In India, there is a dramatic change in the way marriage and family life are looked at. The values of our society have changed over a period of time. This is strikingly visible in the cities though it is not so very visible in the rural areas.

When a woman gets married, it is to be expected that she will move with her husband’s family without any question and become part of her husband’s family. She has to get along with the parents and the siblings of her husband. If there are more male siblings in the family, when they get married, their brides too joined the family. Eventually, they became one huge family. Today, we can hardly see such huge families. The concept of joint family is not workable anymore.

Why is this so and what has brought about these changes? One of the major reasons is that most of the women are not satisfied to be homemakers anymore. They want to earn for the family by taking up challenging jobs. The percentage of educated women in India is increasing in every state and they indeed become the toppers in many examinations. They enroll for many courses that women were hesitant to join few years ago. All these have made women of today’s India more confident. Even if they have missed the opportunity to get good education in their childhood, they are becoming highly enterprising by joining women’s groups and starting their own home industries. This again boosts their confidence level and they have started earning for the family like men. They are no more ready to be submissive daughter in laws. They are becoming highly self-assertive individuals this creates problems within the larger family whereby the elders are not ready to accept such changes.

While independent families gain more freedom, it has also a number of disadvantages. When they separate themselves from the main family, the young couples are left to themselves in meeting all their needs. They lack experience that comes with age and they also lack guidance from the elders that they would have received if they were to be part of the larger family. Now they have to source all their funds because they do not get the benefit of the common pool of funds of the larger family. When there are many earning members in a family, meeting an emergency medical expense will not look so burdensome, but when the young couple stay alone, they need to have enough resources to meet such expenses all by themselves.

One of the biggest problems that is faced by working couples today is their non-school going kids. The mother has to stop working for the period from the childbirth to the time when the child is ready to go to school because they do not have anyone else to take care of their kids. Even after the kids are ready to go to school, parents have very little time for their children. This will never be the case with joint families because children will get the attention of the family members easily as there will be many people living in the same house.

I think that living in with a joint family is not so easy, because of the different views of everyone, the working lives. If I'm not wrong then it appeals to more the Asian community, in which this is a popular trend to be with joint families.

These days women also work and are independent, then coming home to a joint family and doing the house work too, just becomes more difficult and stressful. However in India living in a joint family is still going great!
I think it also depends on what your in laws are like, whether they are understanding or not, which is the main thing in joint families.