughts. It is also expected to serve another purpose. It is taking out one thing at a time from the overall context, analysing it and placing it back. In doing so, it is expected to at least understand the elements. Once such understanding is mastered, the synthsis can be attempted with renewed vigor. One might object to the approach and claim that the analysis may not add any value whatsoever to a synthetic approach. That however is a conceptual dead end. The whole of the study of wellbeing is so highly complex that one can only get overwhelmed and stop further study. The hope of this analysis is that in the units outlined in the introduction to the handbook project (social, family, individual, state, markets, global cooperation) are large enough for allowing their own study while temporarily ignoring the effects from other elements. The final synthesis will then deal with the entire system whose parts we understand better than earlier.