I wrote a paper analyzing a family's dynamic when faced with life stressors.

1. Family Stress and Resilience Theory in The Glass Castle
Reagan Brownfield
University of Georgia

2. Introduction
Family Functioning
In the memoir film, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the Walls family system is ever-
changing and developing. The functioning ways of a family system are dependent upon many
things, including: protection and care of family members, emotional and social support, financial
provision, strength and warmth of relationships, and societal contribution. The Glass Castle
provides a sufficient depiction of a family functioning in depth on each one of these levels. A
family that consisted of a father, mother, three daughters, and a son and which held their own
definition of life fulfillment, success, happiness, and conception of what truly constitutes life
meaning. The Walls family operated very independently, paving their own way rather than
allowing the world to pave it for them. They also had a significant amount of familial hardships

3. that they had to navigate, leading to the first prominent concept of family stressors and their
significant impact on family functioning.
Family Stressors
Stressors consist of an event that takes place causing major life changes. They can also be
viewed as mountains because they have to be successfully climbed, or managed, and there often
is not only one that exists in the life course of a family. One of the biggest stressors present in the
Walls family is the stressor of being a highly nomadic family. The sole reason for being a
nomadic family was the fact that Rex Walls, the father, could not successfully retain a job for a
moderate period of time. He often was dismissed because of his rash actions and he was
therefore unable to make necessary life payments, meaning the family would have to pile in the
car and flee to the next temporary home. As a result of this, the Walls family struggled with a
large amount of economic hardship as well, rarely having enough money for food or a roof over
their heads. They had to sleep under the stars rather often, on the hard ground, without pillows
which, according to Rex Walls, was “why indians’ backs were so straight” (Kao, Netter, Feig,
and Cretton, 2017). Their family’s poverty status, however, was hoped to be nothing that would
separate the family ties in any way. Rex thought that the kids were being taught different lessons
than school could ever provide and that they were gaining much more life experience. According
to Vandsburger’s article on stress, resiliency, and poverty, families who are in poverty find that
effective coping comes with how close-knit, loving, and affectionate the family relationships are.
This was once Rex’s dream for their family, to be able to operate off of familial unity and
oneness, however, he takes a tangent and relies on his own form of coping, which leads to their
next family stressor of having a family leader who struggles with alcoholism. This is a stressor
that carries greater weight when the alcohol problem is paternal because it shakes the family’s

4. system of communication patterns and can seriously hinder the emotional development of
children (Kelly and Rangarajan, 2006). This put a strain on the parent-child bonds present in the
family, which is the next important concept of focus.
Parent-Child Relationships
The parent-child relationships that exist in The Glass Castle serve to be a very important
backbone of family functioning. The Walls parents, from the beginning, claim to find importance
in not over-parenting children. It is very evident, when Jeannette is cooking herself hot dogs on
the stove at the age of three, that these parents valued allowing their children freedom to make
their own mistakes and mess up, even if it ended up with a hospital visit. Their mindset was that
suffering as a kid was good for you and that it built character. However, this way of thinking led
them to create an emotional separation between them and their children. Parenting is something
that requires a certain mindfulness in which parents are attentive, aware, responsive, and
protective (Duncan, Coatsworth, and Greenberg, 2009). Children have emotional, relational, and
financial needs that they rely on their parents to meet and in the absence of this, parent-child
relationships begin to lose their comfortable and optimistic factors.
Stress and Resilience Theory
History and Origin
The family stress and resilience theory can very well be applied to many situations that arise in
the Walls family. This addresses the risks that are present that threaten an individual and family
well-being. These risks are stressors that carry immense weight and can consist of tragic losses.
Dependent upon the strength and resiliency of a family system, these stressors can be overcome
over a certain amount of time. Through this theory, a family’s ability to face adversity in a
successful or unsuccessful manner is made very evident. The family stress and resilience theory

