MacDonald

1. MacDonald Family Systems: Understanding Family Interaction

2. Course Syllabus and Assignments

3. Why Take This Course? • Understanding your nuclear family • Creating your own family • Understanding people and society

4. Tips for Success • Regular class attendance • Ask questions often • Form study groups/ partners • Do assignments ahead when possible • Read your text as if you are going to teach it to somebody • Make a study schedule and stick to it

5. Getting to Know You… • Get a partner and introduce yourselves • Share about your nuclear family: • Mom, Dad, siblings • Other people and members • Rules, roles, and traditions • Favorite memories/ Major events that influenced you • Things you would keep or change (or have changed) in your own family • Your current relationship with your family

6. Guest Speakers • If we were to have guest speakers talk in class, which topics would you be most interested in? • List your top 3 choices. • List the people/groups you recommend. • Turn in with your name

7. Review of Major Concepts The Family As a System

8. Defining the Family • A family is a system. • All family systems go through predictable and expected tasks.

9. Defining the Family • Family members establish routine, habitual patterns of interaction with one another • Routines are altered • Family’s distinctive identify • Family’s boundaries • Manage household • Emotional climate • Influence members’ development

10. The Family As a System • Complex structure • Interdependent group of individuals who: • Shared sense of history • Emotional bonding • Devise strategies for meeting needs of individual family members and the group as a whole

11. Characteristics of Family Systems • Multiple subsystems. • Common purposes and tasks that must be fulfilled. • Devises strategies for the execution of these tasks.

12. Viewing the Family As a “System” • Structure • Family’s composition (membership) • Organization (rules governing the family) • Tasks • The “business” of the family • It’s common and essential responsibilities • Tasks fulfilled for society and for members

13. Structural Properties of Families • Wholeness • Organizational complexity • Interdependence • Openness

14. Structural Properties of Families: Wholeness • Individuals form a complex and unitary whole • Understanding the rules that structure interact

15. Structural Properties of Families: Organizational Complexity • Subsystems: family systems are comprised of smaller units • Subsystems organized by: • Each member of the family • Gender • Generation • Marital, parental, and siblings

16. Structural Properties of Families: Organizational Complexity • Subsystems influence the family system • Family system also a subsystem in within the broader community and society • The social, political, economic, educational, and ethical agendas of these broader social systems have an impact on the family

17. Structural Properties of Families: Interdependence • Mutually dependent and mutually influenced by one another. • Factors that appear to influence only one person have an impact on everyone. • Example: changes an adolescent goes through.

18. Structural Properties of Families: Openness • Flow of information • Influenced by outside • Influences outside

19. Predictable and Identifiable Tasks of Families (5) • (1) establishing identity • Family as a whole • Each individual member • (2) clearly defined boundaries • Between family and outside • Between individual members inside • (3) manage the family household • Chores, finances, problem solving

20. Predictable and Identifiable Tasks • (4) create a warm and nurturing emotional environment.

21. Predictable and Identifiable Tasks • (5) adapt how tasks get accomplished in response to stress: • Normative stress: • Events that are expected and normal in families • Teenager graduates from high school and leaves home • Non-normative stress: • Events that are not expected in families • Young child dies • House burns down

22. Strategies • Methods and procedures used within a family to accomplish its essential tasks • For example: how parents social children depends on their beliefs and own childhood experiences • Influenced by: family’s history, class, race, and ethnicity

23. More on “Strategies” • Become well established and routine • Governing principles of family life • Each family adopts their own strategies • Profound affect on each child’s development

24. Rules • Rules are well established strategies • Define the limits of acceptable and appropriate behaviors • Reflect the values • Define the role of individual members

25. More on “Rules” • Maintenance and stability of system • Unique • Organized around the tasks that all families must manage • Overt rules • Openly stated rules

26. More on “Rules” • Covert rules. • Implicit—nobody talks about the rules. • Example: anger cannot be expressed in the family. • Metarules. • Rules about the family rules. • Circumstances when the rules apply and when they don’t apply. • Example: “you kids can come to us and talk about anything and everything” (except about drugs and sex).

27. First-order Tasks • Essential business of the family • Common to all families

28. First-order Tasks • Identity tasks • Boundary tasks • Maintenance tasks • Managing the family’s emotional climate

29. Identity Tasks • Families facilitate the development of identity • individual members • for the family as a whole

30. Identity Tasks • Constructing family themes • Includes conscious, unconscious, intellectual and emotional aspects • Influence how members behave and interact • Personal identity • Related to ethnic and cultural heritage

31. Identity Tasks • Socializing family members • socialization experiences • Individual identity • Learn about being male or female • Influences how we interact with others

32. Identity Tasks: Family Myths • Creating myths • Myths limit individuals potential • Sometimes are inaccurate to how others see the family • Example?

33. Identity Tasks: Family Myths • Inconsistent myths • Ex: families may hold an image of a member being dumb when actually they are quite smart. • Ex: the family may believe that women need protection and are incapable of taking care of themselves.

34. Boundary Tasks • Boundaries mark the limits of a system • Delineates one system from another • Also delineates one subsystem from another

35. Boundary Tasks • External boundaries • Delineate the family from other systems • Determines membership • Regulate the flow of information

36. Boundary Tasks • Internal boundaries • Regulate the flow of information between and within family subsystems • Influence the degree of autonomy and individuality

37. Maintenance Tasks • Promotes the health and well-being of members • Family responsibilities • Establishing priorities • Make decisions about resources

38. Managing the Family’s Emotional Climate • Promoting the emotional and psychological well-being of members • Provide closeness, involvement, acceptance, and nurturance • Establish methods of dealing with conflict and distributing power

39. Adaptability • Adaptability: how the family responds to stress or the demands for changes in its existing customs • Making adjustments to strategies and rules: • Changes • Adjust management of first-order tasks in response to changes

40. Second-order Tasks • Modifying existing strategies and rules • Being flexible and adaptable when changes occur in the family (2nd-order task) • Example: when parents become elderly they may need help from their children—thus, the family roles need to change

41. Second-order Tasks • Open system • Must adapt to changes • Information is used to determine if adaptation is needed. • Ex: the family will need to readjust during the different stages of a toddler-hood.

42. Second-order Tasks • “Stress” is neither good or bad • Means the family needs to adapt • Forcing the family to adapt and change • Examples?

43. Differences between 1st-order and 2nd-order tasks • What is the difference?

44. Morphostasis Vs. Morphogenesis • Morphostasis • Processes that resists change • Tendency to maintain constancy • Ex: adolescents needs more freedom and autonomy. Often parents and children disagree about how much freedom the adolescent can handle.

45. Morphostasis Vs. Morphogenesis • Morphogenesis • Processes that foster growth and development • Ex: my 8-year-old wants to go downtown with her 15-year-old sister (I’m not invited). She is safe with her sister, but is also experiencing independence from her parents.

46. Morphostasis Vs. Morphogenesis • Systems resist changing • Critical threshold • This tension exists in all family systems • Both essential for successful family functioning

47. Morphostasis Vs. Morphogenesis • Closed or rigid: systems fail to make needed adaptations • Chaotic, random, or disorganized: systems make adjusts when none is needed • Health risk

48. The Politics of the Family • When a family uses strategies that are endorsed within society it is viewed as effective. • When families use strategies that deviate from the cultural norms, it is often viewed as ineffective.

49. Problem Solving: Family Strategies

50. Development of Strategies • Family strategies are influenced by broader social systems: • Economic • Religious • Education • Political systems