family unity article essay

What Is The Importance Of Family Unity In Modern Society?

With advancements in technology, changing cultural norms, new priorities, and advanced forms of communication fueled by the internet, you may wonder how family holds up in modern society. The concept of family is likely to continue to be essential for people from all walks of life, despite changing beliefs and customs. Research often demonstrates the importance of family for numerous areas of well-being . No matter how much life changes and the concept of family evolves, it may continue to benefit human health and wellness by offering a sense of belonging and support. If you’re experiencing family-related challenges, it can be helpful to speak to an objective person, such as a licensed therapist, for insight and guidance.

Its definition may evolve, but family may remain essential  

The traditional definition of a "nuclear family" typically entailed one man and one woman who were married and had biological children. However, today’s families can be more inclusive and may look different than family stereotypes. Additionally, research usually labels many different types of families.

Benefits of a healthy family 

As modern life can add pressure and stress, a healthy family dynamic can have multiple benefits, regardless of whether it's a biological family, adoptive family, or chosen family. 

Helps you meet your basic needs

Many years ago, Abraham Maslow created the Hierarchy of Needs . At the bottom of this hierarchy are usually basic needs, including water, food, rest, and health. A family may provide these necessities, which can serve as building blocks for other needs. 

Research also suggests that social connection can be considered a need, as it usually improves physical and mental health. Family may offer social connection in abundance. 

Allows you to belong to something and foster a sense of unity

A sense of belonging can come from the family, group, or community we belong to, and it can contribute to our emotional well-being by allowing us to feel connected socially. 

Offers an important built-in support system and promotes family connection

Research shows that the support system families provide can have a profound impact  throughout different stages of life. Difficult times are often inevitable, but a family may provide a sense of stability and connection that can make it easier to get through them. 

A family bond contributes to health 

Children might experience a healthy lifestyle when they live in a healthy family. They may eat healthy meals, enjoy time outdoors, and get prompt medical attention when needed. 

Health benefits can exist for parents in families, too. Research has shown that people with children in their families tend to live longer , even after the children have grown up and moved away. 

Families provide support when someone is ill

Facing medical problems alone can be challenging. A family may help alleviate this difficulty by offering support and assistance as you heal. 

Offers community benefits by reinforcing family values.

A strong family structure may reduce the likelihood of delinquency and crime. This can mean that the family unit may substantially impact an individual and their community. 

The importance of family and love in educating children

One way many parents contribute to society is by educating their children. Parents and caregivers often begin teaching children at a very young age. They may help them learn to walk and teach them new words as they develop their vocabulary and language skills. They also may teach them manners and take advantage of learning opportunities in everyday life. 

Many parents also encourage scholarship opportunities, ethical behavior, and social skills that can benefit children throughout adolescence and into adulthood.

All families may struggle sometimes

Even though families can have benefits, they may face challenges at times. When it comes to overcoming the difficulties of family life, you might find support in your friends. You can also seek the help of a professional with training and experience in family dynamics. 

Seeking help

Talking to a therapist may help you explore your feelings about family and learn to express those feelings openly. You may also learn to understand the family influences that shaped your personality. 

Benefits of online therapy in enhancing family relationships

Online therapy can be an easy and convenient way to receive insight and guidance from a licensed therapist. It can be helpful to vent to an objective person during therapy sessions, and you can attend these sessions from any location with an internet connection. With an online therapy platform, you can even seek out a therapist who specializes in helping their clients navigate family-related concerns.

Effectiveness of online therapy

 Although more research may be needed regarding the efficacy of individual online therapy for addressing family-related challenges, a growing body of evidence generally supports the idea that online therapy can be just as effective as face-to-face therapy.

What is the importance of a family bond in life?

Family can often serve as a cornerstone of our emotional support system, playing a role in each individual's emotional health. This foundational element often sets the stage for future relationships and helps build self-esteem.

What is the importance of family connection to a person?

Family can provide unconditional love and emotional support, which are key factors in building an individual's self-esteem. These early relationships set the groundwork for personal relationships and adult life.

What are 10 important aspects of family in your life?

• Emotional support:  Family offers a safety net for emotional well-being.
• Unconditional love: The love from family is often lifelong and uncompromising.
• Moral and ethical guidance: Family serves as our first role model, teaching us social skills and crucial role values.
• Financial support: Financial stability often starts with family support.
• Educational support: Family’s involvement can positively impact academic performance.
• Healthy families: A supportive family environment can contribute to healthy relationships.
• Family traditions and history: Knowing your family history adds a sense of belonging.
• Role models: Family provides the first role models in a child’s life.
• Open communication: Communication within the family contributes to emotional health and strong personal relationships.
• Sense of belonging: Family gatherings, such as family meals, add to the sense of community.

Why are family relationships among the most important support we will ever have?

Family relationships can lay the foundation for how we manage future relationships. The skills learned in the family context are applied to personal relationships in adult life, playing an important role in our overall emotional well-being.

What are the most important values in your relationships as a family?

Important values, like unconditional love and open communication, can form the bedrock on which the emotional health of each individual in the family is built. These values often lead to a unified family, increasing senses of security, stability and support.

What is important in life: family or love?

Family often provides the first experience of unconditional love, and this foundational emotional support sets the tone for what we seek in other personal relationships throughout adult life.

Is having a family the most important thing?

Having a family often offers emotional support and unconditional love, serving as an individual’s foundational support system and playing a crucial role in emotional health. However, many aspects of life are important, and family is not necessarily more important than other relationships in your life. 

Why is family more important than happiness?

Family often serves as a significant source of happiness, fulfilling our needs for emotional support and unconditional love. 

What is the importance of family unity?

Family unity offers a conducive environment for emotional health and well-being. This unity is often fostered through open communication during family meals, contributing to each individual's ability to maintain relationships.

What brings unity to the family?

Common values and open communication are key factors that bring family unity. Family meals and traditions also play a part, serving as regular platforms for them to express emotional support and unconditional love.

• What Is Family Support? Understanding Services Available To You Medically reviewed by Laura Angers Maddox , NCC, LPC
• Is Sibling Rivalry Normal? How Conflict Between Siblings Works Medically reviewed by Elizabeth Erban , LMFT, IMH-E
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Creating Cohesion: The Foundations Of Family Unity

• by Relationship Mag
• August 14, 2023 May 17, 2024

Unity within a family forms the bedrock upon which all other facets of social, emotional, and psychological well-being are built. It’s not just about being in the same family tree; it’s about fostering an environment of mutual respect, open communication, shared experiences, and unwavering support. This post explores the foundations of family unity, illustrating how it can be cultivated and strengthened. Each section provides an in-depth discussion of key elements and practical implementation strategies. The objective is to provide an insightful guide to fortify the pillars of unity within every family, fostering healthier, happier, and more fulfilling familial relationships.

• 1 Understanding Family Unity
• 2 The Role of Communication
• 3 Building Trust and Respect
• 4 The Value of Shared Experiences
• 5 Conflict Resolution Skills
• 6 Nurturing a Positive Family Culture
• 7 The Significance of Love and Affection
• 8 The Bottom Line

Understanding Family Unity

Family unity is the bond that ties a family together; the sense of support and love gives each member the confidence to face life’s challenges. This unity does not come from genetic connections or shared living spaces; it emanates from understanding, respect, shared values, and mutual support. When a family is united, it can effectively weather any storm, supporting each member in times of hardship and celebrating together in times of joy.

Understanding why family unity is essential is the first step in fostering it. It promotes emotional health, creates a supportive environment, and offers a sense of belonging. A united family can significantly impact children’s development, providing a solid foundation for emotional, cognitive, and social growth. It offers a blueprint for interacting with the world, negotiating conflicts, and forming healthy relationships. It offers adults a supportive network, mutual understanding, and a haven of comfort and love.

The Role of Communication

Communication forms the lifeblood of any relationship, and within a family , it plays an instrumental role in fostering unity. Open and honest communication allows family members to understand each other’s thoughts, feelings, needs, and desires. It paves the way for empathy and support, creating an environment where each member feels heard and valued.

However, effective communication is not a naturally occurring phenomenon in every family. It requires deliberate effort and, occasionally, the breakdown of barriers that hinder open discussions. Such barriers could range from a generational gap, language differences, or emotional barriers rooted in past conflicts or misunderstandings. Overcoming these challenges can involve establishing regular family meetings, active listening exercises, and encouraging open discussions about feelings and experiences.

Building Trust and Respect

Trust and respect are the cornerstone of any solid relationship, and within the family unit, these elements are paramount. Trust offers safety and predictability, while respect acknowledges each member’s individuality and inherent value. They create a nurturing environment where family members can grow and flourish.

Cultivating trust and respect within a family involves honesty, reliability, and empathy. Keeping promises, acknowledging emotions, validating each other’s experiences, and demonstrating consistent behavior are practical ways to foster these elements. They build individual self-esteem and contribute to a stronger, more unified family dynamic. The interplay between trust and respect significantly impacts cohesion and overall harmony within the family.

The Value of Shared Experiences

Shared experiences play a significant role in the construction of family unity. They are the threads that weave together the fabric of familial relationships, strengthening the bond between family members. From everyday activities like shared meals and bedtime stories to special occasions like vacations or holidays, these moments form a tapestry of memories that foster a deep sense of belonging.

Although these experiences are invaluable, they must not be grandiose or expensive. It could be as simple as a weekly game night, family cooking sessions, or watching a movie together. The critical factor is sharing time, emotions, and experiences. These create shared memories, which are a powerful bonding agent. Over time, these shared experiences foster mutual understanding, shared values, and collective identity, essential elements of family unity.

Conflict Resolution Skills

Even in the most unified families, conflict is inevitable. Differences in opinions, miscommunications, or clashing personalities can lead to disagreements. However, managing these conflicts can significantly impact the family’s unity. Therefore, effective conflict resolution skills are essential in maintaining harmony and fostering understanding within the family.

These skills include patience, active listening, empathy, and compromise. They help family members navigate disagreements respectfully and constructively, ensuring that conflicts become opportunities for growth rather than sources of division. These skills involve acknowledging and respecting different viewpoints, expressing emotions honestly, and working towards a mutually agreeable resolution. Family members learn to understand and appreciate each other more, fostering a stronger bond and more profound unity.

Nurturing a Positive Family Culture

A positive family culture is one where every member feels valued, loved, and accepted. It’s an environment that promotes mutual support, encourages individual growth, and nurtures positive values. This culture significantly contributes to family unity, setting the tone for interactions, influencing family dynamics, and shaping the overall family identity.

Creating such a culture may involve setting family values, fostering open communication, demonstrating love and respect, and encouraging individuality. It requires consistent effort from all members and a commitment to nurturing a supportive, loving, and positive environment. A positive family culture not only makes the family a haven of love and support but also significantly enhances the unity and cohesion of the family.

The Significance of Love and Affection

At the heart of family unity lies love and affection. These emotions form the foundation of the family bond, creating a sense of belonging and acceptance. Expressions of love and affection—whether verbal affirmations, acts of service, quality time, or physical touch—further strengthen this bond, fostering unity within the family.

However, expressing love and affection may not always be straightforward. Sometimes, emotional barriers, busy schedules, or simply not knowing how to express these feelings can stand in the way. Overcoming these challenges requires understanding each member’s love language, setting aside dedicated time for family, and fostering an environment where expressing emotions is encouraged and valued. By doing so, love and affection become the glue that holds the family together, fostering a profound sense of unity.

The Bottom Line

Family unity is the harmonious blend of mutual respect, open communication, shared experiences, conflict resolution skills, positive culture, and love. These elements contribute to creating an environment of support, acceptance, and belonging—forming the pillars of family unity. While each family is unique, and the path to unity may differ, the foundations remain the same. Implementing these strategies and nurturing these foundations can help foster unity within every family, ultimately creating healthier, happier, and more fulfilling familial relationships. In the grand tapestry of life, family unity forms the vibrant threads that hold everything together, a testament to its enduring power and immeasurable importance.

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Understanding The Importance Of Family Traditions And 5 Traditions You Should Embrace

Mark Garcia

Table of Contents

• What Are Family Traditions? 

What Is The Importance Of Family Traditions?

5 unique family traditions you can practice, a word from mind family, frequently asked questions (faqs).

Family customs are not just mere rituals or routines, they are the lifeblood of family ties that make our lives richer by creating a sense of continuity, identity, and communal joy.

The importance of family traditions is that it is typically passed from one generation to another, form an integral part of the fabric of family life. From grand holiday celebrations to simple daily routines, family traditions create a sense of belonging, instill values, and foster lasting memories.

In this article, we look at the significance of family traditions and present five distinctive actions that can unite families forever bonding them through time.

What Are Family Traditions?

Family traditions are the customs and habits a family creates and maintains over time, often passing them from generation to generation. These can be any activity that brings them together, makes them feel as one, and gives them memories.

Frequently celebrated holidays have different importance of family traditions associated with them. For example, during Christmas families decorate trees and bake cookies before exchanging gifts under the tree or attending religious services.

Thanksgiving is usually centered around cooking a large meal to share with others while expressing gratitude for what they have and watching football afterward. Easter tends to involve egg hunts in the morning followed by church services then ending with a family brunch. In contrast, Hanukkah usually consists of lighting candles on the menorah each night for eight nights straight.

Families highly value less frequent but still important daily or weekly practices. Some examples include eating dinner as a family every night, having Sunday brunch together each week, or even just ordering pizza once every Friday night without fail.

Other routines might consist of telling bedtime stories every night before going to sleep as well as playing board games together every Saturday evening after dinner when everyone has free time. Special phrases such as saying grace before meals or sharing best and worst parts about their day everyday also help hold families closer together.

Family traditions hold great significance for many reasons. They contribute towards the general wellbeing and togetherness of the family unit, which brings about various psychological, emotional and social benefits.

The following are some of the importance of family traditions:

1. Building Strong Family Ties

One of the importance of family traditions is that they create a chance for family members to spend quality time together hence developing closeness. These shared activities and rituals help build strong, lasting relationships among family members.

Family members learn better means of communication when they take part in traditions, offer support to each other, and feel united.

2. Identity Formation

Traditions are important in helping individuals understand their families’ history and culture. Such feelings make them feel that they belong somewhere as opposed to themselves only.

This sense of belonging is crucial for children as it helps them understand their own identity and where they come from.

3. Stability through tough times

During moments of change or anxiety, family traditions provide stability as well as continuity. 

The importance of family traditions is that they offer a predictable routine that relatives can lean on during hard times; this is especially meaningful during difficult periods. Traditions are known ahead of time thus making them comforting while also relieving anxiety.

4. Teaching morals and moral principles

Family traditions often pass important values and life lessons from generation to generation. These practices usually embody the fundamental beliefs and ideas that families cherish, educating children about respect, thankfulness, responsibility, and other crucial virtues.

5. Making memories that will last

Traditions mark special occasions that become unforgettable memories. As a result of these shared experiences, a family acquires its collective history with accounts that can be handed down across generations. These recollections help cement emotional ties among family members.

6. Cultivating Group Identity

Involvement in family rituals makes one feel attached to their kin group or clan thereby creating a sense of belongingness. This bond is significant, especially for children and adolescents who experience support as well as understanding within their immediate family setting.

7. Boosting Emotional Wellbeing

Most times, familial conventions entail enjoyable activities that promote happiness and well-being. In this regard, all activities aimed at promoting fun such as holiday celebrations or an annual vacation or participating in a family game night ultimately contribute to overall emotional health by giving pleasure and relaxation too much.

8. Encouraging Family Communication

Traditions create periods for members of a family to communicate with each other on a more regular basis; either as they plan a holiday feast or merely share meals, these enable open dialogue on how to keep members connected.

9. Promoting Cultural and Religious Continuity

These are family traditions that are usually based on cultural or religious beliefs that play a role in preserving and transmitting the main elements of a family’s culture.

Involvement in such traditions helps families maintain their cultural or religious ties thus making them last for generations.

Family traditions provide the very foundation of the family unity and cohesion. They help establish and maintain meaningful connections, transmit essential values, and contribute to one’s sense of identity and belongingness.

These procedures help build up the tapestry of shared memories through which families can navigate life’s problems.

One way of strengthening family ties and creating long-lasting memories is by establishing unique family traditions. Here are some five different family traditions that shows the importance of family traditions:

1. Recipe Swap and Cook-off

For instance, every month a member of the family may pick out a recipe they would like to try. The recipes are then exchanged among individuals while others prepare their dishes.

The family can then eat together and taste all the foods as well as give each other comments about how they have cooked them. This also improves on cooking skills, adds variety to the diet, and introduces fun in the process.

2. Memory Jar

This jar should be kept somewhere everyone can see it so that small pieces of paper and pens may be available at all times in the house. For example, your family members could record happy moments, achievements, funny incidents or anything else worth remembering throughout the year and drop them into this jar.

At the end of the year or during a special occasion involving everyone in your household, empty out its contents by reading them aloud. The significance of this tradition is that it helps people look back upon positive things they have encountered and strengthens feelings of thankfulness also.

3. Sea Hunt for Each Season

Create a game of finding in every season. For example, in spring, look out for certain flowers, birds or insects; In summer go hunting for seashells, leaves of specific types or landmarks;

Alternatively, during autumn months find colourful leaves, acorns and pumpkins or locate festive decorations and footprints on the snow during winter seasons. This will help them to see that spending time outside is a way to gain knowledge and understand the world we live in.

4. Family’s Monthly Talent Show

The family should have a talent show to highlight each member’s gift once per month. Some of the things one can showcase include singing, dancing, playing an instrument such as guitar and violin, performing magic tricks and sharing one’s recent art project. 

