Mongolians, unlike the settled agriculturalists to the south, have never valued complex extended families, and in the 1980s most lived in nuclear families composed of a married couple, their children, and perhaps a widowed parent. The high birthrate, meant that large families were common; the 1979 census showed 16 % of families with 7 to 8 members and 11.8 % with 9 or more. Urban families were larger than rural families, perhaps because rural people tended to marry and to set up new households at younger ages. The average size of rural families also may have reflected the high rates of migration to the cities.

Modern family life differed from that before the 1950s because the children of most herders were away from their families for most of year. Between the ages of seven and fifteen, they stayed in boarding schools at the somon center. Most Mongolian women were in the paid work force, and many infants and young children were looked after on a daily or weekly basis in day-care centers or in all-day or boarding kindergartens. The efforts to bring women into the formal work force and to educate the dispersed herders resulted in separation of parents and children on a large scale. There was some historical precedent for this in the practice of sending young boys to monasteries as apprentice lamas, which had previously been the only way to obtain a formal education for them.