Usually, whoever provides the mothering is the family's chief health officer, and makes decisions regarding what is illness, how to treat it, when to get outside help, and what kind of outside help to get. Second, the family provides material and emotional resources that nurture its members physically and spiritually. This is a central tenet of the biopsychosocial model of medicine. The family has a life cycle, from birth to death, in which differing tasks, stresses, rewards, and so forth, come to the fore. The significance of these stages is that they present the individuals going through them with psychosocial issues that potentially impact on their health in one way or another.
Infertility is another potentially catastrophic condition for many couples.
Those who can and do conceive worry about the health of their fetus and baby, and the change of role from partner to parent has been noted many times to be a profound alteration in life course, particularly for the mother. Family physicians can offer themselves as sources of information and treatment, as well as sounding boards for ill-defined problems.