Anything that qualifies as a form of talent. It emphasizes uniqueness among the students thus increasing their level of confidence since it allows everyone to be supported by others.

5. Yearly Book Club

Selecting a book for the whole family to read over a certain period like a month or even more than that will be crucial at this point. After reading this book organize a discussion session with your family members at which they can share their thoughts about what they have read as well as some memorable parts from it.

To keep everybody engaged change the person responsible for selecting books between different relatives so that people read books from various genres and on different topics within their home library rings . Thus promoting reading culture , analyzing situations critically as well as making meaningful conversations .

These unique family traditions make life richer creating closer bonds among them through activities characterized by fun and interest which everyone eagerly anticipates

Family traditions are the threads that weave together the fabric of our shared lives, offering stability, identity, and joy. By incorporating unique traditions like a Recipe Swap and Cook-off families can cultivate a vibrant, supportive environment that nurtures growth and happiness.

At Mind Family, we believe in the profound impact that family traditions can have. They are more than just activities; they are the foundation upon which strong, loving families are built. 

We encourage you to explore and create your own traditions, tailored to your family’s unique interests and values, and witness the beautiful tapestry of memories and bonds that will unfold.

What are family traditions?

Family traditions are customs and practices developed and maintained over time, often passed down through generations, to strengthen family bonds and create lasting memories.

What is the importance of family traditions? 

Family traditions foster unity, create a sense of identity, provide stability, teach values, and enhance emotional well-being by offering regular opportunities for family connection and shared experiences.

What are some examples of unique family traditions?

Unique family traditions include a Recipe Swap and Cook-off, a Memory Jar, Seasonal Scavenger Hunts, Monthly Family Talent Shows, and an Annual Book Club, promoting fun and family connection.

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2 responses to “Understanding The Importance Of Family Traditions And 5 Traditions You Should Embrace”

[…] kontynuacji. Przypominają nam o wspólnych chwilach, które stanowią fundament naszego życia​ (Mind Family)​​ […]

[…] The smell of coffee often brings to mind cherished family traditions. Imagine waking up to the rich, inviting scent of coffee brewing in the kitchen. This daily ritual is a cornerstone in many households, marking the start of a new day. For some, it recalls mornings spent with parents or grandparents, sitting around the table, and sharing stories over a cup of freshly brewed coffee. This shared experience creates a deep bond, making the smell of coffee synonymous with family, love, and togetherness. learn more […]

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Featured Publication

Family Unity: The New Geography of Family Life

When the most intimate and enduring of human relationships are lived across international borders, states trying to manage migration flows must balance border control concerns with their international obligations to respect and support family life. While it is sometimes thought that state sovereignty over borders is complete, non-citizens can in certain cases, depending on immigration status and the nature of the relationship, claim the right to family unity in their host states.

A "right to family unity" is not expressed as such in international treaties. Rather, the term is shorthand for the sum of several interlocking rights, discussed below. In the migration context, family unity covers issues related to admission, stay, and expulsion. Family unity can also have a more specific meaning relating to constraints on state discretion to separate an existing intact family through the expulsion of one of its members. In contrast, family reunification, or reunion, refers to the efforts of family members already separated by forced or voluntary migration to regroup in a country other than their country of origin, and so implicates state discretion over admission. This article uses family unity in its broader meaning, unless the more limited one is clearly implied.

The Right to Family Unity

A family's right to live together is protected by international human rights and humanitarian law. There is universal consensus that, as the fundamental unit of society, the family is entitled to respect, protection, assistance, and support. A right to family unity is inherent in recognizing the family as a group unit. The right to marry and found a family also includes the right to maintain a family life together.

The right to a shared family life draws additional support from the prohibition against arbitrary interference with the family. Finally, states have recognized that children have a right to live with their parents. Both the father and the mother, irrespective of their marital status, have common responsibilities as parents and share the right and responsibility to participate equally in the upbringing and development of their children.

The right to family unity is not limited to citizens living in their own state. Cross-border family unity issues arise most frequently when a host state either moves to deport a non-citizen family member, or denies entry to an individual seeking to join family members already residing in the state. The corollary problem, that of a state of origin denying exit permission to an individual attempting reunification with family in another country, has become a less salient issue with the end of the Cold War.

The right to family unity across borders intersects with the prerogative of states to make decisions on the entry or stay of non-citizens. These interests seem increasingly often to clash. Today's migratory movements are fueled by the economic pressures and opportunities of globalization, the prevalence of war and other human rights violations, and the existence of kinship networks created by earlier migration. At the same time, many states have been struggling to address real and perceived migration management problems by enacting restrictive laws and increasing enforcement efforts, a trend that has intensified now that national security considerations have come to the forefront of the immigration debate.

The pressures can be enormous, both on policymakers trying to craft orderly immigration procedures, and on families who find it hard to accept that a border has come between them. The problems are widespread; forced and voluntary migrants alike grapple with these issues. Because it is so common for refugee families to be divided, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees devotes much time and attention to refugee family unity and reunification, for obvious humanitarian reasons and also because both protection and solutions are immeasurably easier for intact families. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, Gabriela Rodriguez Pizarro, has emphasized the pervasive nature of the problem in observing that families separated by migration "are becoming increasingly common, and will become a defining characteristic of societies in many countries in the twenty-first century."

Equally defining will be the efforts of families to reunite through migration, and the ways in which states will choose to respond. The rights on which family unity is based are often qualified with provisions for the state to limit the right under certain circumstances. It should be noted, however, that the most important, and sometimes only, qualifier is the imperative to act in the best interests of the child. The nature of the family relationship shapes the right to family unity, with minor dependent children and their parents having the strongest claim to remain together or to be reunited. Maintaining the unity of an intact family poses different issues than reconstituting a separated family. Finally, the immigration status of the various family members has an impact on how the right to family unity should be implemented.

Different Kinds of Families and the Right to Unity

There is not a single, internationally accepted definition of the family, and international law recognizes a variety of forms. Some observers have noted that in many countries, traditional family patterns characterized by duties of care and concern for elders and members of the extended family are giving way to a more "western" or "nuclear" model, and caution against making outdated assumptions that favor these more distant relatives in reunification schemes. Others have pointed out that families are also evolving in more expansive ways, with the increasing acceptance of same-sex unions, and the growing phenomenon of AIDS orphans resulting in child-headed households, as just two examples. Given the variety of families, the existence of a family tie is a question of fact, best determined on a case-by-case basis.

The right to family unity applies universally to all persons. The question, then, is not whether various categories of persons have the right to family unity, but rather which state(s) must act to ensure the right. A look at the various categories of people who might claim a right to family unity demonstrates some of the issues that can arise.

Nationals : The right to marry is not limited to persons of the same nationality. However, for a citizen marrying a non-citizen, issues can arise when arbitrary restrictions are imposed or significant delays are encountered, or when female citizens have fewer rights than male citizens, for example, in obtaining entry for their non-citizen spouses or in transmitting citizenship to their children.

Migrants : Under the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, which is under consideration in the United Nations General Assembly and is soon to come into force, states shall "take measures they deem appropriate" to facilitate reunification. The degree of discretion retained by states with respect to migrant workers reflects an expectation that workers can return to their home countries if they wish to rejoin family members, although this does not take into account economic realities that keep most migrant workers firmly tied to the host country. It is far more common for migrant workers to have, or wish to have, their families join them. Although some states have been reluctant to make generous provisions for family reunification, it is increasingly understood as a positive means of promoting the integration and securing the rights of migrants in their host societies.

Refugees : Refugees recognized under the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees are usually in the most advantageous position of all non-citizens with respect to family unity. Family unity in the refugee context means granting refugee or a similar secure status to family members accompanying a recognized refugee. The country of asylum must likewise provide for family reunification , at least of close family members, since the refugee cannot by definition return to the country of origin to enjoy reunification there. The right to family unity applies equally in situations of mass influx, whether managed under a temporary protection scheme or under international agreement, such as the OAU Refugee Convention. UNHCR's Executive Committee has specifically concluded that respect for family unity is a "minimum basic human standard" in such situations and has called for family reunification for persons benefiting from temporary protection. There is an emerging consensus for the need for prompt reunification during periods of temporary protection.

Others in need of international protection : Those whose claims under the 1951 Refugee Convention have been rejected after an individual determination, but who have nevertheless been found to be in need of international protection (under the Convention against Torture, for example) are entitled to respect for their fundamental human rights, including the right to family unity. The justification for refugee family reunification in a country of asylum derives from the refugee not being able to return home, and not from the Refugee Convention itself. Persons in an analogous situation of inability to return home should benefit from the same application of the right in the host country.

Asylum seekers : Since asylum seekers are, by definition, people whose legal status has not yet been determined, it may be difficult to determine where they should enjoy the right to family reunification, or which state bears responsibility for giving effect to that right. The length of proceedings in many countries causes tremendous hardship, particularly when children are apart from parents. There is a general recognition, at least in principle, that separated children should benefit from expedited procedures, but such measures do not even begin to address the right of children left in a country of origin or in transit to family reunification; no state has adopted expedited procedures for asylum-seeking parents separated from their children. States are understandably not eager to process family reunification applications for asylum seekers whose asylum applications they are having difficulty processing. Given the scarcity of state resources, however, it would be helpful to pursue possibilities for reuniting family members who are seeking asylum in various countries, particularly if determination of the claim has been pending, or is expected to take longer than, six months. The grouping together of potentially related claims, witnesses, and evidence would be more cost effective than parallel procedures in different jurisdictions, would promote more consistent decision-making, and would hasten the provision of a durable solution for the family.

Constraints on State Decisions to Expel and Admit Family Members

As a procedural matter, host states must consider the family interests involved before expelling a non-citizen family member. As a substantive matter, respect for the right to family unity requires balancing the state's interest in deporting the family member with the family's interest in remaining intact. The inquiry is focused whether the effects on the family of the separation would be disproportionate to the state's objectives in removing the individual. Considerations such as length of stay in the host country, age, and the degree of the family's financial and emotional interdependence should be weighed against the state's interests in promoting public safety and in enforcing immigration laws. The best practice suggests that, particularly when expulsion is threatened for immigration violations only, as opposed to criminal law convictions, and citizen children will be affected, states should find it difficult to rely solely on their interest in immigration enforcement to justify separating an intact family.

In assessing family unity cases involving children, states must also take into account the best interests of the child. States seeking to separate families through deportation face significant constraints in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which requires in article 9 that states " shall ensure that a child shall not be separated from his or her parents against their will, except when...such separation is necessary for the best interests of the child ." (emphasis added)

There are both procedural and substantive aspects to the best interests requirement. To ensure an adequate procedure, professional opinions regarding the impact on the child must be taken into account where deportation will mean the separation of a child from his or her parent. The substantive content of the best interests principle is not explicitly defined in the CRC. Nevertheless, certain elements emerge from other provisions of the Convention. In the case of actions and decisions affecting an individual child, it is the best interests of that individual child that must be taken into account. It is in the child's best interests to enjoy the rights and freedoms set out in the CRC, such as contact with both parents (in most circumstances). Best interests must be determined on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the totality of the circumstances. The views of the child shall be heard 'in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child' and be given due weight in accordance with his or her age and maturity. It is certainly not always in the best interests of the child to remain with parents, as recognized in CRC article 9. However, it should be noted that the CRC does not recognize a public interest to be weighed against the involuntary separation of the family. The only exception allowed is when separation is necessary for the best interests of the child.

Family reunification requires a state affirmatively to allow entry to a person, as opposed to refraining from deporting someone, and thus is a right more encumbered by state discretion. Nevertheless, states are bound by international obligations toward the family in this context, as well.

These obligations are most pronounced in the CRC, but support can also be found in other human rights treaties, in humanitarian law and in refugee protection principles. In looking at the situation for minor children and their parents, several elements of the CRC are important. First, the obligation imposed to ensure the unity of families within the state also determines the state's action regarding families divided by its borders. Second, reunification may require a state to allow entry as well as departure. Third, children and parents have equal status in a mutual right; either may be entitled to join the other. Nor is it sufficient that the child be with only one parent in an otherwise previously intact family; the child has the right to be with both parents, and both parents have the right and responsibility to raise the child.

While the CRC does not expressly mandate approval of every reunification application, it clearly contemplates that there is at least a presumption in favor of approval. States cannot maintain generally restrictive laws or practices regarding the entry of aliens for reunification purposes without violating the CRC. Nor can states fail to provide and promote a procedure for reunification.

Globalization has expanded the realm in which families live and work, and created a new geography of family life. Few migrants, even those who have made the choice to travel and to do so alone, intend a permanent, or even long-term, separation from their loved ones. Immigration policymakers will increasingly be called upon to recognize the rights and realities of families living across borders.

Abram, E.F., 1995. "The Child's Right to Family Unity in International Immigration Law" 17(4) Law and Policy .

Bhabha, J., 2001. "Minors or Aliens?" Inconsistent State Intervention and Separated Child Asylum Seekers' 3 European Journal of Migration and Law .

Jastram, K. and Newland, K., 2003. "Family Unity and Refugee Protection," in E. Feller, V. Turk, and F. Nicholson (eds.) Refugee Protection in International Law: UNHCR's Global Consultations on International Protection , Cambridge University Press.

Van Krieken, P.J., 2001. "Family Reunification" in The Migration Acquis Handbook.

Family or Misery? The Question of Modernity

• Daniel de Liever
• — August 24, 2024

The cornerstone of society, the family, has seen unprecedented change since the 1950s. With the number of relatives that an individual has expected to drop by 35% in the near future, one might ask what the future of family life holds. Additionally, more and more Western adults are now child-free by choice , and alarmingly low Western birth rates are continuing to decline.

One crucial outcome has been a decline in mental health across the developed West. The decline of stable families, as one of the primary institutions of individual stability and sanity, was bound to be attended by such costs. With one in four people facing a mental illness at least once throughout their lives, and the rate of the most prominent mental health disorders—anxiety and depression—increasing by 28% and 25% respectively in 2023 alone, we can speak of a mental health crisis. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the mental health crisis is “indisputable and urgent.” It is high time that we take a deeper look at the relationship between prosperous families and mentally flourishing individuals.

Dominant progressive thinkers have argued that the liberation from family life has been a deliverance to people at large, bringing opportunities, independence, and a hitherto unimaginable degree of freedom. Declining family unity is generally written off as a small price to pay or even a natural good reflective only of the emancipation of the individual. Yet the negative impact on the ground is more drastic than first meets the eye. While much of conservative thought has stressed the societal importance of a renaissance of the family as a social institution, I believe that the public debate should additionally be focused on beating modernity at its own game: in creating psychologically resilient, stable, and meaningful lives for people. Modern culture, with its progressive language of self-actualization and happiness, promotes a paradigm in which individual happiness and liberty are deemed the greatest good. But what if we could demonstrate that traditional family life brings exactly that for which modern man claims to strive, and much more besides?

The first step towards family erosion

To understand why family life changed so rapidly throughout the 20th century, we must look at the sexual revolution and its long-lasting impact. Erupting in the 1960s, this wholesale reversal of values transformed how society perceives sex, from a predominantly marital, sacred, and procreative act towards a primary act of pleasure, liberty, and individual emancipation. The result, among other things, has been an increase in divorces and a decrease in household size, marriage rates, and—perhaps most concerning of all—fertility rates (which are now below replacement levels across the vast majority of the developed world).

Underlying these sociological changes is the quest for individual emancipation. This unquestionable dogma—that unlimited liberty represents the highest virtue—is where modernism meets the reality of human nature. Unfettered freedom of choice and radical independence were promised as guarantors of overall quality of life and well-being. In practice, the shift from complementarity towards egalitarianism and from normative behavior towards the worship of the will has in fact made families more vulnerable and unstable over time which, as I will show further, has decreased the quality of life of the individual.

The solution to family erosion

A psychological account of the importance of families is crucial, but it only can be applied once we put it in its proper framework to understand human nature at the most fundamental level. We must call upon the resources of the Western tradition to make explicit an old truth that, until very recent times, was taken for granted: society can only be prosperous to the extent that its families flourish. Aristotle, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, and Roger Scruton, as some of the (pre)conservative giants on whose shoulders we stand, provide key insights which do not only explain the psychological agony in which we find ourselves, but also supply the tools with which we might help ourselves get back on track.

Let’s start with Aristotle, as the classical spokesman for family life. In the Politics , Aristotle describes the procreative pair of man and woman as the beginning and fundamental unit of society. This basic unit branches out into the extended family, village, and the city as a whole. The family thus holds a fundamental role as the primary multigenerational institution which enables the formation of family narratives. As Aristotle makes clear, these narratives preserve the virtues that its members need to develop according to their telos —that is, their goal or purpose. Man’s purpose, for Aristotle, is happiness, though happiness understood in a far more robust way than it usually is today. In order to strive towards our telos , Aristotle claims that we need knowledge of morality, the will to make virtuous choices, and the resolve to perform virtuous deeds, quite independently of achieving personal gain or avoiding loss. The family provides nothing less than the practice grounds, fitted with correctional mechanisms, for reaching our telos .

In modern empirical psychology, we find further support for Aristotle’s foundational outlook on families. Family narratives have been shown to give children more self-embeddedness, security, better family functioning, self-control, and self-esteem. The lack of a family narrative or the complete erasure of its existence has been shown to inflict detrimental effects on everyone concerned.

