Families: What Makes Them Tick?

A family is a social unit, a group bound together through marriage and hereditary links and the people that make up families must balance both their individual needs with the needs of the whole.

Because of the interconnectedness of families, you can appreciate that if one part is off, it throws the rest off balance. Since we are all at different times not operating at our peak, it is not surprise that families can get a bit crazy.

If you look at family like that, you also see that it’s all the family that are involved in parenting the children, not simply one or two people. What can you do to help your family function better?

Sometimes a clue to possible problems may lay in the past, this is especially true if you can identify specific patterns of behavior. For example, when you look at your family history can you find a lot of divorces, addictive behaviors, affairs, premature deaths? What’s the religious history of your family? How have they fared socially or financially? A history of undesirable behavior doesn't mean it has to recur again but it will alert to you areas that need to be looked at as a possible source of problems.

Families are all about relationships. How would you describe the relationships in your family? Are they close, or distant? You can look at relationships on all levels - between your parents and their parents and siblings? What about the relationship between parents? An assessment of all the familial relationships will give you a better understanding of why a family functions as it does. While you can't change other people, you can change how you interact with them and with the family you created with your spouse.

Does your family like to keep secrets from each other? If you answered with a vehement yes, then you may need to seek out a marriage and family counselor to help you work through the issues that this raises for you. Even though you may not know what the secrets are, you may intuitively know that information is being withheld and this can create distrust. Secrets retain their power because they are not addressed.

Families can be a great resource to call on as you go through the challenges of parenting your own children. This doesn't mean that you have to follow their advice without question but it often pays to remember that you have a rich resource of information readily available to you. There are times when you will want to call on the expertise in your own backyard and if you have a large family to choose from then you are able to let nature of your problem dictate who you should call on for advice.