Summary
To understand the defining features of family, the different ways in which families communicate, communication strategies to maintain healthy family relationships, challenges that families face, and how to manage those challenges.
A family is a network of people who share their lives over long periods of time and are bound by marriage, blood, or commitment; who consider themselves as family; and who share a significant history and anticipated future of functioning in a family relationship. Families include the following characteristics:
- Families possess a shared sense of family identity created by how they communicate.
- Families use communication to define boundaries, both inside the family, and to distinguish family members from outsiders.
- The emotional bonds underlying family relationships are intense and complex.
- Family members typically hold both warm and antagonistic feelings toward one another.
- Families share a history, which can stretch back for generations and feature family members from a broad array of cultures.
- Family members may share genetic material, which can lead to shared physical characteristics, similar personalities, outlooks on life, mental abilities, and ways of relating to others.
- Family members juggle multiple and sometimes competing roles.
- There is no such thing as a “typical family.” Families may be headed by heterosexual, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered people, and may adhere to one or more of several different structures.
- A nuclear family--comprising a wife, husband, and biological or adopted children—is now the minority family type in North America.
- Extended families include relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, all living in a common household
- In stepfamilies, at least one of the adults has a child or children from a previous relationship.
- A cohabiting couple comprises two unmarried, romantically involved adults living together in a household with or without children.
- In a single-parent family, only one adult resides in the household, with sole responsibility as caregiver for the children.
- Family stories, whether positive or negative, are narrative accounts shared repeatedly within a family that retell historical events and are meant to bond the family together.
- Family stories help create and promote a unique family identity by teaching individuals about their role in the family and about the family’s norms, values, and goals.
- To ensure that family stories strengthen family relationships, select experiences that cast a positive light and emphasize unity.
- When in doubt with regard to sharing a story, ask the family member featured in the story for permission to share.
Communicating in Families
According to Family Communication Patterns Theory, two dimensions underlie the communication between family members: conversation orientation and conformity orientation. Families are either high or low in each orientation.
- Conversation orientation is the degree of fluidity with which family members are encouraged to participate in unrestrained interaction about a wide array of topics.
- Conformity orientation is the degree to which families use communication to emphasize similarity or diversity in attitudes, beliefs, and values.
- Scholars have identified four possible family communication patterns:
- consensual families (high in both conversation and conformity)
- pluralistic families (high in conversation, low in conformity)
- protective families (low in conversation, high in conformity)
- laissez-faire families (low in both conversation and conformity)
Maintaining Family Relationships
We create our families through how we communicate.
- Three maintenance strategies help foster family bonds:
- Positivity, the most positive maintenance tactic, involves communicating with family members in an upbeat and hopeful fashion.
- Offering assurances involves expressing commitment and telling family members how much they are valued.
- Self-disclosure involves sharing your private thoughts and feelings with family members and allowing them to do the same without fear of betrayal. This requires consistent, ethical, and trustworthy behavior.
- Technology can facilitate family maintenance.
- By using online (asynchronous) communication to convey minor information, and face-to-face (synchronous) communication to convey important information, family members are able communicate in a complementary, rather than substitutive, fashion.
- Technology provides many options for maintaining family ties. For example, e-mail can be used to: (1) maintain positivity, (2) provide assurances; and (3) and facilitate self-disclosure.
- Relational dialectics can cause tensions in family relationships.
- The tension between autonomy and connection relates to the struggle between feeling connected to the family and wanting a separate identity.
- To address this dialectic, share tasks and cultivate social networks.
- The tension between openness and protection involves wanting to share personal information and wanting to protect ourselves from the possible negative consequences of sharing.
- According to Communication Privacy Management Theory, individuals create informational boundaries by choosing carefully the kind of private information they reveal and the people with whom they share the information.
- Family privacy rules are the conditions governing what family members can talk about, how they can discuss such topics, and who should have access to family-relevant information.
- To improve family privacy rules: (1) remember that all families have approved and taboo conversational topics, certain viewpoints they provide over others, and restrictions on which people receive family information; (2) be respectful of varying opinions on openness and privacy; and (3) seek change gradually, conferring with one family member at a time while building consensus.
Family Relationship Challenges
Although family members are the most supportive people in our lives, challenges, including stepfamily transitions and interparental conflict, exist.
- Transitioning to a stepfamily is a common challenge, affecting both the parents and the children involved.
- Triangulation involves loyalty conflicts that arise when a coalition is formed, uniting one family member with another against a third person.
- To ease a stepfamily transition: (1) go slow, but start early; (2) practice daily maintenance; (3) create new family rituals; (4) avoid triangulating family members; and (5) be patient.
- Interparental conflict comprises overt, hostile interactions between parents in a household.
- The effects of such conflict are devastating on children, who demonstrate lower friendship quality, are more likely to imitate their parents’ destructive interaction styles, and have interpersonal relationship problems later on in life (including tainted attitudes toward marriage).
- The spillover hypothesis poses that the emotions, affect, and mood from the parental relationship “spill over” into the broader family, disrupting children’s sense of emotional security.
- Children whose parents are in conflict can encourage their parents to approach differences more constructively, and they can seek therapy.