Love and culture

Burke’s work has inspired many thinkers to pursue family-oriented philosophy. One of the most important figures in this respect is Kirk. In The Conservative Mind (1957), Kirk builds upon Burke’s vision of the family as the natural center of any good society. Kirk emphasized the true antidote of modern nihilism: love. As the old Jewish saying goes, we do not give to the ones we love, but we love the ones to whom we give. And as Kirk noted, primarily in family life we learn in a stable and practical environment to give to—and thus love—the people around us. Hence, the principal instrument of moral instruction, education and economic life should remain within the family. Only then can we learn to love ourselves and others. Additionally, Kirk understood that the family creates a vital tension in which one learns through moral effort to become a functional adult, a fully formed person within the social order, through the constructive disciplining of anti-social impulses. Most of contemporary psychology therefore misplaces the lack of self-love and meaning as a technical problem to do with individuals. No wonder these ‘specialists’ seem so unable to solve the ongoing mental health crisis.

Detrimentally, modernity promises man unparalleled stability and prosperity, even while he abandons all moral efforts and throws off every possible check on personal appetite. This is not only false, but it serves to create generations which are unable to control their destructive desires for the good of their future, their surroundings, and society. This has harmed our mental welfare in two ways: first, by destabilizing families, chaos, insecurity, anxiety and reduced well-being follow; and second, guilt, nihilism, and despair enter the picture due to the inability to harness moral effort. The solution to this cultural sickness is more moral effort, instead of acceptance of moral withdrawal. Again, the family comes to the rescue with its great, ennobling demands to pursue the maximal flourishing proper to human nature.

The role of parents

Scruton lands the most fundamental conservative blow against modern society’s outlook on families as merely “procreative contracts.” In The Meaning of Conservatism (1980), he points out the most problematic thing about the rights-obsessed language of the modern age. The liberal view of society starts from a contractual relationship between individual citizens and the state. Through the conferral by autonomous individuals of a mandate to the state, liberals believe that the state can defend abstract human rights. Yet, in practice, there are no abstract rights to be found. Rights are a product of the particular social history to which we belong. Thus, far from creating society through an indefinite number of acts by individual wills, conservatives understand the dependence that we all have, as individuals, on society. It follows that society should be defended from destabilization by individual selfishness, instead of the liberal view in which the individual should be protected from society. This is crucial, for it legitimizes the conservative defense of one’s society and culture.

To bring Scruton’s vision into the realm of the family, we must look at his understanding of authority and power. According to Scruton, society exists through the alliance of authority and power. Authority and power are drawn to each other, as classically has been observed in the relationship between the church (authority) and the state (power). The establishment is defended by conservatives based on a bond that is prior to any possibility of choice or contract. The primary example of just such a bond, transcending individual will, is the family. Having been established prior to our birth, we do not choose our family. The established power of the family is a great good due to the child’s need for its parents’ power over it. This manifestation of the parents’ will over their children is strongly related to the natural love which parents feel for their children to guide them throughout their primary developmental stages. This description of love is where Scruton and Kirk coincide. The initial feeling for things outside the family is one of love and dependency, like that of the family. Just as we become adults through the established power of our parents, in society we become persons through the society’s power over us.

Relating this to the mental health crisis, the loss of authority and power of parents over their children has broken the foundation of stability and security which is crucial to the rite of passage into stable adulthood. By labeling the authority of parents over their children as an act of oppressive power instead of love, parents have gradually lost the moral claim, let alone the tools, to raise their children in a prosperous way. Instead of trying to heal broken children, modern psychology should focus on healing the family basis that gave rise to stable people in the first place.

Well-being requires family

So far, we have made the case why a strong family life is needed to create psychologically stable and prosperous individuals, as well as flourishing societies. Now, it is crucial to understand the underlying psychological mechanisms that have made the family such a powerful social institution and increased individual well-being. This unites the philosophical and psychological underpinning of the family and indicates how modern psychology might contribute to family policy.

An important psychological theory to understand family life is stress process theory, which tells us that stress can undermine mental health. Additionally, receiving family support increases a sense of self-worth, self-esteem, optimism, positive affect, and overall good mental health. In short, family relations reduce stress and therefore can improve the individual’s mental health. Moreover, family relationships also play a role in regulating other’s behavior and providing information and encouragement to behave in healthier ways, in accordance with the vision of the family, promoted by Aristotle and Scruton, as the primary institution to develop prosperous people. Finally, the quality of family relations is important to highlight. Positive family relations are associated with a lower allostatic load (wear and tear on the body accumulating from stress), whereas negative family relations are associated with a higher allostatic load. When relating this to modern society, the increased instability and erosion of family relations reduces the potential for positive family relations to form and therefore reduces individual well-being, in line with Burke’s warning that only strong families are able to bring forth flourishing people.

Overall, the family forms one of the most important cornerstones of human flourishing. It makes us psychologically able to develop through intergenerational narratives, moral effort, and love. Families are thus entitled to power and authority in society, so that parents are able to nourish their children for the common good. This gives new generations the freedom to develop in accordance with their own adventures. Perhaps counterintuitively for today’s sensibilities, the conservative outlook, with its cardinal emphasis on family, nevertheless fulfills the modern dream of happiness and mental flourishing. A tremendous amount of social capital is lost with the modern shift towards radical individualization. It has reduced the cooperative strength of human beings into fractures and vulnerabilities. Modern man, as he becomes increasingly psychologically fragile, needs to rediscover that most basic of great assets to deal with an increasingly complex and changing world: an embedded family.

• Tags: Daniel de Liever , family

The Seductiveness of Ideology in Politics

An Uncertain Future for Conservative Christians: An Interview with Rod Dreher

Norman Stone (1941-2019)

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Family, culture, and communication.

• V. Santiago Arias V. Santiago Arias College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University
•  and  Narissra Maria Punyanunt-Carter Narissra Maria Punyanunt-Carter College of Media and Communication, Texas Tech University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.504
• Published online: 22 August 2017

Through the years, the concept of family has been studied by family therapists, psychology scholars, and sociologists with a diverse theoretical framework, such as family communication patterns (FCP) theory, dyadic power theory, conflict, and family systems theory. Among these theories, there are two main commonalities throughout its findings: the interparental relationship is the core interaction in the familial system because the quality of their communication or coparenting significantly affects the enactment of the caregiver role while managing conflicts, which are not the exception in the familial setting. Coparenting is understood in its broader sense to avoid an extensive discussion of all type of families in our society. Second, while including the main goal of parenting, which is the socialization of values, this process intrinsically suggests cultural assimilation as the main cultural approach rather than intergroup theory, because intercultural marriages need to decide which values are considered the best to be socialized. In order to do so, examples from the Thai culture and Hispanic and Latino cultures served to show cultural assimilation as an important mediator of coparenting communication patterns, which subsequently affect other subsystems that influence individuals’ identity and self-esteem development in the long run. Finally, future directions suggest that the need for incorporating a nonhegemonic one-way definition of cultural assimilation allows immigration status to be brought into the discussion of family communication issues in the context of one of the most diverse countries in the world.

• parental communication
• dyadic power
• family communication systems
• cultural assimilation

Introduction

Family is the fundamental structure of every society because, among other functions, this social institution provides individuals, from birth until adulthood, membership and sense of belonging, economic support, nurturance, education, and socialization (Canary & Canary, 2013 ). As a consequence, the strut of its social role consists of operating as a system in a manner that would benefit all members of a family while achieving what is considered best, where decisions tend to be coherent, at least according to the norms and roles assumed by family members within the system (Galvin, Bylund, & Brommel, 2004 ). Notwithstanding, the concept of family can be interpreted differently by individual perceptions to an array of cultural backgrounds, and cultures vary in their values, behaviors, and ideas.

The difficulty of conceptualizing this social institution suggests that family is a culture-bound phenomenon (Bales & Parsons, 2014 ). In essence, culture represents how people view themselves as part of a unique social collective and the ensuing communication interactions (Olaniran & Roach, 1994 ); subsequently, culture provides norms for behavior having a tremendous impact on those family members’ roles and power dynamics mirrored in its communication interactions (Johnson, Radesky, & Zuckerman, 2013 ). Thus, culture serves as one of the main macroframeworks for individuals to interpret and enact those prescriptions, such as inheritance; descent rules (e.g., bilateral, as in the United States, or patrilineal); marriage customs, such as ideal monogamy and divorce; and beliefs about sexuality, gender, and patterns of household formation, such as structure of authority and power (Weisner, 2014 ). For these reasons, “every family is both a unique microcosm and a product of a larger cultural context” (Johnson et al., 2013 , p. 632), and the analysis of family communication must include culture in order to elucidate effective communication strategies to solve familial conflicts.

In addition, to analyze familial communication patterns, it is important to address the most influential interaction with regard to power dynamics that determine the overall quality of family functioning. In this sense, within the range of family theories, parenting function is the core relationship in terms of power dynamics. Parenting refers to all efforts and decisions made by parents individually to guide their children’s behavior. This is a pivotal function, but the quality of communication among people who perform parenting is fundamental because their internal communication patterns will either support or undermine each caregiver’s parenting attempts, individually having a substantial influence on all members’ psychological and physical well-being (Schrodt & Shimkowski, 2013 ). Subsequently, parenting goes along with communication because to execute all parenting efforts, there must be a mutual agreement among at least two individuals to conjointly take care of the child’s fostering (Van Egeren & Hawkins, 2004 ). Consequently, coparenting serves as a crucial predictor of the overall family atmosphere and interactions, and it deserves special attention while analyzing family communication issues.

Through the years, family has been studied by family therapists, psychology scholars, and sociologists, but interaction behaviors define the interpersonal relationship, roles, and power within the family as a system (Rogers, 2006 ). Consequently, family scholarship relies on a wide range of theories developed within the communication field and in areas of the social sciences (Galvin, Braithwaite, & Bylund, 2015 ) because analysis of communication patterns in the familial context offers more ecological validity that individuals’ self-report measures. As many types of interactions may happen within a family, there are many relevant venues (i.e., theories) for scholarly analysis on this subject, which will be discussed later in this article in the “ Family: Theoretical Perspectives ” section. To avoid the risk of cultural relativeness while defining family, this article characterizes family as “a long-term group of two or more people related through biological, legal, or equivalent ties and who enact those ties through ongoing interactions providing instrumental and/or emotional support” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 5).

Therefore, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the most relevant theories in family communication to identify frustrations and limitations with internal communication. Second, as a case in point, the United States welcomes more than 50 million noncitizens as temporary visitors and admits approximately 1 million immigrants to live as lawful residents yearly (Fullerton, 2014 ), this demographic pattern means that nearly one-third of the population (102 million) comes from different cultural backgrounds, and therefore, the present review will incorporate culture as an important mediator for coparenting, so that future research can be performed to find specific techniques and training practices that are more suitable for cross-cultural contexts.

Family: Theoretical Perspectives

Even though the concept of family can be interpreted individually and differently in different cultures, there are also some commonalities, along with communication processes, specific roles within families, and acceptable habits of interactions with specific family members disregarding cultural differences. This section will provide a brief overview of the conceptualization of family through the family communication patterns (FCP) theory, dyadic power theory, conflict, and family systems theory, with a special focus on the interparental relationship.

Family Communication Patterns Theory

One of the most relevant approaches to address the myriad of communication issues within families is the family communication patterns (FCP) theory. Originally developed by McLeod and Chaffee ( 1973 ), this theory aims to understand families’ tendencies to create stable and predictable communication patterns in terms of both relational cognition and interpersonal behavior (Braithwaite & Baxter, 2005 ). Specifically, this theory focuses on the unique and amalgamated associations derived from interparental communication and its impact on parenting quality to determine FCPs and the remaining interactions (Young & Schrodt, 2016 ).

To illustrate FCP’s focus on parental communication, Schrodt, Witt, and Shimkowski ( 2014 ) conducted a meta-analysis of 74 studies (N = 14,255) to examine the associations between the demand/withdraw family communication patterns of interaction, and the subsequent individual, relational, and communicative outcomes. The cumulative evidence suggests that wife demand/husband withdraw and husband demand/wife withdraw show similar moderate correlations with communicative and psychological well-being outcomes, and even higher when both patterns are taken together (at the relational level). This is important because one of the main tenets of FCP is that familial relationships are drawn on the pursuit of coorientation among members. Coorientation refers to the cognitive process of two or more individuals focusing on and assessing the same object in the same material and social context, which leads to a number of cognitions as the number of people involved, which results in different levels of agreement, accuracy, and congruence (for a review, see Fitzpatrick & Koerner, 2005 ); for example, in dyads that are aware of their shared focus, two different cognitions of the same issue will result.

Hereafter, the way in which these cognitions are socialized through power dynamics determined socially and culturally by roles constitutes specific interdependent communication patterns among family members. For example, Koerner and Fitzpatrick ( 2006 ) provide a taxonomy of family types on the basis of coorientation and its impact on communication pattern in terms of the degree of conformity in those conversational tendencies. To wit, consensual families mostly agree for the sake of the hierarchy within a given family and to explore new points of view; pluralistic families allow members to participate equally in conversations and there is no pressure to control or make children’s decisions; protective families maintain the hierarchy by making decisions for the sake of achieving common family goals; and laissez-faire families, which are low in conversation and conformity orientation, allow family members to not get deeply involved in the family.

The analysis of family communication patterns is quintessential for family communication scholarly work because it influences forming an individual’s self concept in the long run. As a case in point, Young and Schrodt ( 2016 ) surveyed 181 young adults from intact families, where conditional and interaction effects between communication patterns and conformity orientation were observed as the main predictors of future romantic partners. Moreover, this study concluded that FCPs and interparental confirmation are substantial indicators of self-to-partner confirmation, after controlling for reciprocity of confirmation within the romantic relationship. As a consequence, FCP influences children’s and young adults’ perceptions of romantic behavior (e.g., Fowler, Pearson, & Beck, 2010 ); the quality of communication behavior, such as the degree of acceptation of verbal aggression in romantic dyads (e.g., Aloia & Solomon, 2013 ); gender roles; and conflict styles (e.g., Taylor & Segrin, 2010 ), and parental modeling (e.g., Young & Schrodt, 2016 ).

This suggests three important observations. First, family is a very complex interpersonal context, in which communication processes, specific roles within families, and acceptable habits of interactions with specific family members interact as subsystems (see Galvin et al., 2004 ; Schrodt & Shimkowski, 2013 ). Second, among those subsystems, the core interaction is the individuals who hold parenting roles (i.e., intact and post divorced families); the couple (disregarding particular sexual orientations), and, parenting roles have a reciprocal relationship over time (Le, McDaniel, Leavitt, & Feinberg, 2016 ). Communication between parenting partners is crucial for the development of their entire family; for example, Schrodt and Shimkowski ( 2013 ) conducted a survey with 493 young adult children from intact (N = 364) and divorced families (N = 129) about perceptions of interparental conflict that involves triangulation (the impression of being in the “middle” and feeling forced to display loyalty to one of the parents). Results suggest that supportive coparental communication positively predicts relational satisfaction with mothers and fathers, as well as mental health; on the other hand, antagonist and hostile coparental communication predicted negative marital satisfaction.

Consequently, “partners’ communication with one another will have a positive effect on their overall view of their marriage, . . . and directly result[ing in] their views of marital satisfaction” (Knapp & Daly, 2002 , p. 643). Le et al. ( 2016 ) conducted a longitudinal study to evaluate the reciprocal relationship between marital interaction and coparenting from the perspective of both parents in terms of support or undermining across the transition to parenthood from a dyadic perspective; 164 cohabiting heterosexual couples expecting their first child were analyzed from pregnancy until 36 months after birth. Both parents’ interdependence was examined in terms of three variables: gender difference analysis, stability over time in marriage and coparenting, and reciprocal associations between relationship quality and coparenting support or undermining. The findings suggest a long-term reciprocal association between relationship quality and coparenting support or undermining in heterosexual families; the quality of marriage relationship during prenatal stage is highly influential in coparenting after birth for both men and women; but, coparenting is connected to romantic relationship quality only for women.

Moreover, the positive association between coparenting and the parents’ relationship relates to the spillover hypothesis, which posits that the positive or negative factors in the parental subsystem are significantly associated with higher or lower marital satisfaction in the spousal subsystem, respectively. Ergo, overall parenting performance is substantially affected by the quality of marital communication patterns.

Dyadic Power

In addition, after analyzing the impact of marital interaction quality in families on marital satisfaction and future parental modeling, it is worth noting that marital satisfaction and coparenting are importantly mediated by power dynamics within the couple (Halstead, De Santis, & Williams, 2016 ), and even mediates marital commitment (e.g., Lennon, Stewart, & Ledermann, 2013 ). If the quality of interpersonal relationship between those individuals who hold parenting roles determines coparenting quality as well, then the reason for this association lies on the fact that virtually all intimate relationships are substantially characterized by power dynamics; when partners perceive more rewards than costs in the relationship, they will be more satisfied and significantly more committed to the relationship (Lennon et al., 2013 ). As a result, the inclusion of power dynamics in the analysis of family issues becomes quintessential.

For the theory of dyadic power, power in its basic sense includes dominance, control, and influence over others, as well as a means to meet survival needs. When power is integrated into dyadic intimate relationships, it generates asymmetries in terms of interdependence between partners due to the quality of alternatives provided by individual characteristics such as socioeconomic status and cultural characteristics such as gender roles. This virtually gives more power to men than women. Power refers to “the feeling derived from the ability to dominate, or control, the behavior, affect, and cognitions of another person[;] in consequence, this concept within the interparental relationship is enacted when one partner who controls resources and limiting the behavioral options of the other partner” (Lennon et al., 2013 , p. 97). Ergo, this theory examines power in terms of interdependence between members of the relationship: the partner who is more dependent on the other has less power in the relationship, which, of course, directly impact parenting decisions.