5. came about because of the simple curiosity eager for an explanation as to why some families are
impenetrable to stress, while others crash and burn in the face of stress. Family studies scholar
Reuben Hill formulated a theory of family stress that he called the ABCX model and consisted
of: the stressor event, the psychosocial resources, or strengths, the meaning of the event that the
family places upon it, and the crisis that requires reorganization to take place. The family, in a
stressful event, has to go through a period of disorganization in which new effective ways of
coping are necessary. Then, they embark into a period of recovery as they discover their ability
to bounce back and eventually reach a time of successful reorganization. The ABCX model has
continuously been studied and transformed since its original creation. The Double ABCX model
analyzes a family’s ability to overcome multiple stressors over certain periods of time. There are
constantly things within stressful life situations that make the stressful situation worse and cause
a pile-up of stressors. In this particular revision of the model, all of the same variables remain
and there is a great importance placed on the severity of a crisis and its pile-ups. Another
addition to the ABCX model is the FAAR model, or family adjustment and adaptation response
model. This places emphasis on the adaptive part of the ABCX model, the part where family
members make meanings of crisis situations, and divides it up into two parts: situational meaning
and global meaning. Situational meaning truly looks at the individual’s needs and coping
effectiveness on a personal level. Global meaning looks more into the meaning one places on a
situation as it relates to the outside community. Out of these theories of family stress arises the
need for a closer look into family resilience. Family resilience looks into the basic needs of the
family, as well as family members ability to rely on one another and build a strong unity (Allen
and Henderson, 2016).
Concepts of Stress and Resilience Theory

6. Stress
Once again, stress is captioned in the ABCX model as anything that disrupts familial peace in a
family system which exerts pressure to reorganize (Allen and Henderson, 2016). This theoretical
concept is seen ever so often in The Glass Castle. The Walls family experiences stressors in
certain situations, such as the instance when Jeannette catches on fire, or when the Walls kids get
into a fight with Erma, their grandmother, or even towards the end of the story, when Rex
punches Jeannette’s husband in the face. There are constantly little stressful events that require at
least a small amount of transformation and growth. The largest stressors are the ones that have to
do with the issues that arise from living in a family that struggles from poverty and having a
father with an alcohol dependence. There are times when the whole family sleeps somewhere in
the middle of nature and times when the family has not eaten in three whole days due to the fact
that they do not have the monetary needs to satisfy the needs for shelter and food. During this
time, the family uses the resources present. For example, when all of the children were craving
food because they had not had any in three days, Jeannette uses what little they have in the house
they are crashing in, butter and sugar, to feed herself and her younger siblings. They have little
money and in this situation, all of the family’s money is going towards Rex’s alcohol and
cigarettes, which heightens the crisis present. The family as a whole is not actively working to
recover from this stressful situation, as the money is being blown on non-necessities, and so the
family morale of the crisis situation is very negative. The children are at the point of begging
their parents for any kind of food. Another situation in which we see this extreme stress is the
relationship between Jeannette and Rex when it pertains to Rex’s alcoholism. It is simple: Rex
relies wholeheartedly on alcohol, Jeannette longs for him to give it up, he asks her to hold him
accountable, but then relapses under a stress overload.

7. Coping
Coping is how stressed families get in the face of a crisis and how effectively can they overcome,
or at least lessen the severity of, adversity (Allen and Henderson, 2016). In many families, they
rely on their networks of each other and their social networks around them. However, the Walls
family is a little bit different. In the face of stress, Rex turns to cigarettes and alcohol and
Rosemary, the mother, turns to painting, and the kids are forced to team up with one another.
One particular situation involved them having no other option than to go stay temporarily with
the only family around, Rex’s mother, Erma, because their level of poverty reached a point in
which this action was deemed necessary. This was an attempt at relying on their social networks
to help them cope with their situational crisis, however, it only brought about more stressors. The
children coped with the downward spiral of their father’s alcoholism and with their financial
situation by leaning on one another. They would sit and plan exactly how they would get away
from this vicious cycle. They dreamt up big dreams and ideas for their lives, much like their
father had taught them to do long ago, before he had let his stressful life get away from him.
They would cope by holding on to the idea that one day, they would be free of their father’s
drunken rule.
Trauma
Trauma is a case of the most extreme stress that comes from catastrophic events when families
are least prepared to deal with them (Allen and Henderson, 2016). This is a very prevalent
concept because often times, the Walls family is having to pick up and relocate after suffering a
job loss, which is an extreme trauma for young children and adults alike. Trauma is also present
in Rex Walls’s life to a very intense extent when he realizes that all of his children have made
big plans to leave him for bigger and better things in life that he could never provide for them,

