The family is the most important factor in the socialization process, transferring the individual to a social-cultural life. This institutionis so deeply rooted that in spite of structural and functional changes, the family has kept its ties with the individual and the society from various dimensions. However, the extensive ethnological, inter-cultural as well as sociological and mental pathological studies carried out in recent years have shown that some of. the structural and functional changes happening in the family are destructive from social and individual viewpoints, and that these changes, in certain cases, are deep, irreversible, expanding and continual. In this article the writer tries to study the factors creating structural and functional changes in the family as the institution that connects the individual to the society in general and in the Iranian society in particular. By citing examples, the writer maintains that the family is a self- controlling system, resisting against the functional and structural changes that go beyond biologic tolerance. In this study, which is inter-disciplinary, the writer, in his analysis of structural and functional changes, tries to show the three levels of biologic" social and mental, creating some kind of relation between them.