As a case in point, Worley and Samp ( 2016 ) examined the balance of decision-making power in the relationship, complaint avoidance, and complaint-related appraisals in 175 heterosexual couples. Findings suggest that decision-making power has a curvilinear association, in which individuals engaged in the least complaint avoidance when they were relatively equal to their partners in terms of power. In other words, perceptions of one another’s power potentially encourage communication efficacy in the interparental couple.

The analysis of power in intimate relationships, and, to be specific, between parents is crucial because it not only relates to marital satisfaction and commitment, but it also it affects parents’ dyadic coping for children. In fact, Zemp, Bodenmann, Backes, Sutter-Stickel, and Revenson ( 2016 ) investigated parents’ dyadic coping as a predictor of children’s internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and prosocial behavior in three independent studies. When there is a positive relationship among all three factors, the results indicated that the strongest correlation was the first one. Again, the quality of the marital and parental relationships has the strongest influence on children’s coping skills and future well-being.

From the overview of the two previous theories on family, it is worth addressing two important aspects. First, parenting requires an intensive great deal of hands-on physical care, attention to safety (Mooney-Doyle, Deatrick, & Horowitz, 2014 ), and interpretation of cues, and this is why parenting, from conception to when children enter adulthood, is a tremendous social, cultural, and legally prescribed role directed toward caregiving and endlessly attending to individuals’ social, physical, psychological, emotional, and cognitive development (Johnson et al., 2013 ). And while parents are making decisions about what they consider is best for all family members, power dynamics play a crucial role in marital satisfaction, commitment, parental modeling, and overall interparental communication efficacy in the case of postdivorce families. Therefore, the likelihood of conflict is latent within familial interactions while making decisions; indeed, situations in which family members agree on norms as a consensus is rare (Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990 ).

In addition to the interparental and marital power dynamics that delineates family communication patterns, the familial interaction is distinctive from other types of social relationships in the unequaled role of emotions and communication of affection while family members interact and make decisions for the sake of all members. For example, Ritchie and Fitzpatrick ( 1990 ) provided evidence that fathers tended to perceive that all other family members agree with his decisions or ideas. Even when mothers confronted and disagreed with the fathers about the fathers’ decisions or ideas, the men were more likely to believe that their children agreed with him. When the children were interviewed without their parents, however, the majority of children agreed with the mothers rather than the fathers (Ritchie & Fitzpatrick, 1990 ). Subsequently, conflict is highly present in families; however, in general, the presence of conflict is not problematic per se. Rather, it is the ability to manage and recover from it and that could be problematic (Floyd, 2014 ).

One of the reasons for the role of emotions in interpersonal conflicts is explained by the Emotion-in-Relationships Model (ERM). This model states that feelings of bliss, satisfaction, and relaxation often go unnoticed due to the nature of the emotions, whereas “hot” emotions, such as anger and contempt, come to the forefront when directed at a member of an interpersonal relationship (Fletcher & Clark, 2002 ). This type of psychophysical response usually happens perhaps due to the different biophysical reactive response of the body compared to its reaction to positive ones (Floyd, 2014 ). There are two dimensions that define conflict. Conflict leads to the elicitation of emotions, but sometimes the opposite occurs: emotions lead to conflict. The misunderstanding or misinterpretation of emotions among members of a family can be a source of conflict, as well as a number of other issues, including personality differences, past history, substance abuse, mental or physical health problems, monetary issues, children, intimate partner violence, domestic rape, or maybe just general frustration due to recent events (Sabourin, Infante, & Rudd, 1990 ). In order to have a common understanding of this concept for the familial context in particular, conflict refers to as “any incompatibility that can be expressed by people related through biological, legal, or equivalent ties” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 6). Thus, the concept of conflict goes hand in hand with coparenting.

There is a myriad of everyday family activities in which parents need to decide the best way to do them: sometimes they are minor, such as eating, watching TV, or sleeping schedules; others are more complicated, such as schooling. Certainly, while socializing and making these decisions, parents may agree or not, and these everyday situations may lead to conflict. Whether or not parents live together, it has been shown that “the extent to which children experience their parents as partners or opponents in parenting is related to children’s adjustment and well-being” (Gable & Sharp, 2016 , p. 1), because the ontology of parenting is materialized through socialization of values about every aspect and duty among all family members, especially children, to perpetuate a given society.

As the findings provided in this article show, the study of family communication issues is pivotal because the way in which those issues are solved within families will be copied by children as their values. Values are abstract ideas that delineate behavior toward the evaluation of people and events and vary in terms of importance across individuals, but also among cultures. In other words, their future parenting (i.e., parenting modeling) of children will replicate those same strategies for conflict solving for good or bad, depending on whether parents were supportive between each other. Thus, socialization defines the size and scope of coparenting.

The familial socialization of values encompasses the distinction between parents’ personal execution of those social appraisals and the values that parents want their children to adopt, and both are different things; nonetheless, familial socialization does not take place in only one direction, from parents to children. Benish-Weisman, Levy, and Knafo ( 2013 ) investigated the differentiation process—or, in other words, the distinction between parents’ own personal values and their socialization values and the contribution of children’s values to their parents’ socialization values. In this study, in which 603 Israeli adolescents and their parents participated, the findings suggest that parents differentiate between their personal values and their socialization values, and adolescents’ values have a specific contribution to their parents’ socialization values. As a result, socialization is not a unidirectional process affected by parents alone, it is an outcome of the reciprocal interaction between parents and their adolescent children, and the given importance of a given value is mediated by parents and their culture individually (Johnson et al., 2013 ). However, taking power dynamics into account does not mean that adolescents share the same level of decision-making power in the family; thus, socialization take place in both directions, but mostly from parents to children. Finally, it is worth noticing that the socialization of values in coparenting falls under the cultural umbrella. The next section pays a special attention to the role of culture in family communication.

The Role of Culture in Parenting Socialization of Values

There are many individual perceived realities and behaviors in the familial setting that may lead to conflict among members, but all of them achieve a common interpretation through culture; indeed, “all family conflict processes by broad cultural factors” (Canary & Canary, 2013 , p. 46). Subsequently, the goal of this section is to provide an overview of the perceived realities and behaviors that exist in family relationships with different cultural backgrounds. How should one approach the array of cultural values influencing parental communication patterns?

An interesting way of immersing on the role of culture in family communication patterns and its further socialization of values is explored by Schwartz ( 1992 ). The author developed a value system composed of 10 values operationalized as motivational goals for modern society: (a) self-direction (independence of thought and action); (b) stimulation (excitement, challenge, and novelty); (c) hedonism (pleasure or sensuous gratification); (d) achievement (personal success according to social standards); (e) power (social status, dominance over people and resources); (f) conformity (restraint of actions that may harm others or violate social expectations); (g) tradition (respect and commitment to cultural or religious customs and ideas); (h) benevolence (preserving and enhancing the welfare of people to whom one is close); (i) universalism (understanding, tolerance, and concern for the welfare of all people and nature); and (j) security (safety and stability of society, relationships, and self).

Later, Schwartz and Rubel ( 2005 ) applied this value structure, finding it to be commonly shared among over 65 countries. Nevertheless, these values are enacted in different ways by societies and genders about the extent to which men attribute more relevance to values of power, stimulation, hedonism, achievement, and self-direction, and the opposite was found for benevolence and universalism and less consistently for security. Also, it was found that all sex differences were culturally moderated, suggesting that cultural background needs to be considered in the analysis of coparental communication when socializing those values.

Even though Schwartz’s work was more focused on individuals and societies, it is a powerful model for the analysis of the role of culture on family communication and parenting scholarships. Indeed, Schwartz et al. ( 2013 ) conducted a longitudinal study with a sample of 266 Hispanic adolescents (14 years old) and their parents that looked at measures of acculturation, family functioning, and adolescent conduct problems, substance use, and sexual behavior at five time points. Results suggest that higher levels of acculturation in adolescents were linked to poorer family functioning; however, overall assimilation negatively predicted adolescent cigarette smoking, sexual activity, and unprotected sex. The authors emphasize the role of culture, and acculturation patterns in particular, in understanding the mediating role of family functioning and culture.

Ergo, it is crucial to address the ways in which culture affects family functioning. On top of this idea, Johnson et al. ( 2013 ) observed that Western cultures such as in the United States and European countries are oriented toward autonomy, favoring individual achievement, self-reliance, and self-assertiveness. Thus, coparenting in more autonomous countries will socialize to children the idea that achievement in life is an outcome of independence, resulting in coparenting communication behaviors that favor verbal praise and feedback over physical contact. As opposed to autonomy-oriented cultures, other societies, such as Asian, African, and Latin American countries, emphasize interdependence over autonomy; thus, parenting in these cultures promotes collective achievement, sharing, and collaboration as the core values.

These cultural orientations can be observed in parents’ definitions of school readiness and educational success; for Western parents, examples include skills such as counting, recognizing letters, or independently completing tasks such as coloring pictures, whereas for more interdependent cultures, the development of obedience, respect for authority, and appropriate social skills are the skills that parents are expecting their children to develop to evaluate school readiness. As a matter of fact, Callaghan et al. ( 2011 ) conducted a series of eight studies to evaluate the impact of culture on the social-cognitive skills of one- to three-year-old children in three diverse cultural settings such as Canada, Peru, and India. The results showed that children’s acquisition of specific cognitive skills is moderated by specific learning experiences in a specific context: while Canadian children were understanding the performance of both pretense and pictorial symbols skillfully between 2.5 and 3.0 years of age, on average, Peruvian and Indian children mastered those skills more than a year later. Notwithstanding, this finding does not suggest any kind of cultural superiority; language barriers and limitations derived from translation itself may influence meanings, affecting the results (Sotomayor-Peterson, De Baca, Figueredo, & Smith-Castro, 2013 ). Therefore, in line with the findings of Schutz ( 1970 ), Geertz ( 1973 ), Grusec ( 2002 ), Sotomayor-Peterson et al. ( 2013 ), and Johnson et al. ( 2013 ), cultural values provide important leverage for understanding family functioning in terms of parental decision-making and conflict, which also has a substantial impact on children’s cognitive development.

Subsequently, cultural sensitivity to the analysis of the familial system in this country needs to be specially included because cultural differences are part of the array of familial conflicts that may arise, and children experience real consequences from the quality of these interactions. Therefore, parenting, which is already arduous in itself, and overall family functioning significantly become troublesome when parents with different cultural backgrounds aim to socialize values and perform parenting tasks. The following section provides an account of these cross-cultural families.

Intercultural Families: Adding Cultural Differences to Interparental Communication

For a country such as the United States, with 102 million people from many different cultural backgrounds, the presence of cross-cultural families is on the rise, as is the likelihood of intermarriage between immigrants and natives. With this cultural diversity, the two most prominent groups are Hispanics and Asians, particular cases of which will be discussed next. Besides the fact that parenting itself is a very complex and difficult task, certainly the biggest conflict consists of making decisions about the best way to raise children in terms of their values with regard to which ethnic identity better enacts the values that parents believe their children should embrace. As a result, interracial couples might confront many conflicts and challenges due to cultural differences affecting marital satisfaction and coparenting.

Assimilation , the degree to which a person from a different cultural background has adapted to the culture of the hostage society, is an important phenomenon in intermarriage. Assimilationists observe that children from families in which one of the parents is from the majority group and the other one from the minority do not automatically follow the parent from the majority group (Cohen, 1988 ). Indeed, they follow their mothers more, whichever group she belongs to, because of mothers are more prevalent among people with higher socioeconomic status (Gordon, 1964 ; Portes, 1984 ; Schwartz et al., 2013 ).

In an interracial marriage, the structural and interpersonal barriers inhibiting the interaction between two parents will be reduced significantly if parents develop a noncompeting way to communicate and solve conflicts, which means that both of them might give up part of their culture or ethnic identity to reach consensus. Otherwise, the ethnic identity of children who come from interracial marriages will become more and more obscure (Saenz, Hwang, Aguirre, & Anderson, 1995 ). Surely, parents’ noncompeting cultural communication patterns are fundamental for children’s development of ethnic identity. Biracial children develop feelings of being outsiders, and then parenting becomes crucial to developing their strong self-esteem (Ward, 2006 ). Indeed, Gordon ( 1964 ) found that children from cross-racial or cross-ethnic marriages are at risk of developing psychological problems. In another example, Jognson and Nagoshi ( 1986 ) studied children who come from mixed marriages in Hawaii and found that the problems of cultural identification, conflicting demands in the family, and of being marginal in either culture still exist (Mann & Waldron, 1977 ). It is hard for those mixed-racial children to completely develop the ethnic identity of either the majority group or the minority group.

The question of how children could maintain their minority ethnic identity is essential to the development of ethnic identity as a whole. For children from interracial marriage, the challenge to maintain their minority ethnic identity will be greater than for the majority ethnic identity (Waters, 1990 ; Schwartz et al., 2013 ) because the minority-group spouse is more likely to have greater ethnic consciousness than the majority-group spouse (Ellman, 1987 ). Usually, the majority group is more influential than the minority group on a child’s ethnic identity, but if the minority parent’s ethnicity does not significantly decline, the child’s ethnic identity could still reflect some characteristics of the minority parent. If parents want their children to maintain the minority group’s identity, letting the children learn the language of the minority group might be a good way to achieve this. By learning the language, children form a better understanding of that culture and perhaps are more likely to accept the ethnic identity that the language represents (Xin & Sandel, 2015 ).

In addition to language socialization as a way to contribute to children’s identity in biracial families, Jane and Bochner ( 2009 ) indicated that family rituals and stories could be important in performing and transforming identity. Families create and re-create their identities through various kinds of narrative, in which family stories and rituals are significant. Festivals and rituals are different from culture to culture, and each culture has its own. Therefore, exposing children to the language, rituals, and festivals of another culture also could be helpful to form their ethnic identity, in order to counter problems of self-esteem derived from the feeling of being an outsider.

To conclude this section, the parenting dilemma in intercultural marriages consists of deciding which culture they want their children to be exposed to and what kind of heritage they want to pass to children. The following section will provide two examples of intercultural marriages in the context of American society without implying that there are no other insightful cultures that deserve analysis, but the focus on Asian-American and Hispanics families reflects the available literature (Canary & Canary, 2013 ) and its demographic representativeness in this particular context. In addition, in order to acknowledge that minorities within this larger cultural background deserve more attention due to overemphasis on larger cultures in scholarship, such as Chinese or Japanese cultures, the Thai family will provide insights into understanding the role of culture in parenting and its impact on the remaining familial interaction, putting all theories already discussed in context. Moreover, the Hispanic family will also be taken in account because of its internal pan-ethnicity variety.

An Example of Intercultural Parenting: The Thai Family

The Thai family, also known as Krob Krua, may consist of parents, children, paternal and maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, grandchildren, in-laws, and any others who share the same home. Thai marriages usually are traditional, in which the male is the authority figure and breadwinner and the wife is in charge of domestic items and the homemaker. It has been noted that Thai mothers tend to be the major caregivers and caretakers in the family rather than fathers (Tulananda, Young, & Roopnarine, 1994 ). On the other hand, it has been shown that Thai mothers also tend to spoil their children with such things as food and comfort; Tulananda et al. ( 1994 ) studied the differences between American and Thai fathers’ involvement with their preschool children and found that American fathers reported being significantly more involved with their children than Thai fathers. Specifically, the fathers differed in the amount of socialization and childcare; Thai fathers reported that they obtained more external support from other family members than American fathers; also, Thai fathers were more likely to obtain support for assisting with daughters than sons.

Furthermore, with regard to the family context, Tulananda and Roopnarine ( 2001 ) noted that over the years, some attention has been focused on the cultural differences among parent-child behaviors and interactions; hereafter, the authors believed that it is important to look at cultural parent-child interactions because that can help others understand children’s capacity to socialize and deal with life’s challenges. As a matter of fact, the authors also noted that Thai families tend to raise their children in accordance with Buddhist beliefs. It is customary for young Thai married couples to live with either the wife’s parents (uxorilocal) or the husband’s parents (virilocal) before living on their own (Tulananda & Roopnarine, 2001 ). The process of developing ethnicity could be complicated. Many factors might influence the process, such as which parent is from the minority culture and the cultural community, as explained in the previous section of this article.

This suggests that there is a difference in the way that Thai and American fathers communicate with their daughters. As a case in point, Punyanunt-Carter ( 2016 ) examined the relationship maintenance behaviors within father-daughter relationships in Thailand and the United States. Participants included 134 American father-daughter dyads and 154 Thai father-daughter dyads. The findings suggest that when quality of communication was included in this relationship, both types of families benefit from this family communication pattern, resulting in better conflict management and advice relationship maintenance behaviors. However, differences were found: American fathers are more likely than American daughters to employ relationship maintenance behaviors; in addition, American fathers are more likely than Thai fathers to use relationship maintenance strategies.

As a consequence, knowing the process of ethnic identity development could provide parents with different ways to form children’s ethnic identity. More specifically, McCann, Ota, Giles, and Caraker ( 2003 ), and Canary and Canary ( 2013 ) noted that Southeast Asian cultures have been overlooked in communication studies research; these countries differ in their religious, political, and philosophical thoughts, with a variety of collectivistic views and religious ideals (e.g., Buddhism, Taoism, Islam), whereas the United States is mainly Christian and consists of individualistic values.

