The Role of Family in Healthy Development

1
The Role of Family in Healthy Development

• Lecturer Dr Louise Ellis
• Course HSBH 1005
• Date 27th August 08

2
Overview

• We will be looking at
• The family as a system
• Parenting styles
• The infant and families
• Critical thinking exercise
• Video - the changing family

3
The Family as a System

• Garbarino (1992) has characterised the family as
  the basic unit of human experience.
• The family is a whole consisting of interrelated
  parts, each of which affects and is affected by
  every other part, and each of which contributes
  to the functioning of the whole.
• Up until the 1970s family studies focused only
  on mother-child relationships. We now know things
  are more complex even within the nuclear
  family.
• The term nuclear family refers to a household
  consisting of a husband/father, a wife/mother and
  at least one child. Still the norm?
• Every individual within the family affects every
  other individual through reciprocal influence.

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A System within other Systems

• Whether a family is nuclear in structure or not,
  it does not exist in a vacuum.
• Families are a system embedded in larger social
  systems
• Neighbourhoods
• Communities
• Subcultures (e.g., religious group)
• Broader cultures (e.g., ethnic origin)
• Family experiences across different cultures can
  differ greatly (e.g. husband takes many wives).
• There is almost infinite ways a family is
  comprised and how they influence each other over
  the lifespan.

5
A system within other systems
Bronfenbrenners Ecological Approach to
Development
6
The Family as a Changing System

• Family membership changes as new children are
  born and as grown children leave the home.
• The individuals within the family are all
  developing individuals.
• Changes in family membership or changes in any
  individual or relationship within the family
  affect the dynamics of the whole.
• It is very hard to predict a typical family
  system and to understand dynamics in that
  system.
• The most commonly referred to system of typical
  family is that of the family life cycle A
  sequence of changes in family composition from
  birth to death.

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Stages of the Family Life Cycle

• Duvall (1977) outlined 8 stages of the family
  life cycle
• Married without children
• Child bearing family (oldest child no more than
  30months)
• Family with pre-school children (oldest child no
  more than 6 years)
• Family with school age children (oldest no more
  than 12 years)
• Family with teenagers (oldest child no more than
  20 years)
• Family launching young adults (until last child
  leaves)
• Family without children (Empty next till
  retirement)
• Aging family (Retirement till death)
• Each stage is characterised by a set of
  developmental tasks the family must master to
  remain healthy.
• Research indicates that most Australians are no
  longer travelling through these traditional
  stages.

8
A Changing System in a Changing World

• To complicate things even further, the family
  exists and develops in a changing world.
• During the last half of the 20th century, several
  dramatic social changes have altered the makeup
  of the typical family.
• Australian Bureau of Statistics (2007) statistics
  that
• Almost 1 in 3 people will never marry
• 1 in 3 marriages end in divorce
• 1 in five children are in one parent families

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Trends Affecting Western Families

• More single adults
• Postponed Marriage
• Fewer Children 2 in 2006, 3.1 in 1976.
• More women are working 70 in 2006, 55 in 1976.
  
• More Divorce 33 in 2007, 10 in mid-1960s
• More single parent families 20 in 2006
• More children living in poverty
• More remarriages and redefined families
• More years without children
• More intergenerational families
• Fewer carers for aging adults

10
Parenting Styles

• 2 key elements
• Parental demandingness (level of supervision
  discipline)
• Parental responsiveness (level of warmth
  support)

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Parenting Styles

• Authoritarian Directive Parenting
• Strict control, minimal child input, high
  monitoring behaviour
• High demandingness / low responsiveness
• Sound academic achievement and uninvolved in
  problem behaviour, but poor social skills, low
  self-esteem, and increased depression
• Authoritative Parenting
• Parent sets and enforce rules but children given
  autonomy
• High demandingness / high responsiveness
• Sound academic achievement, high social
  competence, high self esteem and uninvolved in
  problem behaviour
• (Maccoby Martin, 1983)

