الفهرس 
AcknowledgementOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
The family is a social institution recognized in every society and carries out certain functions for the benefit of the society. There are more than one definitions for the family depending on what aspect of the family each of them was concentrating. The first definition demonstrated that the family is a universal institution whose most important functions are socializing and nurturing the younger generations. On the other hand the other definition showed that the family is a group of persons united by the ties of maITiage, blood constituting a single household interacting and intercommunicating with each other in their respective role of husband and wife, mother and father, brother and sister creating a common culture. The first definition is a function - oriented approach because it puts an emphasis on the role of the family while the second one can be analysed as biological or structural approach. There are two main kinds of family structure, nuclear family and extended family. The nuclear family is the common form of family structure and consists of a couple and their offsprings. The extended family consists of several generations of blood relatives all living together. The health of the family specially children may be affected by certain components of family fonnation which is either sociocultural and/or DlOlogical variables such as age of the mother, preceding birth interval, birth order, family size, consanguinity and family type ( nuclear, extended). The aim of this work was to study the impact of these sociobiological family formation variables on health status of children. The study was a cross sectional one. It was carried out in six MCH centers representing the six zones of Alexandria. Each centre was selected randomly from each zone of Alexandria. The total sample size was (450) mothers and their infants in the age group 12-24 months selected from those centers using the systematic random sample 1 :2. A sub sample 150 infants were chosen to assess their development using abbreviated Denever test provided that they are cooperative and healthy. Each centre was visited twice to three times / week for one month. The field work was conducted in about 6 months period. For conduction of this work, the following techniques were carried out: I. Structured interviewing questionnaire of mothers about sOciobiological characteristics of the family, history of child loss below 5 years, vaccination history, morbidity data in the last three months prior to the study. 2. Anthropometric measurements (weight- length) to assess the growth status of each infant using percentile charts and standard score. 3- Assessment of developmental achievement of each child by using abbreviated Denever test. Tlte study showed the following main results: (I) Illiteracy among the selected mothers were 540/0. (2) Low and very low social class represent 47 of the studied sample.