The Case of Hispanic/Latino Families in the United States

There is a need for including Hispanic/Latino families in the United States because of the demographic representativeness and trends of the ethnicity: in 2016 , Hispanics represent nearly 17% of the total U.S. population, becoming the largest minority group. There are more than 53 million Hispanics and Latinos in the United States; in addition, over 93% of young Hispanics and Latinos under the age of 18 hold U.S. citizenship, and more than 73,000 of these people turn 18 every month (Barreto & Segura, 2014 ). Furthermore, the current Hispanic and Latino population is spread evenly between foreign-born and U.S.-born individuals, but the foreign-born population is now growing faster than the number of Hispanic children born in the country (Arias & Hellmueller, 2016 ). This demographic trend is projected to reach one-third of the U.S. total population by 2060 ; therefore, with the growth of other minority populations in the country, the phenomenon of multiracial marriage and biracial children is increasing as well.

Therefore, family communication scholarship has an increasing necessity to include cultural particularities in the analysis of the familial system; in addition to the cultural aspects already explained in this article, this section addresses the influence of familism in Hispanic and Latino familial interactions, as well as how immigration status moderates the internal interactions, reflected in levels of acculturation, that affect these families negatively.

With the higher marriage and birth rates among Hispanics and Latinos living in the United States compared to non-Latino Whites and African American populations, the Hispanic familial system is perhaps the most stereotyped as being familistic (Glick & Van Hook, 2008 ). This family trait consists of the fact that Hispanics place a very high value on marriage and childbearing, on the basis of a profound commitment to give support to members of the extended family as well. This can be evinced in the prevalence of extended-kind shared households in Hispanic and Latino families, and Hispanic children are more likely to live in extended-family households than non-Latino Whites or blacks (Glick & Van Hook, 2008 ). Living in extended-family households, most likely with grandparents, may have positive influences on Hispanic and Latino children, such as greater attention and interaction with loving through consistent caregiving; grandparents may help by engaging with children in academic-oriented activities, which then affects positively cognitive educational outcomes.

However, familism is not the panacea for all familial issues for several reasons. First, living in an extended-family household requires living arrangements that consider adults’ needs more than children’s. Second, the configuration of Hispanic and Latino households is moderated by any immigration issues with all members of the extended family, and this may cause problems for children (Menjívar, 2000 ). The immigration status of each individual member may produce a constant state of flux, whereas circumstances change to adjust to economic opportunities, which in turn are limited by immigration laws, and it gets even worse when one of the parents isn’t even present in the children’s home, but rather live in their home country (Van Hook & Glick, 2006 ). Although Hispanic and Latino children are more likely to live with married parents and extended relatives, familism is highly affected by the immigration status of each member.

On the other hand, there has been research to address the paramount role of communication disregarding the mediating factor of cultural diversity. For example, Sotomayor-Peterson et al. ( 2013 ) performed a cross-cultural comparison of the association between coparenting or shared parental effort and family climate among families from Mexico, the United States, and Costa Rica. The overall findings suggest what was explained earlier in this article: more shared parenting predicts better marital interaction and family climate overall.

In addition, parenting quality has been found to have a positive relationship with children’s developmental outcomes. In fact, Sotomayor-Peterson, Figueredo, Christensen, and Taylor ( 2012 ) conducted a study with 61 low-income Mexican American couples, with at least one child between three and four years of age, recruited from a home-based Head Start program. The main goal of this study was to observe the extent that shared parenting incorporates cultural values and income predicts family climate. The findings suggest that the role of cultural values such as familism, in which family solidarity and avoidance of confrontation are paramount, delineate shared parenting by Mexican American couples.

Cultural adaptation also has a substantial impact on marital satisfaction and children’s cognitive stimulation. Indeed, Sotomayor-Peterson, Wilhelm, and Card ( 2011 ) investigated the relationship between marital relationship quality and subsequent cognitive stimulation practices toward their infants in terms of the actor and partner effects of White and Hispanic parents. The results indicate an interesting relationship between the level of acculturation and marital relationship quality and a positive cognitive stimulation of infants; specifically, marital happiness is associated with increased cognitive stimulation by White and high-acculturated Hispanic fathers. Nevertheless, a major limitation of Hispanic acculturation literature has been seen, reflecting a reliance on cross-sectional studies where acculturation was scholarly operationalized more as an individual difference variable than as a longitudinal adaptation over time (Schwartz et al., 2013 ).

Culture and Family Communication: the “so what?” Question

This article has presented an entangled overview of family communication patterns, dyadic power, family systems, and conflict theories to establish that coparenting quality plays a paramount role. The main commonality among those theories pays special attention to interparental interaction quality, regardless of the type of family (i.e., intact, postdivorce, same-sex, etc.) and cultural background. After reviewing these theories, it was observed that the interparental relationship is the core interaction in the familial context because it affects children from their earlier cognitive development to subsequent parental modeling in terms of gender roles. Thus, in keeping with Canary and Canary ( 2013 ), no matter what approach may be taken to the analysis of family communication issues, the hypothesis that a positive emotional climate within the family is fostered only when couples practice a sufficient level of shared parenting and quality of communication is supported.

Nevertheless, this argument does not suggest that the role of culture in the familial interactions should be undersold. While including the main goal of parenting, which is the socialization of values, in the second section of this article, the text also provides specific values of different countries that are enacted and socialized differently across cultural contexts to address the role of acculturation in the familial atmosphere, the quality of interactions, and individual outcomes. As a case in point, Johnson et al. ( 2013 ) provided an interesting way of seeing how cultures differ in their ways of enacting parenting, clarifying that the role of culture in parenting is not a superficial or relativistic element.

In addition, by acknowledging the perhaps excessive attention to larger Asian cultural backgrounds (such as Chinese or Japanese cultures) by other scholars (i.e., Canary & Canary, 2013 ), an insightful analysis of the Thai American family within the father-daughter relationship was provided to exemplify, through the work of Punyanunt-Carter ( 2016 ), how specific family communication patterns, such as maintenance relationship communication behaviors, affect the quality of familial relationships. Moreover, a second, special focus was put on Hispanic families because of the demographic trends of the United States, and it was found that familism constitutes a distinctive aspect of these families.

In other words, the third section of this article provided these two examples of intercultural families to observe specific ways that culture mediates the familial system. Because one of the main goals of the present article was to demonstrate the mediating role of culture as an important consideration for family communication issues in the United States, the assimilationist approach was taken into account; thus, the two intercultural family examples discussed here correspond to an assimilationist nature rather than using an intergroup approach.

This decision was made without intending to diminish the value of other cultures or ethnic groups in the country, but an extensive revision of all types of intercultural families is beyond the scope of this article. Second, the assimilationist approach forces one to consider cultures that are in the process of adapting to a new hosting culture, and the Thai and Hispanic families in the United States comply with this theoretical requisite. For example, Whites recognize African Americans as being as American as Whites (i.e., Dovidio, Gluszek, John, Ditlmann, & Lagunes, 2010 ), whereas they associate Hispanics and Latinos with illegal immigration in the United States (Stewart et al., 2011 ), which has been enhanced by the U.S. media repeatedly since 1994 (Valentino et al., 2013 ), and it is still happening (Dixon, 2015 ). In this scenario, “ask yourself what would happen to your own personality if you heard it said over and over again that you were lazy, a simple child of nature, expected to steal, and had inferior blood? . . . One’s reputation, whether false or true, cannot be hammered, hammered, hammered, into one’s head without doing something to one’s character” (Allport, 1979 , p. 142, cited in Arias & Hellmueller, 2016 ).

As a consequence, on this cultural canvas, it should not be surprising that Lichter, Carmalt, and Qian ( 2011 ) found that second-generation Hispanics are increasingly likely to marry foreign-born Hispanics and less likely to marry third-generation or later coethnics or Whites. In addition, this study suggests that third-generation Hispanics and later were more likely than in the past to marry non-Hispanic Whites; thus, the authors concluded that there has been a new retreat from intermarriage among the largest immigrant groups in the United States—Hispanics and Asians—in the last 20 years.

If we subscribe to the idea that cultural assimilation goes in only one direction—from the hegemonic culture to the minority culture—then the results of Lichter, Carmalt, and Qian ( 2011 ) should not be of scholarly concern; however, if we believe that cultural assimilation happens in both directions and intercultural families can benefit both the host and immigrant cultures (for a review, see Schwartz et al., 2013 ), then this is important to address in a country that just elected a president, Donald Trump, who featured statements racially lambasting and segregating minorities, denigrating women, and criticizing immigration as some of the main tenets of his campaign. Therefore, we hope that it is clear why special attention was given to the Thai and Hispanic families in this article, considering the impact of culture on the familial system, marital satisfaction, parental communication, and children’s well-being. Even though individuals with Hispanic ancentry were in the United States even before it became a nation, Hispanic and Latino families are still trying to convince Americans of their right to be accepted in American culture and society.

With regard to the “So what?” question, assimilation is important to consider while analyzing the role of culture in family communication patterns, power dynamics, conflict, or the functioning of the overall family system in the context of the United States. This is because this country is among the most popular in the world in terms of immigration requests, and its demographics show that one out of three citizens comes from an ethnic background other than the hegemonic White culture. In sum, cultural awareness has become pivotal in the analysis of family communication issues in the United States. Furthermore, the present overview of family, communication, and culture ends up supporting the idea of positive associations being derived from the pivotal role of marriage relationship quality, such that coparenting and communication practices vary substantially within intercultural marriages moderated by gender roles.

Culture is a pivotal moderator of these associations, but this analysis needs to be tethered to societal structural level, in which cultural differences, family members’ immigration status, media content, and level of acculturation must be included in family research. This is because in intercultural marriages, in addition to the tremendous parenting role, they have to deal with cultural assimilation and discrimination, and this becomes important if we care about children’s cognitive development and the overall well-being of those who are not considered White. As this article shows, the quality of familial interactions has direct consequences on children’s developmental outcomes (for a review, see Callaghan et al., 2011 ).

Therefore, the structure and functioning of family has an important impact on public health at both physiological and psychological levels (Gage, Everett, & Bullock, 2006 ). At the physiological level, the familial interaction instigates expression and reception of strong feelings affecting tremendously on individuals’ physical health because it activates neuroendocrine responses that aid stress regulation, acting as a stress buffer and accelerating physiological recovery from elevated stress (Floyd & Afifi, 2012 ; Floyd, 2014 ). Robles, Shaffer, Malarkey, and Kiecolt-Glaser ( 2006 ) found that a combination of supportive communication, humor, and problem-solving behavior in husbands predicts their wives’ cortisol and adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)—both physiological factors are considered as stress markers (see 2006 ). On the other hand, the psychology of individuals, the quality of family relationships has major repercussions on cognitive development, as reflected in educational attainment (Sohr-Preston et al., 2013 ), and highly mediated by cultural assimilation (Schwartz et al., 2013 ), which affects individuals through parenting modeling and socialization of values (Mooney-Doyle, Deatrick, & Horowitz, 2014 ).

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Follow the 5 C's to build family unity

Last Saturday, I was blessed with the privilege and opportunity of presenting a special seminar for the Sitka Church of Christ in Milan on "How to Build Family Unity." It was inspiring to hear feedback on various participants' insightful ideas regarding the meaning and purpose of family.

Some persons felt that our families exist to provide safety and security for persons in the home. Others alluded to goals of parental nurturance, spiritual growth and personal development. However, the answer I was most impressed with was that our families' primary purpose is to point to God and bring praise to him through our godly examples.

It doesn't take us looking to far to observe the tragic reality that the traditional family is under full frontal attack in America with many powerful evil forces vying against it. Even within the church we often struggle to keep our families together and on track. The question I am seeking to answer in today's column is as follows: How can we go about building (or restoring) family unity and making our families stronger? I believe that there are at least five important keys to consider, each of which begins with the letter "C."

The first essential key to developing family unity is commitment. It seems these days that marriages and families are frequently viewed as temporary — even throwaway — conveniences. There's little to no loyalty. Selfishness and self-centeredness can easily get in the way of harmony and happiness in the home. Whether we're a spouse, parent, child, sibling or all of the above, we need to think long and hard about how committed we are to our families' basic physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. What level of sacrifice are we willing to make for the health and wholeness of our family units? Family ought to walk in when the world walks out on us.

Second is the all-important characteristic of compassion. Why is it that we often tend to hurt the ones we should love the most through our unkind words, pettiness, envy, angry outbursts and bitterness toward each other? To demonstrate compassion in the home means to develop a genuinely caring and considerate heart — one that sympathizes and empathizes with the various struggles, fears and difficulties we each possess. And it is more than just something we feel; it's what we do. We must demonstrate mercy and kindness to one another, being patient, understanding and forgiving.

Third is the concept of communication. To communicate effectively necessitates more listening than talking, more concentration than jumping to hasty conclusions, more clarification than condemnation. We must take down our defenses and open our ears and minds so we can take in what our family members are trying to get across to us. Listen with your heart and speak with honesty and humility. Reflect back to the other person what you have grasped from their words to give them the opportunity to clarify any misconceptions.

Fourth comes compromise. I'm not talking about compromising the truth or our moral values in any way. What I mean is that everything — within reason — should be open to negotiation in our families. A healthy family will be characterized by give and take. Certain spouses seem to adhere to the idea that "It's my way or the highway!" Some parents are like cantankerous ogres who never consider their children's legitimate wishes and desires. On the other hand, some children act like spoiled brats who operate with a sense of personal entitlement for whatever they want at whatever cost to their parents. We've got to strike a balance in our families so that wisdom and fairness prevails in the end.

Finally, and most importantly in our attempt to foster peace and unity within our families, there must be Christ. Jesus should be the very cornerstone of our family life, and our homes need to be built upon him as our firm foundation. Our ultimate purpose in our families ought to be to bring glory to God. Psalm 127:1 states, "Unless the LORD builds the house, those who build it labor in vain."

Dr. Ryan Fraser is an assistant professor of counseling at Freed-Hardeman University. Visit his website at www.ryanfraser.org or blog at www.ryannoelfraser.blogspot.com.

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The Increasing Diversity and Complexity of Family Structures for Adolescents

Lisa d. pearce.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

George M. Hayward

Laurie chassin.

Arizona State University

Patrick J. Curran

The structure of adolescents’ families, and thus parental forms, in the United States, have become more heterogeneous and fluid over the past several decades. These changes are due to increases in never-married, single parents, divorce, cohabitation, same-sex parenting, multi-partnered fertility, and co-residence with grandparents. We document current diversity and complexity in adolescents’ families as important context for rethinking future parenting theory and research. We also discuss how understandings of adolescents’ families are somewhat limited by current methods used to measure characteristics of families. We recommend social network and profile-based methods as alternatives to capturing key dimensions of family structure and processes. Understanding the diversity of households and families in which adolescents are raised can improve theory and research on parenting.

Even though a universal feature of adolescence is the growing autonomy that youth gain from parental oversight, parents, and the family context in general, continue to play a vital role in adolescents’ lives. The ways that adolescents are “parented,” including the provision of material and psychosocial resources, the quality of parent-child interactions and relationships, and levels of parental monitoring and scaffolding of youth have been consistently shown to matter for adolescents’ academic outcomes, subjective well-being, sexual behavior, substance use, delinquency, and other outcomes ( DiClemente et al. 2001 ; Simons and Conger 2007 ; Steinberg 2001 ). Thus, social scientists, policy-makers, and practitioners continue to investigate and attempt to promote successful models for parenting adolescents.

For better or worse, many current investigations of the features and types of parenting that seem most beneficial for adolescents are based on theories of parenting and adolescence developed decades ago when family structures and their distribution in the population looked very different than they do today. Two cornerstones of contemporary theory, warmth and control, are concepts developed primarily between the 1930s and 1960s ( Baldwin 1955 ; Baumrind 1967 ; Becker 1964 ; Sears, Maccoby, and Levin 1957 ; Symonds 1939 ) —a period in which about 90 percent of children under the age of 18 lived with two parents ( Ruggles and Brower 2003 ). Studies of parenting have been increasingly recognizing how styles of parenting and their impact vary across cultures, socioeconomic strata, and family structures (e.g., Lareau 2003 ; Newman 2012 ; Sorkhabi and Mandara 2013 ; see also from this issue Jones, Loiselle, and Highlander; Lansford et al.; Murry; Stein et al.). Thus, to more accurately theorize, measure, and interpret findings regarding the parenting of adolescents, we must be clear about how families and households have changed over time, especially their increasingly dynamic and complex natures.

In this article, we review and summarize a wide body of literature showing how family forms and their prevalence have changed over the last several decades. After defining what we mean by “family” and “adolescence,” we describe the family households of adolescents, or the family members with whom they tend to live. We then discuss how family members might also be spread across other households, near and far. We then examine current practices in measuring the family contexts of adolescents and recommend innovations such as family network and profile methods. It is our goal to provide as detailed a picture as we can as to the range and distribution of adolescents’ family contexts in addition to suggesting methods for further enhancing our understanding of parenting contexts during adolescence.

Definitions

Family has always been a relatively elusive concept – definitions of family have changed over time, families themselves change over time, and members of families change (i.e., development and aging) ( Harris 2008 ; Powell et al. 2010 ). For our purposes, we focus on all parents, siblings, and extended family members who play a role in adolescents’ lives. Family members may be related by blood, marriage, or other lasting bonds (e.g., cohabitation, guardianships, or adoption). Some family members reside in the same household as a given adolescent and some do not. Sometimes adolescents move between households following custody arrangements or other special circumstances. Thus, we start by describing change in the family households of adolescents and then broaden our focus to consider non-residential family members and their connections to adolescents over time.

