PCB 4024 : SPECIAL CHILDREN AND FAMILY COUNSELING Course Leader: Puan Hajah Sabariah Siron

COURSE NOTES
TOPIC 3: FAMILY STRUCTURE

1.1

FAMILY STRUCTURE Families - organizationally complex emotional systems. comprise at least three four generations. A family attempts to arrange itself into functional or enabling group so that it can meet its needs and goals without preventing members from meeting their individual needs and goals (Kantor & Lehr 1975). A family develops rules that outline and allocate the roles and functions of its members. Those who live together develop patterns for negotiating and arranging their lifes to maximize harmony and perdictability. Affection, loyality, and a continuity or durability of membership charaterize all families. When these qualities are challenged, in crisis situation or severe conflict , families are typically resistant to change, likely to engage in corrective maneuvers to reestablish familiar interactive patterns. All families promote positive relationships among members, attend to personal needs of their constituents, prepare to cope with developmental or maturational changes ( children leaving home) as well as unplanned or unexpected crises (divorce, death, a sudden acute illness). All must organize themselves in order to get on with living. All must develop their own special styles or strategies for coping with stresses imposed from outside or from within the family itself.

1.2 GENDER AND CULTURAL CONSIDERATIONS Males and females are indoctrinated from early in life into different gender-role behavior in the family. Biology undoubtedly plays a determining role in gender differences, Most of the differences (value systems, personality characteristics, roles, problems solving techniques, attitude toward sexuality, etc are the result from learning reinforced by society and passed down across generations(Philpot, 2000). As a result of their differing socialization experience, members of each sex develop distinct behavior expectations, and have differing life experiences, 1

Gender-role changes have had a powerful impact on family functioning. Percentage of women in paid employment has risen, at home responsibilites of men and women have had to be redefined. The pattern of gender-linked behaviors, expectations, and attitudes regarding a familys sex-defined roles has begun to change. Male and female roles differences have become less clearly defined. Today many families, especially those of the younger generations, struggle to fine more flexible if not yet fully worked out patterns for living together harmoniously.

Cultural factors, play an increasingly central role in understanding family life. Values, rituals common transactional patterns, ways of communicating brought in through immigration that contribute to the behavioral patterns, levels of alculturation and ethnic identification, and socioeconomic power have an impact on how(and how well) families function. Social class differences also add to diversity between families, shaping the resources, expectations, opportunities, privilages, and options of their members. Depending to a large extent on social class membership,work may be fulfilling or despairing; a mean to achieving upward mobility or a dead end; filled with satisfactions or boredom; or, in the case of the underclass, frequently nonexistent. People lives are contrains by the larger forces of racial,cultural,sexual, and class-based inequalities. (McGoldrick, 1998) 1.3 FAMILY INTERACTIVE PATTERNS

Families display stable, collaborative, purposeful, and recurring patterns of interactive sequences. Nonverbal exchange patterns between family members represent coded transactions, transmits family rules, check acceptable behavior tolerated by the family. ( a son does not speak before his mother speaks ).

 The complementary construction of family members requires long periods of negotiating, compromising,rearranging, and competing. These transections are usually invisible, not only because context and subject constantly change but also because they are generally the essence of minutiae. Who passes the sugar?Who checks the map for directions, chooses the movie, changes the channel?Who respond to whom, when,and in what manner? This is the cement by which families solidify their relationships. Minuchin,Lee,and Simon,1996: p30.

TOPIC FOR DISCUSSION 1. Share your experience of your family culture, system, values and relationship. 2. Do you agree with the statement that family values, culture, system has to change as time changes. Discuss in detail.

sabariah_siron@email. unitar.edu.my 3.01. 2009