8. and they fully intend on following through with these plans. He is not prepared to deal with the
fact that his life requires alterations because he is losing relationships with his children. The
concept of family stressors is also present here because some of these stressors build up to these
large catastrophic traumas. Rex is an alcoholic who lives deep in poverty, and this ultimately
leads to the large, awful event of him getting terminally ill. This situation is something that
shakes the lives of his children, who had thought they so truly desired their lives to be rid of him
completely, yet were seriously hit by it all because they were ill-prepared to face a trauma like
this at the time.
Family Resilience
This concept of family resilience depends upon the family’s ability to adapt and rebound from
stress. It refers to the ability of a family to get back up, dust themselves off, and rebuild life
(Allen and Henderson, 2016). While family members may cope by relying on others in their own
way, family resilience consists of the family as a systemic unit. Jeannette had coped from the
stress of her faltered relationship with her parents by moving to New York City, getting an
accredited job, and marrying into money, however, she still did not feel completely like herself.
The rest of the Walls children followed suit. Rex’s traumas will be struggled with until the day
that he is on his deathbed. When he is dying, his true resilience is the act of getting to reminisce
with Jeannette on positive experiences from their family life, like when he gave them stars for
Christmas, or when he spent hours upon hours blueprinting out the glass castle. He gets the
chance to rebound from his mistakes and life hardships with one of the people he cherishes most.
While this serves as Rex’s form of resilience, all of his family members experience true
resilience years after his passing. They are able to rejoice in the freedom that characterized their

9. younger years, the confinement that characterized their adolescent years, and the life experience
and growth that happened in between.
Strengths and Weaknesses of Theory
Strengths
The family stress and resilience theory has many strengths associated with its usage. First, it has
provides a positive perspective of family change and growth because of its focus on resilience as
well as stress. It also normalizes the inevitability of familial stress. Families will constantly go
through things that require growth and transformation and this theory truly highlights the
importance in understanding that. Lastly, it conceptualizes family stressors according to severity
of the stressor. Severity is important to conceptualize because of the differences in resources and
meanings of certain stressors (Allen and Henderson, 2016). For example, the severity of the
death of a loved one is different than a car getting slightly rear-ended. These strengths proved to
be very evident while using this theory to analyze the concepts present in The Glass Castle. It
prompts one to examine the family in a holistic manner when in the face of stress, which led to a
deeper understanding of the film. Stress and Resilience go together in a two-part process, and
many situations in The Glass Castle follow this outline. There were often stressful situations, and
it was helpful to be able to also focus on the family’s ability to get back up again. Also, some of
the familial stressors that were present in The Glass Castle, such as poverty and alcoholism, are
very prevalent in today’s world, and this theory proved that those are normative events that can
take place in life. It was also beneficial to analyze the stressful situations based off of the severity
of each. There were different forms of resiliency necessary, for example, when the family was
navigating alcoholism rather than when they were navigating death. The strengths of the theory
helped to positively frame the situations present in The Glass Castle.

