CHFD 3920 Exam 1

• Who's there
• Proximity of family members

• Who does what
• Power structure
• Gender

Interrelatedness of family members

Explicit

Implicit

• Essential business of the family
• Common to all families
• Identity, boundary regulation, strategies for household maintenance, etc.

• Family's customs for modifying existing rules/strategies
• If something happens that you can't control, how do you respond?

• 1st order task
• Constructing family themes
• Socializing members with biological/social issues
• Congruence of images for the individuals w/in the family (image of self is consistent with the image the family has of you)
• Purposeful

• 1st order task
• Mark the limits of the system

• Delineate one system or subsystem from another
• Ex- Who's a family member and who's not

• Regulate the flow of information
• Ex- Parents don't talk about finances with kids
• 2 types: enmeshed (too much) & disengaged (too little)

• 1st order task
• Establish priorities & make decisions about the use of resources

• 1st order task
• Methods of dealing w/ conflict & tension
• Goal: Promote health & well-being of family members
• Distribution of power
• Influence cohesion & cooperation
• Nurture & support indiv. family members
• Successful strategies promote acceptance of conflict & responsible efforts to negotiate conflict

Family must adapt to changes internally and externally

Ability to change strategies if needed in times of stress

• Framework of meaning that becomes part of family-shared identity
• Shapes expectations of behaviors
• Purposeful
• Often intergenerational
• Linked to core values

Family of Origin

Illustrated an individual who couldn't "live up to" the identity of the family

• The first messages you get about who you are and what the world is like
• We look to confirm these

I don't know where I stop and you begin

There's a cut off. Who you are is very separate of who I am.

Degree of pressure exerted on the family to alter the strategies it employs to accomplish its basic tasks

Expected & ordinary developmental changes

• Unexpected
• Create unanticipated hardships
• Require adaptations in strategies to execute tasks

• Bronfenbrenner
• Horizontal: Normative & non-normative stressors, which occur over time
• Vertical: Occur simultaneously

Looks not only at the stressors, but at the resources involved & your perception of the incident

Perceptions of stressor events (beliefs)

• What the family actually does to manage stress
• Directly related to cognitive coping strategies (what you think about it affects how you deal with it)

• Heavily influenced by family systems theory
• Forces w/in the family system work to influence the members' thoughts, feelings, & actions
• Rule-goverened patterns of interactions w/in families
• Relationships w/in families are mutually influential

• What we think/feel/do is contextually bound
• Day to day we affect each other
• The way our family members act/think/feel affects the way we act/think/feel
• Everybody has a choice. We don't blame others.

• Main person in structural family models
• His own background greatly influenced what he chose to do with his career
• Believed families were problem-focused
• Single families are, by definition, dysfunctional

• Everyone exists in a system that gives them rules for their behavior
• Every social context has a definable structure (invisible set of demands that organizes the way families interact)
• Some structures are better than others (ie- in-tact, dual-parent families)

• Family structure model
• Sub-systems carry out different functions
• Parent, Marital, Sibling
• Hierarchical relationship btw. family sub-systems (lack of heirarchy leads to dysfunction)
• Need clear boundaries

• Organizational characteristics
• Response to stress
• Clarity of boundaries

• 2 members in a family align w/ each other & gang up on a third
• Most detrimental when it's intergenerational (ie- parent & child ganging up on other parent)

• 2 ppl share an interest & leave the 3rd person out
• Not a big deal- no one feels left out

• Legacy is important
• Patterns of adjustment from generation to generation

• Re-enactment of actions (ie- teen pregnancy, abuse, etc.)
• Family of origin shapes your identity & your strategies

• Intergenerational Model
• Central concept is differentiation (sense of yourself away from your family while maintaining your emotional connectedness w/ others)

• Sense of yourself away from your family while maintaining your emotional connectedness w/ others
• The degree to which a family can tolerate difference in politics, religion, sexuality, etc.
• Enables you to take mature roles
• No such thing of no differentiation or unlimited differentiation
• Lack of: inhibits your ability to act like an adult, can lead to conflit w/in the system, affects how well you can have an intimate relationship or be a parent to your kids

• Differentiation of self
• Triangles
• Nuclear family emotional processes
• Family projection process
• Cutoffs
• Multi-generational transmission process
• Sibling position
• Societal emotional process

• Dont
• Touch
• Nothin
• Fuckin
• Cunt
• Maggot
• Sister
• Slut!

• Intergenerational model
• Balance!
• Theoretical scale of 1 to 100
• Shows the degree to which you can act as an indiv. & still fit into an emotional family system
• The degree to which you can be a calm presence in an anxious system
• The degree to which other family members see you as an adult
• How much say you have
• How emotionally reactive you are

• Intergenerational model
• Poorly differentiated families use triangles to manage anxiety
• Basic molecules of human relationships
• Pull in a 3rd person to relieve stress
• The targeted person's differentiation level goes down, while the untargeted goes down

• Intergenerational model
• Over-functioners: Somewhat stuck in their roles; need to be in control
• Under-functioners: Let someone else be the planner; sometimes feel like they're not taken seriously
• Regulators: distance regulation (boundaries)

• Intergenerational model
• How differentiation level gets passed down from generation to generation
• The lower the level of differentiation of the parents, the more that will affect the kids
• The intensity that the projection process is used depends on parents' level of differentiation and the level of stress & your reaction to it

• Intergenerational model
• When the stress in a relationship is too great that a relationship is severed (toxic relationships)
• This is never a good thing (from this perspective)
• Anxiety builds up, so you look for new relationships to deal w/ the anxiety, but the anxiety builds up in those relationships, etc. (feedback loop!)

• Intergenerational model
• Describes the emotional processes thru the generations
• Passes down process of interaction/level of differentiation thru the use of triangles
• Family legacy is the set of expectations & responsibilities that are based on these patterns of interaction
• Family leger: the "accounting" book of the family and is multi-generational... who "owes" who what

• Intergenerational model
• Accounting book of the family
• Keeps track of who owes who what
• If a child feels like they "owe" something to their parent, they'll try to diffuse the tension in a situation that parent is involved in

• Intergenerational model
• The tendency for some ppl to be anxious & unstable at some times as opposed to other times (ie- stressful times)
• As a society we regress to the most anxious segment of that society (ie- economic downturn)

• When we appreciate the different cultural values that groups have
• Problem: Tendency to over-generalize and stereotype
• Society changes every 10-15 years, changing our views along with it

• The understanding that we have multiple sub-cultural influences or contexts that we deal w/ all the time
• Race, religion, life stage, etc.

• Looks at acknowledging the influence of cultural subgroups
• Allows us to look at each family as unique
• Need to pay attention to the ecological fit (how their values fit in their environment) of a family in its context

• How each family's culture/cultural pracice fit into their environment/setting/neighborhood
• Need to look at the family's impact on society and the society's impact on the family

• Examines specifics on cultural attitudes, thoughts, feelings, & behaviors that characterize a specific group
• Focuses on the differences- what distinguishes them from another group?
• Doesn't look at sub-groups and ignores variation among families... looks at the entire group as homogenous

• More than just membership to a specific group
• Has to do w/ the processes indiv.'s use to fulfill their identity
• So engrained in who we are that it becomes invisible to us

• Can become problemativ when the stereotypes obscure the diversity
• Results in simplistic patterns of interaction (if we cant understand this, we cant understand the family)

Discreet category of ppl who are similar in their level of education, income, occupation, status, housing, & lineage

• Defined by education, income, & occupational status
• Seen much more as a continuous variable (no categories) than social class
• Used more than class in research
• Best predictor of most areas of family functioning