Lecture 5: Family Contexts Flashcards
1
Q
family [3]
A
- A social unit, usually composed of adult spouses and their children.
- Share economic, social, and emotional rights and responsibilities.
- Sense of commitment and identification.
2
Q
function of families [4]
A
- Social contact
- Interpersonal bonds; intense (usually positive/high levels of all emotions) and enduring.
- Shared past (memories) and future (expectations).
- Standard we use for judging and comparing against future relationships.
3
Q
family systems [6]
A
- Extends beyond moms, dads, and siblings.
- Interdependent members and subsystems (e.g. mother-child, sibling-sibling).
- System for socialization: parents teach children the different standards of behaviour, attitudes, motivations, etc. that are considered socially appropriate.
- 1990s: Bidirectional influences and multidirectional pathways; i.e. different ways for members of families to influence one another.
- Direct influences; e.g. praise, criticism, talking back influences how parents view and treat their kids.
- Indirect influences; e.g. father limits quality of interaction between mother and child by being emotionally dependent on mother, taking away resources from the child.
4
Q
functional vs. dysfunctional family systems [5]
A
- Well-functioning families: good spousal and parent-child relationship, supportive parents, cooperative and responsible children.
- Doesn’t mean no conflict, but able to overcome conflict and adapt to social and environmental stressors.
- Dysfunctional families: unhappy marriage, irritable parents, antisocial children.
- Difficult to change once dysfunctional.
- Dysfunctional families marked by inability to adapt, making them very resistant to change.
5
Q
family typologies [5]
A
- Largely based on intimacy, autonomy, warmth, discord.
- Cohesive: balance between autonomy and intimacy, warmth and lack of discord, offer children choices, explain why things happen (not just “because I said so”).
- Disengaged: lacking intimacy, low warmth, withdrawal from one anther, low autonomy, disorganized interactions heavy in negativity and discord, little support and acceptance.
- Enmeshed: moderate intimacy, too much dependency and low autonomy, no clear boundaries among members about what’s appropriate, intrusive parenting, hostility among members, discord between married couple.
- Authoritarian: low intimacy and autonomy, expectations that children should obey parents (much like authoritarian parenting).
6
Q
effects of parental conflict [8]
A
- Direct effects:
- Intense and destructive: insecurity, depression, anxiety, behaviour problems, relationship problems, poor emotion regulation.
- Less likely to make friends at school, modelling destructive behaviour from parents.
- Intense and destructive: insecurity, depression, anxiety, behaviour problems, relationship problems, poor emotion regulation.
- Indirect effects:
- Child rearing practices affect child’s development.
- Sometimes parents aren’t in agreement about parenting styles, leads to different affects on child.
- Parenting styles (angry, intrusive) and reciprocal links;
- If one parent is angry and intrusive and one isn’t, over time the child will like the other parent more and depend on them more, leading to even more conflict between two parents.
7
Q
family distress model [5]
A
- Proposes that family distress is highly correlated to SES.
- Lower SES is related to negative parenting style, marital discord, harsher discipline, reduced higher level language use, limited emotional language use.
- Economic disadvantage impacts child development; psychological distress and disinvolved parenting.
- Psychological distress in parents: worrying about whether they can provide for their children; children worrying about being punished if their parents are too stressed.
- Family-systems oriented perspective; stress from parents leads to marital discord, which then leads to more conflict.
8
Q
impact of new baby on families [5]
A
- Shift toward traditional division of labour?
- Often accompanied by decreased marital satisfaction.
- Men not feeling taken care of by their wives.
- Women dealing with mental and physical aftermath of birth, not being able to return to work lowers self-efficacy.
- If the baby has a difficult temperament, exacerbates the effect of decreased marital satisfaction.
9
Q
Lindbolm et al. (2014) [8]
(hint: family typologies and newborns)
A
- Measured ways different family typologies responded to newborns; completed surveys during pregnancy, 7 months after birth, and 12 months after birth.
- Cohesive families (35%): experience increased intimacy and autonomy, positive growth after birth of baby.
- Disengaged families (5%): experience generally decreased intimacy and autonomy, higher levels of stress, almost exacerbated levels of arousal and responses to stress.
- Enmeshed families (11%): decreases in intimacy.
- Authoritarian families (14%): stronger boundaries between family members and clarified roles, stabilized the system.
- Other categories of family typologies:
- Escalating crisis families (4%): more levels of conflict between parents that spend a shorter amount of time together.
- Discrepant families (15%): loss of intimacy between parents, fathers felt more negative than mothers, more distancing in relationship.
10
Q
Hollenstein et al. (2016) [7]
(hint: triad model)
A
- Triadic model; focusses on system between mother, father, and child (discounting sibling effects).
- Measured over 100 children, large portion of whom were depressed, in problem solving situations:
- Diversity (range of emotions)
- Flexibility (number of changes in affect)
- Unpredictability in interactions between triads
- Discrepant stress: how many times there were 3 different affective states at once between triad
- Matchen states: identical affective states between triad.
- Families with depressed children demonstrated more diversity, higher unpredictability, longer disrepant durations, and shorter matched states.
- Could be because depressed children tend to have muted reactions and emotions, meaning the child would have different reactions from parents and parents would be trying to socialize child to react in proper ways.
11
Q
functions of socialization [3]
A
- Control, regulate; well-socialized kids will be able to control their reactions and regulate their emotions.
- Promote growth; develop skills in the child’s zone of proximal development (things they develop with some guidance).
- Uphold social order; ultimate goal is to help children internalize the attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviours of the larger society.
12
Q
learning theory of socialization [7]
A
- Child learns through reinforcement by parent or environment.
- Parenting practices more important than parenting style.
- Examples of parenting practices:
- Control; not characterizing as authoritarian, just how much control there is
- Physical punishment
- Sanctions
- Setting rules/failure to enforce rules
13
Q
Sears, Maccoby, & Levins (1957) [10]
(hint: learning theory)
A
- Identified seven patterns of parenting practices:
- Permisiveness/strictness
- Family adjustment (to pregnancy)
- Relationship warmth
- Responsible child-training orientation; tendency for mother to be attentive and want to train/teach/socialize the child
- Aggressiveness/punitiveness
- Perception of husband; not really a practice, but came up a lot in interviews and was related to aggression
- Orientation toward child well-being
- However, researchers only looked at these factors separately and not in relation to one another.
- No way of knowing whether there are additive effects or how they could be unrelated to one another (because they definitely should be).
14
Q
psychodynamic model of socialization [7]
A
- Emphasizes practices (vs. learning theory, which stresses parenting styles)
- Parent-child relationship; includes personality, psychosexual and psychosocial development
- Constrain instincts and encourage self-control
- Emphasis on unidirectional parent to child influence
- Feelings → practices (may mean something different to parent and child) → meaning → different impacts on parent-child relationship based on interpretations
- Grouping of parenting practices
- Bridge gap between attitudes and behaviours
15
Q
Schaefer (1959): circumplex model [4]
A
- Two-dimensional, circular model
- Based on axis of autonomy vs. control and love vs. hostility
- Different dimensins of feelings from parents interact to form different parenting styles
16
Q
two dimensional approach to socialization [4]
A
- What we use today
- Focus on warmth (love vs. hostility) and control (autonomy vs. control) as two central styles of what parenting can look like
- Produce consistent results over time