10. Weaknesses
The weaknesses of the family stress and resilience theory include: the difficulty of
simultaneously focusing on both stress and resilience, if normative family catastrophic traumas
and stressors only differ by severity, and if individual stressors can be resolved if the family is
the cause (Allen and Henderson, 2016). The majority of the weaknesses coincide directly with
the strengths. Although it is difficult to focus on both stress, the problems, and resiliency, the
optimism, at the same time, it is necessary because resilience does not make sense without stress
because it is a two part theory. As noted in The Glass Castle, the two concepts of stress and
resilience have to work together on deep levels. Also, stressors may differ by severity, but the
true judge of severity are the family members that are caught in the midst of a stressful situation.
It depends on how they make meaning of the stressor and define it for themselves and their
families. Lastly, it was found that in The Glass Castle, it was very difficult for the family to
effectively steer through stressors when ultimately, the stressors were often caused by family
members. Because Rex Walls was an intense alcoholic, the children’s ability to be resilient from
that situation was always conditional around if he was going to choose to be sober or not. He
continued to do things to sabotage his job and get fired, in which resiliency would have been
measured by his ability to retain a job for a longer period of time. It is difficult to analyze family
stress and resiliency when the family stressors rest entirely within the family system.
Conclusion
Theory helped greatly in creating the proper framework to discuss concepts present in The Glass
Castle. Family systems theory initially provides the essential foundation for the analysis of
families. Given that this exact theory is focused in on the exact relationships present in a family
system and the way each member of the family system influence and communicate with one

11. another, the relationships between each of the subsystems present in The Glass Castle, marital,
parental, sibling, were able to be examined in depth. Family systems theory also tracks down the
emotional issues that arise in everyday life, which could be a result of one’s family of origin or
family of procreation. In this particular case, both were the issue. Rex and Rosemary Walls were
exactly who they were because they were each raised to be that way. Naturally, they were going
to raise a family with its own set of problems. This then leads to the theory that builds upon
family systems theory and provides a deeper understanding to these problems. The stress and
resilience theory, which comes with its counterparts of: stress, coping, trauma, and family
resilience. Because of the deliberateness of this theory, connections can be drawn between the
ways in which a family handles stressors that pile-up in their lives and the Walls family and
aspects of the theory can be further applied. Upon application of the theory to the movie, the
family in the movie could be seemingly understood on a deeper level that included many layers.
As each of the concepts of the theory, family stressors and parent-child relationships through the
lens of stress, coping, trauma, and family resilience, were analyzed, a new layer of the Walls
family was discovered. The stress and resilience theory also helped explain the curiosities that
arose in certain situations, for example, the Walls children cope with stressful situations in their
own unique manner because that is how they had to do it go get by in their family and Rex Walls
copes with stressful situations the way that he does because of events that took place years ago in
his very own childhood. Theory is the backbone that helps put many aspects of families together
and provides a big picture through family systems theory, which then paves the way for all
dynamic aspects to be analyzed through the family stress and resilience theory, which proved to
be very useful in the analytical breakdown of the Walls family in The Glass Castle.

12. References
Allen, K. R., & Henderson, A.C. (2016). Family Theories: Foundations and Applications. Wiley.
Duncan, L.G., Coatsworth, J.D., Greenberg, M.T. (2009). A Model of Mindful Parenting:
Implications for Parent-Child Relationships and Prevention Research. Clin Child Fam Psychol
Rev, (12), 255-270. doi:10.1007/s10567-009-0046-3
Kao, K., Netter, G., Feig, E. (Producers), & Cretton, D.D. (Director). (2017). The Glass Castle
[Motion Picture]. United States: Gil Netter Productions.
Rangarajan, S., Kelly, L. (2006). Family Communication Patterns, Family Environment, and the
Impact of Parental Alcoholism on Offspring Self-Esteem. Journal of Social and Personal
Relationships, 23(4), 655-671. doi:10.1177/0265407506065990
Vandsburger, E., Harrigan, M., Biggerstaff, M. (2008). In Spite of it All, We Make It: Themes of
Stress and Resiliency as Told by Women in Families Living in Poverty. Journal of Family Social
Work, 11(1), 17-35. doi:10.1080/10522150802007303