Adolescence is a phase of life whose exact age bounds vary by expert or study, but are generally considered to encompass the second decade of life. This is roughly the time period from the onset of puberty to the beginning of adult roles ( Steinberg 2016 ). We cite studies using a variety of age or grade ranges, including 12–17, 18–24, or grades 7–12, primarily due to the ages of participants. Further, many studies of family structure or stability aggregate data for all minors (ages 0–17). Thus, some of the data that we present apply to all youth, not just adolescents. Where we are able, we comment on the extent to which adolescents’ family forms are different than those of younger children.

The Households in Which Adolescents Live

As of 2016, 15 percent of all American households, and 23 percent of family households, contained at least one 12–17 year old ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017a ). Below we describe the changing prevalence of other family members in the households of adolescents. We discuss the parents, siblings, and grandparents with whom adolescents often live as well as homeless adolescents and adolescents who head their own households.

Parental Structure

The nuclear family (a mother and father—usually married—and their biological child/ren) has long been assumed to be the Standard North American Family (SNAF) ( Smith 1993 ) and continues to generally be the standard form to which all others are compared ( Powell et al. 2010 ). As seen in Figure 1 , as recently as 1960, about 88 percent of children (ages 0–17) lived with two parents (biological/adoptive, step, or cohabiting parents), eight percent lived with their mothers only, one percent lived with their fathers only, and three percent lived with other relatives or non-relatives. As of 2016, the percentage of children living with two parents is 69 percent -- a 22 percent decrease in 56 years. The shift was mostly due to single mother and single father families: now, 23 percent of children live with their mother only and four percent live with their fathers only. These numbers represent a 192 percent increase in mother-only families and 259 percent increase in father-only families ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017e ). Although father-only families have increased in number faster than mother-only families, mother-only families are still nearly six times more common.

Living Arrangments of Children Under 18 Years Old, 1960–2016

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2017e)

Notes. The Census report does not have statistics for 1961–1967; for graphical purposes, a linear trend in each category is used between the data points for 1960 and 1968.

The increase in single parent households over time is primarily the result of two trends. First, divorce has been on the rise in the United States since the end of the Civil War, with a brief plateauing during the early 1980s ( Kennedy and Ruggles 2014 ). Second, there has been a rise in the percentage of all births occurring to unmarried women, from four percent in 1940 to 41 percent in 2013 ( Curtin, Ventura, and Martinez 2014 ). However, just over half (55 percent) of the births to single mothers, as of 2016, are to cohabiting parents ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017d ), and this has been increasing over time ( Kennedy and Bumpass 2008 ). Thus, increasingly, one biological parent is not residing in the household, and if there are two parents, they may be cohabiting partners rather than marital ones. Because of racial and ethnic variation in rates of nonmarital births, cohabitation, and divorce ( Barber, Yarger, and Gatny 2015 ; Curtin et al. 2014 ; Ruggles 1997 ; Smith, Morgan, and Koropeckyj-Cox 1996 ; Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan 1995 ), the increase in mother-only households and children living with other relatives has been particularly dramatic for Black and Hispanic youth, as illustrated in Figure 2 .

Living Arrangments of Children Under 18 Years Old, by Race/Ethnicity, 1960–2016

Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2017g

Notes. The Census report does not have statistics for 1961–1967; for graphical purposes, a linear trend in each category is used between the data points for 1960 and 1968. Data for Hispanics begin in 1980 since they were not available before then for the subcategories shown here.

The way data were collected for many years, one can identify whether there are two adults living in a household and whether at least one of the adults is biologically or adoptively related to children in the household. However, further specification of the marital or even romantic status of the two adults or how both adults are related to each child is often impossible in data collected from before the mid-1990s. More contemporary data has the specificity that allows us to further distinguish households by the complexity of family relationships. For example, we create Table 1 below by adapting U.S. Census Bureau data based on the Current Population Survey in 2016 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017b ). This table builds upon Figure 1 and allows us to hone in on three groups of adolescents: 9–11 year-olds, 12–14 year-olds, and 15–17 year-olds.

Living Arrangements of Children and Adolescents in the United States in 2016 (Numbers in Thousands)

Source. U.S. Census Bureau (2017b) .

Note: Calculations of significant differences were made following the source documentation instructions.

Overall, 9–17 year-olds have very similar living arrangements to 0–17 year-olds. About 68 percent of 9–14 year-olds and 64 percent of 15–17 year-olds live with two parents as compared to 69 percent of all 0–17 year-olds. Twenty-eight percent of 9–14 year-olds and 30 percent of 15–17 year-olds live with one parent, compared to 27 percent of 0–18 year-olds. And, four and five percent, respectively, do not reside with a parent compared to four percent of those aged 0–17. Not surprisingly, the older adolescents (whose parents have had more time to change living situations or family structure) are slightly more likely than the younger children to live in single parent, other relative, or nonrelative homes.

For the 64–68 percent of adolescents living with two parents, the vast majority of them (about 96–98 percent) live with married biological or adoptive parents. For the 28–30 percent of adolescents who live with one parent, the vast majority of them live with their mothers; specifically, 85 percent of 9–11 year-olds, 84 percent of 12–14 year-olds, and 82 percent of 15–17 year-olds who live with a single parent live with their mother. Conversely, between 15 and 18 percent of adolescents in a single-parent home live with their single father. For all single parent categories, the largest groups, by far, are never married mothers and divorced mothers. Living with a separated mother is the third most common single parent living arrangement, which describes 11–13 percent of adolescents. Lastly, for the 4 to 5 percent of adolescents who do not live with either parent, the most common arrangement is to live with a grandparent, though this likelihood decreases with age: 65 percent of 9–11 year-olds, 58 percent of 12–14 year-olds, and 46 percent of 15–17 year-olds living without parents are living with a grandparent. The next most common arrangements for those living without either parent are living with another relative (25 to 33 percent), living with a nonrelative (7 to 18 percent), and living in foster care (4 to 6 percent).

Given the family change and diversity we have documented, theory and research about the parenting of adolescents must take into account that both parents and children are increasingly experiencing transitions in who lives with them that may induce emotional and financial stress or raise real or perceived stigma ( Cherlin 2010 ; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994 ; Pryor 2004 ). This changes resources for parenting as well as the kinds of issues for which adolescents need support. Further, parents are increasingly spread across different households, which raises issues of how parenting is shared (or not) inside and outside an adolescent’s primary residence.

Same-Sex Parents

There have also been changes over time in the percentage of children living with two parents of the same sex. Vespa, Lewis, and Kreider (2013) find that about 16 percent of same-sex cohabiting or married couples in the United States have biological, adoptive, or stepchildren under age 18 living with them as of 2012 (11 percent of male couples and 22 percent of female couples). This is higher than the 1990 rate of 13 percent, but is lower than estimates between 2000 and 2008, which fluctuated between 17 and 19 percent ( Gates 2012 ). With current estimates of same-sex couples from the American Community Survey at about 860,000 for 2015 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017c ), if 15–20 percent of them have one child, then between 129,000–172,000 youth are currently living with co-resident same-sex parents.

One noteworthy trend among same-sex couples is the proportional increases in adoptive children compared to biological children, which may be due to LGBT individuals coming out earlier in life and thus becoming less likely to have children while in relationships with opposite sex partners ( Gates 2012 ). The global increase in assisted reproductive techniques (ART)( Dyer et al. 2016 ), in tandem with medical advances and fertility clinics welcoming same-sex couples, is also increasing the ability for same-sex individuals (whether coupled or not) to become parents ( Greenfeld and Seli 2016 ; Grover et al. 2013 ). With the number of same-sex couples growing each year between 2008–2015 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017c ), the proportion of adolescents living with same-sex parents has grown.

Theory and research on parenting often consider mothers’ and fathers’ roles in providing warmth and control, and sometimes claim unique and essential roles of both, but evidence suggests the gender composition of parents has minimal influence on children’s psychological and social outcomes ( Biblarz and Stacey 2010 ). However, parents’ gender is correlated with how parents and children get along, parents’ emphasis on gender conformity, and parenting skills, so theory and research on parenting should continue to examine the gender composition of parents as a factor shaping parenting and its outcomes ( Bos, van Balen, and van den Boom 2007 ; Golombok, Tasker, and Murray 1997 ).

Although social acceptance of same-sex couples marrying and having children is growing, there is still potential for parents and children in these families to experience stigma and discrimination ( Gates 2015 ). As Jones et al. (this volume), Mills-Koonce, Rehder, and McCurdy (this volume), Murry (this volume), and Stein et al. (this volume) all point out, in families facing real and perceived stigma, parents face the challenge of building a positive sense of oneself and one’s family in addition to helping children understand and persevere in these social dynamics.

Foster and Adoptive Parents

In September of 2015, about 172,000 adolescents ages 10–20 were living in foster care; during the same year, 92,000 adolescents entered foster care and 99,000 exited foster care ( Children’s Bureau 2016 ). Among youth ages 0–20 who exited, 51 percent were reunified with their parents or primary caretakers and 22 percent were adopted ( Children’s Bureau 2016 ). In published statistics, adopted children are typically included with those who are biologically related to parents. However, Child Trends (2012) uses more detailed survey data on adoption from 2007 to show that two percent of all children (ages 0–17) live with at least one adoptive parent and no biological parents. Of those, 37 percent were in foster care at some point, 38 percent were adopted through private domestic adoption, and 25 percent were adopted internationally. One more recent estimate suggests that approximately seven percent of children ages 0–17 in the United States live with at least one adoptive parent, but this includes those adopted by a step-parent, unlike the prior estimate ( Kreider and Lofquist 2014 ).

Fostering and adopting children raises all kinds of unique parenting issues. Adolescent foster or adoptive children have often experienced prior neglect, abuse, or abandonment, making them less trusting of parent figures in general ( Pryor 2004 ). Adoptive parents and children sometimes differ notably in culture or appearance, posing potential issues for how they or others view their relationships ( Pryor 2004 ). Foster parents may be managing uncertainty about how long a child/ren will be in their home and what kinds of bonds to forge ( Pryor 2004 ). Birth parents may still be in contact and involved with their children, raising issues of how to manage co-parenting with foster parents. In other words, there are additional factors at play in foster or adoptive parenting, highlighting key roles of parents and how those are modified across family structure.

Another important feature of family or household context, when it comes to parenting, is how many and what types of siblings live with adolescents on average. Using data from 2009, Kreider and Ellis (2011) find that about 58 million children live with siblings (78 percent). Of these children, the majority (82 percent) live with only full siblings, 14 percent live with a halfsibling, 2 percent live with a stepsibling, and 2 percent live with an adopted sibling. About 22 percent of all youth have no siblings, 38 percent have one sibling, 24 percent have two siblings, 11 percent have three siblings, and 5 percent have four or more siblings.

Siblings function as both sources of intimacy and conflict for adolescents ( Lempers and Clark-Lempers 1992 ), which is largely a continuation of their sibling relationships from childhood ( Dunn, Slomkowski, and Beardsall 1994 ). Intimacy remains stable among same-sex sibling dyads throughout adolescence, but increases for mixed-sex dyads, while conflict appears to taper off during middle to late adolescence ( Kim et al. 2006 ). Theory and research on parenting often focuses on one dyad despite there often being other children in the family. The number of siblings has implications for how resources (material and emotional) are shared which is directly related to parenting ( Blake 1981 ). This takes on even more complexity in blended families with a combination of sibling types.

Grandparents

Table 1 , discussed earlier, shows that about two percent of all children live without parents but with a grandparent. Figure 3 , below, adds to this statistic by showing trends over time in children living with grandparents, in any combination with or without parents ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017f ). The figure shows a doubling in the percent of children who live with a grandparent between 1980 and 2014, from 3.2 percent to 6.6 percent. Notably, about two-thirds of children living with a grandparent are also living with one of their parents (typically the mother). These are called multigenerational households, or households containing three or more generations, and have been shown elsewhere to also vary by race – with Hispanics and blacks having the highest rates (8 percent of households), followed by Asians (6 percent) and whites (4 percent)( Vespa et al. 2013 ). Theories and research on grandparents as parents should factor in how the middle generation (biological parents) fit into the family and parenting, as well as how life course stages and developmental compatibility between family members affect grandparents’ parenting styles ( Burton, Dilworth-Anderson, and Merriwether-deVries 1995 ; Kemp 2007 ).

Children Under 18 Living with Grandparents as Percentage of All Children Under 18

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2017f)

Homeless adolescents

Although rare, another important family form to address for adolescents is homelessness. About seven percent of the homeless population are unaccompanied children (under 18 years old) and youth (18–24), and about 37,000 children and youth were experiencing homelessness during a point-in-time estimate in 2015 ( National Alliance to End Homelessness 2016 ). However, this is likely an underestimate, since enumeration techniques are not as effective for youth, and youth often do not congregate in the same areas as those in older age groups. Indeed, survey estimates of youth who experience at least one night of homelessness in a given year range from about 1 million to 1.7 million ( Fernandes-Alcantara 2013 ). Homelessness is surely a taxing and stigmatizing experience for adolescents and their parents, further what parents can or cannot provide adolescents.

Adolescents as parents

Births to adolescents are declining and reached an all-time low in 2015 ( Martin et al. 2017 ), predominately due to improved contraceptive usage ( Lindberg, Santelli, and Desai 2016 ), though many adolescents do become parents – usually unintentionally. Finer and Zolna (2014) show that, as of 2008, 91 percent of pregnancies among 15–17 year-olds and 77 percent of pregnancies among 18–19 year-olds are unintended. Nevertheless, in 2015, adolescent females ages 15–19 had about 230,000 births, with about one percent of 15–17 year-old girls giving birth and four percent of 18–19 year-old girls ( Martin et al. 2017 ). Adolescent parents and their children face a number of obstacles and are at an increased risk for a host of negative outcomes, yet intervention programs have the potential to mitigate these (see Pinzon et al. (2012 ) for a comprehensive review on both outcomes of adolescent parenting and interventions). The renegotiation of parenting when one’s own adolescent becomes a parent, and may need new kinds of support and/or more independence, likely presents unique challenges.

Household Transitions Experience by Adolescents

What we have presented to this point are snapshots of what the households of children or adolescents look like across the population in certain years. Another way of understanding variance in the family contexts of youth is to consider how stable these contexts are over time. Several studies have conceptualized family instability as the number of transitions households experience ( Cavanagh 2008 ; Fomby, Mollborn, and Sennott 2010 ), and increasingly studies are comparing particular types of transitions or the timing of those transitions and their associations with child well-being ( Lee and McLanahan 2015 ). When households lose or gain parents or siblings, it is likely to affect parenting resources and styles ( Pryor 2004 ).

Parental Transitions

Brown (2006) uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of youth in grades 7–11 during the 1994–95 school year to report the frequency of family transitions within one year of adolescence. Ninety-three percent of these youth experienced no household transitions in that year; specifically, 62 percent of adolescents in this sample lived with two-biological parents throughout the year (married or cohabiting), 12 percent remained in a previously formed stepfamily, and 19 percent remained with a single mother. Seven percent of adolescents experienced a household or family transition during that year: four percent moved from a two-parent family to a single-mother family, three percent went from a single-mother household to a two-parent household (either cohabiting or married), and one percent experienced a transition from one two-parent household type to another (usually from a cohabiting stepfamily to a married stepfamily). Laughlin (2014) shows that 12 percent of children ages 12 to 17 years old in 2011 had experienced a change in the number of residential parents or parent’s partners in the home in the past four years.

Considering the trajectories of household structure throughout all of childhood and adolescence, Mitchell (2013) uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Mother’s and Children sample to estimate latent classes of children’s long-term living arrangements for youth who were 14–19 years old in 2006. She finds five general pathways: 1) consistently living with two biological parents from birth (55 percent), long-term living with a single mother (18 percent), living with married biological parents who divorce (12 percent), gaining a stepfather through marriage (11 percent), and being born to cohabiting parents who later married or broke up (4 percent). Although these five pathways do not encompass the experiences of all adolescents, they give a good sense of the most common experiences over time.

Custody and Living Arrangements

Using data from the 2009 American Community Survey, Elliot and Simmons (2011) show that about 18 percent of men and 44 percent of women with a divorce in the past year were living with children under 18. This equates to over a million children experiencing a divorce in the past year, with the median age of these children around 9.8 – about the onset of adolescence. Following many of these divorces will be custody arrangements that inevitably change the living situation of the adolescents involved. Custody arrangements have changed tremendously over the past few centuries (see DiFonzo (2014) for a review), but the most recent trend (from the mid-1980s to present) has been a substantial decline in sole custody awards to mothers coupled with a dramatic increase in shared custody awards ( Cancian et al. 2014 ). Estimates of custody awards from 2008, based on a very large sample of court records in Wisconsin, suggest that about 42 percent of awards are now for sole mother custody, 45 percent are for shared custody, nine percent are sole father custody, and the rest are split custody ( Cancian et al. 2014 ).

Other Residential Transitions

The period between late adolescence and early adulthood, often called “emerging adulthood” ( Arnett 2004) , is marked by numerous transitions and identity exploration. For example, about 69 percent of high school graduates begin college immediately following their high school completion ( McFarland et al. 2017 ). This is often accompanied by a residential move, as about half of college students live apart from their parents, which is split about evenly between those with and without roommates ( Sallie Mae 2017 ). Thus, late adolescence is a period of home-leaving for many but not necessarily independent living for most. For adolescents who do not go on to college, many of them begin some sort of paid work, establish their own household, or start families ( DeLuca, Clampet-Lundquist, and Edin 2016 ; Mitchell and Syed 2015 ), often with difficulties in the labor market due to having no more than a high school degree ( Rosenbaum 2001 ). Especially among disadvantaged youth, the typical explorations of emerging adulthood may not be possible ( Côté 2014 ); these youth often face an expedited path to adulthood that involves forgoing postsecondary education and becoming independent as quickly as possible ( DeLuca et al. 2016 ).