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Parenting Styles

• Indulgent parenting (also referred to as
  permissive or non-directive)
• Parents are open to child input, they have few
  demands and moderate to low levels of monitoring
• High responsiveness / low demandingness
• Involved in problem behavior and poor academic
  competence, but have high self-esteem, good
  social skills, and low levels of depression
• Uninvolved parenting
• Laissez-faire approach with little involvement in
  or of monitoring of child life
• Low responsiveness / low demandingness
• Involved in problem behavior and poor academic
  competence, poor social skills, low self-esteem,
  and increased depression
• (Maccoby Martin, 1983)

13
The Infant and Families

• Importance of mothers due to their caregiver
  role.
• Evidence suggests that fathers and mothers are
  more similar than different in the ways they
  interact with infants and young children. (Eg
  Fathers sense feeding cues in babies just as well
  as mothers).
• Each parent is equally capable of raising a
  child, but quantity and quality of time doing
  this can be different (Marsigilo et al, 2000)
• Quantity Mothers spend more time than fathers
  with children (Bjorklund Pellegrini, 2002)
• Quality Fathers spend more quality time in some
  instances (Pleck Masciadrelli, 2004)
• Mother are spending at least as much time with
  their children as they did 40 years ago. Fathers
  are now spending more time with their children
  (Bianchi, Robinson Mikie, 2006).
• Nonetheless, fathers still spend less time with
  their children than mothers.

14
Styles of Child Interaction

• Mothers and fathers differ in their typical
  styles of interacting with young children.
• Fathers like to bounce, tickle and surprise
  infants.
• Mothers like to hold, talk to and play quietly
  with infants.
• However, fathers are noted to adopt mothers style
  of play when they are the sole caregiver.
• Perhaps fathers automatically see themselves as
  the back up parent (Phares, 1999).

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Infant Development with Fathers

• A fathers primary role in infant support is
  traditionally a financial one (Marsiglio et al,
  2000)
• However, by psychological standards, being warm
  and compassionate is more important (Lamb
  Tamis-Lemonda, 2004)
• When both parents are highly involved with the
  infant, social competence grows quickly as the
  child develops (Main Weston, 1981)
• Affectionate fathering is correlated with
  academic achievement in early schooling (Cabrera
  et al, 2000)
• Fathers like to egg their children into
  explorative behaviour during play. This is highly
  correlated with breeding secure attachment styles
  in later life relationships (Grossmann et al,
  2002)

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Mothers, Fathers and InfantsThe System at Work

• To understand the basis of family, it should be
  viewed as a 3 person system at the very least
  (mother-father-child).
• No longer do we consider the mother-child
  relationship the core of the family.
• Every member of the family has indirect effects
  on the other members.
• Indirect effect means that 2 persons in the
  families relationship is modified in behaviour
  when a 3rd person is present.
• Eg. Mother and Fathers who communicate well with
  each other tend to raise their child in an
  equitable and caring way.
• An imbalance in communication between the
  mother-father relationship can lead to
  over-bearing parenting behaviour with the child.
• Overall, parents can co-team well if
  communication between them is of a high level. If
  not, they can undermine each others attempts at
  good parenting (Parke, 2000)

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Critical Thinking Exercise

• Are fathers essentially for children to
  experience normal, healthy development?
• Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic
  trend of this generation. It is the leading cause
  of declining child well-being in our societyto
  tolerate the trend of fatherlessness is to accept
  the inevitability of continued societal
  recession Blankenhorn (1995).
• Evidence
• Over the past 40 years, the proportion of
  children growing up without a father in the home
  has more than doubled.
• During that time we have seen dramatic increases
  in juvenile delinquency, violent crime, drug
  abuse, eating disorders, suicide and family
  dysfunction.
• Studies have demonstrated the association between
  father absence and these factors.
• Implications
• heterosexual marriage is the only appropriate
  context in which to raise children?
• Inappropriate for single women or lesbian couples
  to have children?