Marriage and Family

1. Importance of Family and Peer
Groups in one’s Life

2. Various relationships and what they
mean
 Family
 Peers
 Acquaintances
 Marriage

3. Family
 What is family according to you?
 Who all are the part of your family?
 What is their importance according to you?
 How has their importance changed with time?

4.  Close supportive relationships between
parents and children, between siblings, and
between extended family members enhance
the social support available to all family
members
 Ways to enhance relationship with family
members:
- Keep in regular contact with members of your
family.
- Plan your lifestyle to allow you to maintain
closer physical contact with your family.

5. Family Lifecycle

9. Importance of Family
 Close supportive relationships between parents and
children, between siblings, and between extended family
members enhance the social support available to all family
members
 Social support enhances subjective well-being
 Maintaining contact with family members increases social
support

10. Importance of Friendship
 Maintaining a few close confiding relationships has been found to correlate
with happiness and subjective well-being (Argyle, 2001, 2000)
 Factors important for maintaining confiding relationships:
- Trust and betrayal
- Atonement and forgiveness: forgiveness and atonement are ways of repairing
relationships that have been damaged by transgressions
- Gratitude: occurs in relationships when we acknowledge that we are the
recipients of the prosocial behaviour of others

11.  The capacity to make and maintain stable,
supportive and satisfying friendships is
determined by many historical, personal and
environmental factors
 Adult attachment style is particularly important,
and this has its roots in childhood attachment
experiences
 People with a secure attachment style tend to
develop better-quality peer relationships which
hold up under stress than those with anxious
attachment styles

12. Importance of Marriage
 Marriage provides psychological and physical intimacy
 In individualistic cultures, cohabiting couples are happier
than even married couples, but not in collectivist countries
 Separated or widowed people in collectivist countries are
happier than their counterparts in individualist cultures

13. Marital Satisfaction
The following demographic factors are associated
with
marital satisfaction (Newman and Newman, 1991):
 High level of education;
 High socio-economic status;
 Similarity of spouses interests, intelligence and
personality;
 Early or late stage of family lifecycle;
 Sexual compatibility;
 For women, later marriage.

14. Distinctive Features of Happy
Couples
 Respect
 Acceptance
 Dispositional attributions for positive
behaviour
 More positive than negative interactions
 Focusing conflicts on specific issues
 Rapidly repairing relationship ruptures
 Managing differing male and female
conversational styles
 Addressing needs for intimacy and power

15.  Happy couples attribute their partners’ positive
behaviours to dispositional rather than situational
factors
 When happy couples disagree, they focus their
disagreement on a specific issue, rather than
globally criticizing or insulting their partner
 Happy couples tend to rapidly repair their
relationship ruptures arising from conflict and they
do not allow long episodes of non-communication
 Happy couples constantly negotiate the need for
power and intimicy