Interestingly, the percentage of older adolescents and young adults who return to their parents’ home after leaving, who are sometimes referred to as “boomerang kids,” has been increasing over time in the United States ( Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1999 ). In fact, recent estimates show that living with parents is the most common living situation for 18 to 34 year-olds, at 32 percent ( Fry 2016 ). The reaction of parents to this phenomenon varies, but there is an expectation among parents in the United States that their live-in adult children are working toward independence ( Newman 2012 ).

In general, the increasing fluidity and change in the households and family structures of adolescents signals a growing need for theories and research on the parenting of adolescents to not just expand to consider different family forms, but to also recognize family instability as its own context for parenting ( Pryor 2004 ). As the life course perspective recognizes ( Elder 1998 ), young people (and their parents) carry forward their early life experiences, and so a divorced and single mother might not just be parenting with reduced time and resources in the present, but she and her child/ren are also living with the experiences of the past, such as how well was the divorce handled by all. Due to distress and disruption, parenting is often temporarily compromised during and immediately following a transition in family structure ( Capaldi and Patterson 1991 ; DeGarmo and Forgatch 1999 ).

Nonresidential Family Members of Adolescents

Nonresident fathers.

Due to rising rates of births to single mothers and divorce, as well as the fragility of cohabiting unions, many children have nonresident fathers for some or all of adolescence. In Figure 1 , we show that about 27 percent of youth live away from their father, with the majority of them (23 percent of youth) living with a single mother. Rates of single motherhood also vary substantially by race, with 18 percent of white children, 52 percent of black children, and 25 percent of Hispanic children living with a single mother as of 2016 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017g ). Nonresident fathers, as a group, substantially increased involvement in their children’s lives between 1976 and 2002, with more fathers seeing their children weekly and fewer fathers reporting no contact at all ( Amato, Meyers, and Emery 2009 ). Cheadle, Amato, and King (2010) add nuance to this finding and identify four latent classes of nonresident father involvement: 38 percent of fathers have high and stable involvement over time, 32 percent have low and stable involvement, 23 percent have high involvement initially but decrease it over time, and 8 percent have low involvement initially but increase it over time.

Nonresident Mothers

Although uncommon, some children spend years not living with their biological or adoptive mothers. In Figure 1 we show that about 8 percent of youth live away from their mother, with about half of these youth (4 percent) residing with single fathers. Table 1 further shows that this percentage is about the same for 9–11 year-olds, 12–14 year-olds, and 15–17 year-olds. The economic situation of nonresident mothers tends to be worse, on average, than that of nonresident fathers, as they earn less money and are less likely to be working ( Sousa and Sorensen 2006 ). However, nonresident mothers tend to spend more time with their children than nonresident fathers ( Gunnoe 1993 ). Because of the historical norm that mothers are more likely to get custody, women who lose or have less custody than fathers probably face stigma that will affect their parenting and create a need for children to also be parented in ways that helps them prepare for potential discrimination. Being a nonresident parent, father or mother, introduces challenges to spending time with one’s children to parent, and may remove one from involvement in important decisions or parenting tasks ( Pryor 2004 ).

Multi-Partner Fertility

Adults have become increasingly like to have children with more than one partner, often called multi-partner fertility (MPF). Recent estimates suggest about 10 percent of adults have MPF ( Monte 2017 ). This means many adolescents have siblings (with full, partial, or no biological ties) with whom they may be maintaining relationships, potentially across residences. Once again, because surveys usually only collect information on household members, we know little about how many adolescents have siblings of any kind residing in other households, nor the quality, benefits, or consequences of those relationships. It is likely that the presence of siblings across other households stretches resources such that adolescents in these situations may get, on average, less time and support from their parents ( Meyer and Cancian 2012 ; Tach, Mincy, and Edin 2010 ). There may also be tension between different parent figures or parents and children that interferes with or complicates the parenting of adolescents ( Pryor 2004 ).

Extended Family

Adolescents are often close to and exchange support with extended family members, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins ( Sterrett et al. 2011 ). Increasing gains in longevity translate to a higher likelihood that adolescents know their grandparents longer than in previous generations ( Kemp 2007 ). The closer grandparents live to their grandchildren, the more emotionally close they are, but grandparents who live far away often use electronic forms of communication, and studies show that frequent phone or email conversations build closeness ( Harwood 2000 ). Kinds of support that grandparents provide include emotional support, peace-keeping, “straight talking,” and sharing family history ( Soliz 2008 ).

Although research is increasingly incorporating the roles of nonresidential family members, and especially parental figures, in the lives of adolescents ( Jones et al. 2007 ), more could be done to examine forms of support (or conflict) provided to adolescents and residential parent figures. Past theories and methods have relied heavily on the household context and often assumed two biological parents are involved, but now the socialization and raising of adolescents falls to a larger network of adults. The better we understand the forms family configurations and exchanges take, the better we can tailor theory, research, and practice or interventions to fit families as they are.

Measuring Family Contexts for the Parenting of Adolescents

In addition to data on families collected through the U.S. Census, there are a number of high quality, nationally representative sample surveys, many of which are used in the research reported above, that make the description of adolescent family contexts possible. What we know about the family contexts in which adolescents live depends on how we collect data and “measure” family life. Although we learn a great deal from existing data, in some ways, the designs of these studies limit our ability to fully understand certain aspects of adolescents’ families.

Most existing surveys mainly collect information about family members who reside together in households. For some surveys, like the Current Population Survey or the American Community Survey, households are a sampling unit, and one member of the household reports on all others. The quality of those data for understanding family structures within households depends heavily on a well-designed household roster or matrix that lists all members of a household and carefully notes the relationships between all members. When data do not include complete information about the relations between each household member and all other household members, we are restricted from knowing important family characteristics, like whether a married or cohabiting couple in a household are biological, adoptive, or step-parents to the child/ren in the household ( Manning, Brown, and Stykes 2014 ; O’Hara, Shattuck, and Goerge 2017 ). Further, data often lack the detail necessary to determine whether co-resident children are full, half, or unrelated siblings ( McHale, Updegraff, and Whiteman 2012 ).

For many years, household surveys such as U.S. Census forms (up until 1980) required the “household head” to be the household respondent. This was typically a man. In 1980, the Census changed procedure, allowing any “householder” to be the respondent, and this would include men or women who jointly own or rent the home. The proportion of reporting householders who are women has increased over time ( Ruggles and Brower 2003 ). On the other hand, in many more recently established survey studies, such as the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults, or the National Study of Youth and Religion, mothers are the primary reporting parent and source of information on other members of the household. Household- or child-focused studies are often designed to have mothers (whenever possible) as reporters because of long-standing assumptions about their chief importance in and knowledge of children’s development and family processes ( Schaeffer, Seltzer, and Dykema 1998 ). It has also proved easier and less costly, historically, to locate and recruit women or mothers for survey research ( Braver and Bay 1992 ; Schaeffer et al. 1998 ). Despite the benefits of relying on mothers for family information, only having reports from one parent limits the information we have about adolescents and their families.

Regardless of how residential family members and their relationships to each other are documented, household-based surveys are also limited by the extent to which they can shed light on family members who reside outside the focal household ( Manning et al. 2014 ). This includes nonresidential parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, or even adults who are not blood relatives but play a central role in parenting adolescents. Some studies, like the National Study of Families and Households, involve interviews with multiple parents, including follow ups with parents who leave the household. Very few nationally representative studies of youth or families collect data from nonresidential parents from the start. One exception is the Fragile Families Study ( Reichman et al. 2001 ), in which fathers are interviewed at all the same time points as mothers, even if they live apart. It is undoubtedly expensive to fully delineate and measure adolescents’ families, especially from the perspective of multiple family members, but the value in doing so justifies consideration of how we might more creatively approach the collection of data on adolescents’ family contexts.

A handful of other previously identified factors may also bias our understandings of adolescents or young adults’ living arrangements when young people themselves are the sampling units. For example, when youth are sampled from schools, youth who are not in school either because of dropping out or being homeschooled may be missing from the sampling frame ( Johnston and O’Malley 1985 ). Thus, the types of families or households those youth tend to have could be underrepresented in the data. Further, some studies restrict residents of institutions from being in the sampling frame, meaning that when focusing on youth, those who live on a college campus or are incarcerated (and their family situations) are underrepresented. And, some studies restrict their samples to college students, making findings less generalizable to the whole population of late adolescents or young adults. ( Côté 2014 ; Mitchell and Syed 2015 ).

Future Directions

Family networks.

One alternative that could address limitations inherent in the household-centric design of surveys is the application of social network approaches and methods to the collection of data on family members ( Bernardi 2011 ; Widmer 2010 ). These methods have been primarily used for adults’ social networks to date, and to collect information on the most influential people in their lives. Widmer (2010) argues families are best defined as configurations created out of the interdependencies between family members. Using a social network approach to conceptualize families allows researchers to put adolescents at the center of a network of family members, considering the social, psychological, biological, and geographic distances of those in the web of family. It also makes it possible to assess the type and quality of ties between members of an adolescent’s family network, including the social capital available ( Widmer 2010 ). Further, one could consider the support networks (family or wider) of multiple family members and the extent to which they overlap or leave certain family members isolated ( Bernardi 2011 ).

The conceptualization of adolescents’ families as social networks suggests new forms of data collection as well ( Bernardi 2011 ; Widmer 2010 ). In survey studies designed to understand the role of family and family members in the lives of adolescents, rather than a standard household roster,, adolescents might be asked to complete a sociogram or network diagram that systematically elicits reports of the important family members in an adolescent’s life ( Widmer, Aeby, and Sapin 2013 ). “Important” could be defined according to key theories or research questions. For example, studies might focus on listing and describing family ties based on levels of closeness, social support, financial support, or time spent together. Further, adolescents could report perceptions of how close each of these family members is to every other family member, so that standard network measures, such as density or centrality, could be applied to understanding family characteristics. Other family members could also become participants in the study and provide their own assessment of adolescents’ family networks and the ties involved.

In longitudinal studies, the repeated mapping of adolescents’ family networks could provide rich data for shifts over time in influential family members, family relationships, and family living arrangements. This dynamic approach allows for assessing levels of stability or instability in family networks as well as various trajectories in network change. Widmer (2010) demonstrates how change in family configurations in the short and long term are related to psychological well-being.

Using a social network approach in measuring the family structures, ties, and interactions of adolescents could address several issues raised earlier in the paper. For one, this measurement strategy could do a better job of documenting family relations across households, not limiting researchers to the context of one household. Second, depending on how data about family networks are collected, this approach could do a better job of characterizing types and features of family relationships ( Widmer 2010 ). With a variety of studies indicating that levels of warmth and control provided by parents are more predictive of youth well-being than the family structure/s in which they have lived ( Arnold et al. 2017 ; Demo and Acock 1996 ; Lansford et al. 2001 ; Phillips 2012 ), it is important that we understand how family configurations improve or challenge the ability of parents to provide high quality parenting ( Pryor 2004 ; Murry this issue).

Family Profiles

Another alternative for measuring the family contexts in which adolescents live is to use cluster analysis or latent class methods to suggest “types” or “profiles” of families. Common types of families would be identified by a set of indicators of family structure such as number and type of parent figures, sibling types and living arrangements, different residential custody arrangements, multigenerational living, and more. Family configurations could represent families at one moment in time or a set of experiences across time.

Research on the implications of family structure for children and adolescents often focuses on one part of family structure at a time, like whether there are one or two parents in the home, or the impact of a remarriage on adolescents. However, the relationship status or transitions experienced by parents might be different based on whether an adolescent has siblings or not and how many. Manning et al. (2014) and others describe the multifaceted nature of families as “complexity,” and they recommend an approach that documents types of parent figures as well as siblings. Methods such as latent class analysis could achieve this.

Indicators of dynamic living arrangements such as shared residential custody could be included in analyses. One could represent family transitions over time such as having ever lived with a single parent, a step-parent (married or cohabiting), having had a biological-, half-, or step-sibling, having ever lived with a grandparent, having experienced a parental dissolution, having moved from home, or ever having returned to home.

The use of social network or configurational methods has the potential to transform the study of adolescents’ family contexts and parenting by providing better coverage of family members and processes. Rather than having to rely on certain segments of what adolescents might define as their family, or only consider one aspect of family structure at a time, these methods allow the complexity of families to be more fully captured. Moreover, with network or family profile methods, measures of the quality or content of family interactions could be included. This might include family experiences, such as death, severe or chronic health issues, incarceration, or deportation of a family member as factors that define a family and present new issues for parenting adolescents.

Conclusions

Understanding forms of family in which adolescents come of age and their impact is challenging on a number of fronts. There are many dynamics at play. The definition of family has been changing over time, families experience changes of members across time, and parents and adolescents themselves are developing through time. Further, there are key measurement challenges, including the extent to which we focus on household members as family, who we ask to report on family structure and dynamics, and how to best capture changes in these very complex processes over time.

Despite these challenges, we do have a sense of the range and prevalence of family forms and how these have changed over time. Adolescents increasingly live in single-parent, step-parent, and no-biological-parent homes. Having step-siblings or half-siblings in the home or in other homes is more common. Grandparents are increasingly present in adolescents’ homes and lives. Older adolescents or young adults are more likely to return to their parents’ homes for a period of time. Further, the number of changes in living arrangements families experience has increased. Because so much about adolescents’ families has changed since the middle of the 20 th century when foundational theories of parenting were developed, it is important we consider how newer contexts for parenting might alter or expand theory or research on parenting adolescents.

The many aspects of family change experienced in the United States over the past few decades share a common set of implications for parenting adolescents. Different forms and increasing change within families involves relationship transitions for both parents and children, can be stigmatizing for parents and children, might increase the number of parent figures needing to coordinate support and guidance for an adolescent, and can be a source of difference or distance between parents and children.

Relationship transitions, such as separation or divorce, are associated with more parental stress and harsher parenting in mothers ( Beck et al. 2010 ; Cooper et al. 2009 ). Amato (2004 :32) contends that while there are many risk factors associated with divorce, “disruptions in parent-child relationships have the greatest potential to affect children negatively.” Families with “boomerang” adolescents, who have moved out and then return, may have challenges negotiating appropriate autonomy-granting and independence-building ( Newman 2012 ). Thus, the transitions involved in creating increasingly new and different family forms raise challenges to parenting adolescents. Classic theories highlighting the importance of warmth and control (e.g., Baldwin 1955 ; Baumrind 1967 ; Becker 1964 ; Sears et al. 1957 ; Symonds 1939 ) can be enhanced in thinking about ways parents can adequately provide support to adolescents during times of transition and in new family forms.

These considerations all point to an increased need for cooperation, negotiation, and understanding among parents, partners, and children ( Amato 2004 ). Theory and research should continue to address the extent to which relationship transitions limit parents’ abilities to provide optimal support and monitoring, and whether, at the same time, adolescents in these situations might need more support and monitoring. Parents themselves should and often do acknowledge the need to process these transitions in as healthy a manner as possible to protect their and their adolescents’ well-being. For example, authoritative parenting, in which parents are warm, involved, and supportive of their adolescent’s autonomy and decision-making, yet are clear and firm about their boundaries and expectations, can be successful across multiple family types and cultures ( Baumrind 1971 ; Sorkhabi and Mandara 2013 ; Steinberg 2001 ). Other parents and family members who are not be dealing with family transitions might consider how they can best support those parents who are, in the interest of helping families emerge from transitions.

When family forms are changing so fast, and society holds strong to nostalgia for the idealize family of the past ( Coontz 1992 ), there is great potential for suspicion and condemnation of non-nuclear families, same-sex parent families, or foster/adoptive families that stem from a failure or inadequacy on the part of biological parents. Thus, parents and adolescents in these family forms, with these experiences and identities, face personal challenges that arise from marginalization, and they worry about and attend to each other’s harm from such discrimination. These processes are also discussed by Murry (this issue) and are a potential context in which to consider what optimal parenting of adolescents involves.

Parents in these often-judged families can benefit from being aware and educated about the risk of experiencing real and perceived stigma. If parents are presented with data to show the relative normality of their experiences today and the questionable reasoning in assuming a golden age of families in the past ( Coontz 1992 ), they may gain confidence as parents, allowing them to provide the support and monitoring that seems more essential to adolescents than family structure in and of itself. Likewise, adolescents who face potential stigma because of their family experiences can be taught how to understand and cope with it. Finally, parents and adolescents who have consistently been a part of a nuclear, biological, heterosexual parent family should also recognize that different family forms are not necessarily inferior family forms. They should connect with different kinds of families to learn how their lives are more similar than they know. As everyone recognizes the dangers in assuming that family structure equates to family quality, the risk of stigma for parents and children in new family forms will decline.

Complex families with multiple parent figures, including grandparents, other relatives, non-residential parents, and foster parents, have increased potential for conflicts about parenting and greater challenges negotiating a unified and beneficial parenting approach ( Pryor 2004 ). As a greater number of parent figures become involved in adolescents’ lives, parenting behaviors become responsive to the desires and circumstances of a range of parent types, new children, and others. These complex family networks will affect access to, and relationships with, all of a parent’s children ( Meyer and Cancian 2012 ; Tach et al. 2010 ).

Finally, with greater heterogeneity and change over time in the number of parent figures involved in an adolescents lives comes the potential for greater distance between parents and adolescent along a number of lines. Step-parents, foster or adoptive parents, or even parents who had children via ART, and their adolescent children, often have issues surrounding the lack of biological connection between them and/or negotiating how to establish strong bonds and encourage their connection with their biological parents (if they are still involved) ( Pryor 2004 ). Grandparents who parent may share biological ties with adolescents, but their age difference may pose challenges to parenting. Non-resident mothers or fathers may be or feel less involved in key decisions or socialization processes due to their limits on time together ( Pryor 2004 ).

We have covered a variety of aspects of family structure and their implications for the contemporary study of parenting adolescents. Yet, there remain other ways that families differ that might impact parenting and should also be studied further. We focused on permanent relationship and living arrangement change in our survey of the literature, but families can become separated in temporary (but often long-term) ways that hold many of the same implications for how parenting might unfold. For example, military families deal with frequent moves as well as deployment of at least one parent ( Arnold et al. 2017 ). There has been a massive increase in the likelihood an adolescent will be separated from a parent who is incarcerated, presenting its own unique challenges ( Johnson and Easterling 2012 ; Murphey and Cooper 2015 ). Deportation is increasingly an issue for immigrant families in the United States, and refuges may have family members left in their country of origin. There are also family experiences that do not change the structure of family, but shift the balance of resources or parenting. This could include parent or child physical or mental health issues, unemployment, or death of a family member. In general, the better we are at considering the range of family forms and experiences in our measures and models, the more advice can be tailored to specific parenting contexts for adolescents.

In addition to incorporating new family forms and their implications into our theorizing and research on parenting adolescents, we must also advance our methods of measuring families. Because of the challenges in grasping all complexities of adolescents’ families, research should continue to pursue and implement new ways to conceptualize and measure family forms and processes. Social network methods bring a flexibility and comprehensiveness to the measurement of significant family ties, as well as allowing the study of multiple family members’ perspectives. Profile or clustering methods permit studying unique configurations of certain aspects of family structure and the quality of interactions.

In the absence of these alternate forms of data on families, we recommend that studies focused on or controlling for the role of family structure in parenting theorize the appropriate dimensions of family context to a given topic, and include as many of those as possible. This would include measures of number and type of parents, siblings, and extended family members and involvement of non-residential parent figures in an adolescent’s life. We also recommend modeling interactions between parenting styles and family structure, so we can better evaluate the extent to which the importance of key constructs like emotional support or behavioral monitoring varies by family context.

More fully recognizing the contemporary range of family structures and the unique issues involved with each greatly improves the odds that we are more accurately theorizing, measuring, and analyzing best practices for parenting adolescents. In turn, the public can also be better informed about the growing normality of non-nuclear, impermanent family structures, possibly lowering stigma of certain families and raising parents’ and adolescents’ confidence in maintaining strong bonds and successfully preparing for the transition to adulthood.

Acknowledgments

This research received support from the Population Research Training grant (T32 HD007168) and the Population Research Infrastructure Program (P2C HD050924) awarded to the Carolina Population Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Contributor Information

Lisa D. Pearce, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

George M. Hayward, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Laurie Chassin, Arizona State University.

Patrick J. Curran, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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Or so she says...

Family Fun, Favorites, Food, and Faith

March 12, 2017 by Adelle Belnap

The Stories That Bind Us – Creating Family Unity (she: Adelle)

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Do you know your family history? Try sharing stories with your kids to bring past and present generations together! Here’s a Family Night lesson to get you started.

What makes a family strong, resilient, and happy? It is something we all desire. There are many articles and books written on this topic. One of my favorite is an article published in the New York Times written by Bruce Feiler. It is titled, “The Stories That Bind Us.” (Link Here) I like this particular essay because the principles taught make sense, it feels right, and it is easy to implement.

This article teaches a simple principle that draws the generations of a family tree together and makes the overall family resiliency strong. It is all about stories. What is your family story? Talk about it tonight with this fun Family Night Lesson.

Lesson: I recommend reading the article in advance to teaching this lesson. Or, read it together as a group. It will only take a few minutes and it will help you understand the lesson better!

First, define what family means. There are two parts to the common definition. The first is, “A group consisting of parents and children living together in a household.” Obviously, this ideal isn’t always the case, and that is ok!

The second part of the definition is, “All the descendants of a common ancestor.” Adding this part of the definition to the world family is important for this lesson. We are part of something bigger than just our single family unit.

Talk about who your family is. What is Grandma’s name? Who is Aunt Susan? Where did they come from? Where do they live? Pull out a scrapbook and show your children pictures of your extended family. I love to look at physical similarities. Do your kids have Great Grandpa’s nose? Did they inherit Uncle Billy’s curly hair? Is there a trait that is consistent through the generations? The grandkids in my family are really lucky when they get my father’s bright blue eyes. My siblings and I all secretly hope our kids will be born with them, because they are the most vibrant beautiful blue eyes a person could have.

Why is it important for your children to know about their ancestors? In the article Dr. Duke said, “that children who have the most self-confidence have what he and Dr. Fivush call a strong intergenerational self. Meaning, they know they belong to something bigger than themselves.” Their research points to a direct correlation between a child’s ability to cope with stress (general happiness and resiliency) and the child’s sense of being part of a larger family. When a child knows that they are a link in a strong chain of people, it makes life easier to handle. Each person is not battling life alone, but as part of a greater whole.

Isn’t that an amazing gift? We are all part of a family that is bonded together through trials and success. The more you know and your children know about your ancestors, the stronger the family bond can be.

So, how to you make this link solid? By telling stories! Take a few minutes to share a few stories about your ancestors that are interesting, funny, inspirational, or educational. You don’t have to go very far up the family tree if you don’t want to. You can talk about your parents or your siblings. Tell your kids about how your parents met. Talk about what they did to earn a living. Is there a time when you were impressed by a hard decision your parents had to make when you were a kid? Share it. This is story time. And these are the stories that will bind your family together.

This might be a fun time to call a grandma or grandpa on the phone to ask them questions! Ask them about where they served a Church mission. Ask what they liked to learn about in school. What is their favorite vacation? Find out what trial was the hardest in their life and how they overcame it. Make a list of questions on a piece of paper before you call to help guide the conversation. This little interview will help you get to know them better.

A few months ago, while preparing dinner, I took two minutes to tell my kids a story about their Great Great Great Great Grandpa Dan Jones. This is what I said in a nutshell: Dan Jones was a Mormon Pioneer. He was with his good friend Joseph Smith the night before the prophet was martyred. Dan Jones got lost heading home that night. It was a lucky mistake, because there was a mob of people waiting to kill him on the correct road to his home. The Lord was watching out for Dan. He knew him and He knew there was still so much good work for Dan to do on Earth. He was a very special man. You kids are so lucky to have a brave hero as a Grandpa.

That was it! I wasn’t even sure if my kids were listening. Then, a few weeks after I told the story, my family and I were at Disneyland. We walked past the Indiana Jones ride in Adventureland. My little six year old boy’s eyes lit up and he got so excited. He exclaimed, “Mom! It’s the Dan Jones ride! We know him!” After I laughed, my heart swelled up. Because, he remembered the story and he was proud to be related to Mr. Jones. Even if it was the wrong hero. His sense of self was elevated because of his connection to his Great Grandpa Jones.

Kids really do feel a bond with their ancestors when they learn about them through the stories we tell.

Cut paper into strips that are about 1 inch thick. Give each person a single strip of paper and have them write their own name onto it. H0ld the paper in a circle. (Don’t staple it yet) Tell each child that this link represents you.

Link the pieces of your chain together so that the links that represent your immediate family are all together.

Then, start writing down the names of your extended family onto the extra paper strips.

When you write the name it would be good to say a quick thing about that person. For example, “Great Grandma Mary-she made the best orange rolls every Thanksgiving dinner. My siblings and I would get stuffed eating as many as we could. I got my recipe from her!” Take turns hooking the extended family chain pieces to your own family chain.

When you are finished you will have one giant family chain that has been bonded together. This giant chain is much more impressive than the individual links you started with. Hang the chain up so that you can see it throughout the week as a reminder that you are all part of a family bond.

Sharing stories about your family should become a consistent dialog in your home. The article in the New York Times gave the suggestion to utilize times when you are already together to talk about family stories. Stories can be told and bonds can be built during family dinner time, while riding in the car, waiting at the dentist office, walking home from school, after a hard loss at a sporting event, before a big date, or during young children’s bath time.

Hopefully, you are already spending time together. (That is the first big step!) Now, you just need to remember to use that time to create a sense of family belonging in the hearts of your children. It is amazing how knowing who they are and what their family has accomplished over time really does make a child feel more important, strong, better adjusted, and happier than those who are living life without that bond of love and belonging.

For more posts like this, check these out:

Recording Family History Through Pictures

The Moment I Realized Family History is AWESOME

Family Night: Kids Interviewing Grandparents

The Rare Newsletter

It doesn't happen very often, but when it does... it's good!! Favorite things, great ideas, and all things "FAMILY."

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10 Reasons I Love Being a Latter-day Saint

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

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Family Unity

Favorite Quote: "What I am looking for is not out there, it's in me." ~ Hellen Keller

Family life is an inevitable demand of human beings. Needless to say, our individual and collective existence impels/compels us towards family life. A family - young or mature - earnestly yearns for happiness and unity. However, in this age, when, according to statistics, marital/familial issues are increasing enormously, it is surmised that establishing strong family unity is a rather complicated and arduous task. But, in my opinion, the prevailing domestic affairs demand a few apt measures with commitments from all family members. On account of this, associated household concerns will reduce, and, as a result, unity will enhance in the family. We mention hereunder the practices briefly.

Communication - Research claims that open and frequent communication is the quality of strong and united families. Communication has two aspects, speaking and listening. Speaking means conveying ideas and feelings while listening means receiving ideas and feelings, i.e., giving heed to the speaker's words. Getting into the nitty-gritty, speaking requires honesty whereas listening demands faithfulness. Family communication, in a few words, is a single process demanding two platforms - honest speaking and faithful listening. The upholding of both the platforms simultaneously is essential to cultivate a healthy and united family.

Proactive Understanding - In domestic life, proactive understanding of fellow members greatly matters. This phase is concomitant feeling/reaction of the listener after bilateral communication with the speaker. Once the speaker's words are out, they require more than just listening, in fact, they entail respect and further consideration by the listener as well. This act is called proactive understanding. In consequence of this attitude, companionship is realized, similarities are shared and dissimilarities are respected or reduced among family members.

Share household Responsibilities & Assign Specific Chores - Cooperation is just as important in a family life, as in a team. The sum total chores should be divided, according to household needs, and be assigned to members, consistent with their will and skill. For example, in traditional family setup, cooking task is assigned to mother, mowing effort to son, hosting by girls, financial struggle by father, etc. Fair sharing of household responsibilities wipes out any possibility of hatred and jealousy in the family; rather it greets peace and unity. Therefore, it is the duty of family head to share household responsibilities, equally and wisely, among all family members.

Establish Routines - Routines make life more organized. Research proves that a household performs best in active and regular routines. Apart from activeness and regularity, family routines are recommended to be simple as well, that is, they should not pressurize the members. An overlooked benefit of a routine structure, according to multiple pieces of research, is that effectiveness of the task performed as a routine, regularly, within a particular schedule/timetable, is increased significantly. General family routines include dining together, visiting parks at weekends, spending family time, and doing certain chores at specified junctures.

Spiritual Efforts - The efforts through which soul serenity is enhanced refer to as spiritual efforts. Just like a body, each family unit has a separate soul. The purity/impurity of any family depends on its soul. Therefore, family members should partake in spiritual endeavors to gain purity. Generally, purity in a family means the moral improvement of members. A few family-soul purification efforts are reinvigorating/initiating targets, meditating and praying together, discussing inspirational literature or sacred revelations, and promoting religious rituals.

Have Fun Together - All families look forward to leisure time, every once in a while. Filling up the spare time with recreations can offer freshness, love, and unity-driven environment to household members. Also, a time-off is often a wise idea to shun burnout and monotony. Some common family pastimes include sharing and laughing at jokes, outing, spending vacation overseas and watching television/movies together.

Most people urge to discover a proper technique to safeguard their family from gaps/conflicts. Conflicts are an inevitable part of domestic life. A family can fall prey to different form of conflicts, such as poor communication, excessive financial work, inequity between children, external grounds/conspiracies, etc. These conflicts should never be allowed to intensify; otherwise, they may jeopardize the family - your near and dear ones. Hence, before the conflicts overwhelm the family, the family should overcome the conflicts. The aforesaid steps are highly useful to avoid gaps in family life.

The ground rule for leading a happy family life, in my opinion, is to set up strong unity among family members. Though it may not seem an easy undertaking, but with the six practices mentioned in the article, one can definitely hit the road.

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Essay on Unity for Students and Children

500+ words essay on unity.

Unity is of utmost importance for society as well as the whole country. “Strength is always with Unity” is a popular phrase and it is true to its every word. Unity represents togetherness. Therefore, it is standing together for every thick and thin matter. There are many stories as well as real-life incidences have proved that unity always leads a harmonious and fulfilling life for all. On the other hand, many people still do not understand the importance of staying in unity. People keep fighting over insignificant things and at last end up with loneliness.

Towards Common Goal- Unity

People in unity look forward to work towards a common goal instead of satisfying their own selfish motives. People love their nation as well as their fellow citizens. Therefore, it is the fact that they would be able to grow with a better lifestyle only when there is national development.

And it is but obvious that national development is possible only when they maintain unity. Hence, this goes a long way in the development of the nation.

Advantages of Unity

Here are some of the advantages of unity:

Help and Support-

People help each other and provide moral as well as financial support when it is needed. On the other hand, living in isolation will make anyone feel insecure and introvert.

Good Guidance-

It is a proven fact that when we stay united then we may seek guidance from others them for both personal and professional matters.

Proper Growth-

Staying united is good for our growth as well as the nation’s development. This is also good for the family in particular and all-round development of children.

Source of Motivation-

When we work together, we are motivated and encouraged to work harder. Also, we push each other to accomplish the goals and this works as a great motivational factor.

Greater Accomplishment-

When we work together as a team, we are able to accomplish greater goals which might not be possible alone.

Fighting a Mission-

Fighting a mission becomes much easier when there are more numbers of people involved. Indian national movement for freedom is it’s the best example. Many social evils and unjust practices have been fought and eradicated in the past only because of unity among people.

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Government’s Role in Building Unity

Unity can be achieved if each individual is ready to leave his individual interests and work for the betterment of the nation as a whole. Undoubtedly this spirit must be inborn. But the government can play an important role in building unity among people. Few steps in which this can be achieved are as follows:

End Corruption-

A country can never be prosperous if its political system is corrupt. So, the political leaders must be chosen with utmost care. Also, the government must make it possible by imposing the required legal measures.

Lower Economic Disparity-

There is a lot of economic disparity in our country. As we can see that rich people are becoming richer day by day and the poor are getting poorer. This makes the poor people adopt the criminal means that hamper national development. The government must bridge this gap.

Educate People-

People must be educated about many things related to the country’s development and also about the importance of unity. This should be made a part of the school curriculum. Many other means are also there through which it can be emphasized.

Thus, we see there are uncountable benefits of staying in unity. We can accomplish big tasks, rely on the people in times of need and nurture youth power in a better way. Safety and security can be assured by the national unity. Every citizen must work towards having full unity in the country.

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RFK Jr. Confronted by Fox on Cheryl Hines Drama

The former presidential candidate was also forced to answer for calling Donald Trump a “terrible human being,” “barely human,” and “probably a sociopath.”

Matt Wilstein

Senior Editor

Fox/screengrab

The first question Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received when he sat down with Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream for his first big TV interview after dropping out of the presidential race and endorsing Donald Trump was about reported text messages he sent recently in which he referred to Trump as a “terrible human being,” “barely human,” and “probably a sociopath.” By the end of the interview, he was confronted with the implicit and explicit disapproval from his own family.

Kennedy did not dispute the veracity of those texts, instead explaining that once he realized as had no “path to victory” as an independent candidate, he decided to throw his support behind a man he evidently doesn’t respect because Trump actively courted his favor—unlike Kamala Harris .

“He invited me to form a unity government and we agreed to be able to continue to criticize each other on issues on which we don’t agree,” Kennedy said, but their shared desire to “make American children healthy again,” as he put it, alluding to his history of opposition to childhood vaccines, meant he could overlook everything else.

Since Kennedy officially came out in support of Trump last week, there has been much speculation about how his wife, Curb Your Enthusiasm actress Cheryl Hines, is taking the news, given that she has made her opposition to Trump well-known in the past —and even suggested she would divorce her husband if he were named as Trump’s running mate.

Kennedy acknowledged the tension on Twitter this past Friday when he posted, “I am so grateful to my amazing wife Cheryl for her unconditional love, as I made a political decision with which she is very uncomfortable. I wish this also for the country—love and unity even in the face of disagreement. We will need that in coming times.”

Towards the end of his appearance on Fox Sunday morning, Bream brought up the “personal cost” of Kennedy’s Trump embrace, referencing his tweet about Hines and the fact that nearly all of his extended family previously endorsed Joe Biden and are now supporting Harris. “Talk to us about the personal backlash you have a deal with,” she said.

“My family is at the center of the Democratic Party,” Kennedy replied, adding that he has family members working within the Biden administration and that President Biden himself has a bust of his late father, Robert F. Kennedy, sitting behind his desk in the Oval Office. “My family is—I understand that they are troubled by my decisions, but I love my family,” he continued. “I feel like we were raised in a millieu where we were encouraged to debate each other and debate ferociously and passionately about things, but to still love each other. They are free to take their positions on these issues.”

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