Family can be defined in several ways, including blood relations, legal ties, and people who support each other over time. It can be viewed through different lenses such as role (relationships where partners feel and act like family), social (relationships sanctioned by law), and biogenetic (sharing genetic material). In general, a family refers to a network of people bound by marriage, blood, commitment, or law who consider themselves a family and share a significant history and future together. There are various family structures like two-parent biological families, single-parent families, stepfamilies, and families created through adoption or new technologies. Communication patterns around cohesion, adaptability, and supporting functions help define family functioning. A family's communication

2. • What is Family?
Viewed as according to the blood ties, legal ties and
networks of person who live over a period of time and
supporting each other.
Group of people who has ties of marriage and
kinship to one another.
It is a role lens, a social lens and a biogenetic lens
Role lens- relationships are familial to the extent that
the relational partners fell and act as a family.
•

3. • Social lens- relies on the enactment of laws and
regulations or those formally sanctioned by law.
• Biogenetic lens- the extent to which the relationship
is directly reproductive and whether or not the relational
partners share genetic material (Floyd, Mikkelson and
Judd 2006).

4. As a generalization family refers as networks of
people who share their lives over longer period of time
bounds by ties of marriage, blood, law or commitment ,
legal or otherwise who considered themselves as family
and who share significant history and anticipated future of
functioning in a family relationship.

5. • Style of family formation
• Two- parent biological family- consist of parents and
children who are from union of these parents.
• Single- parent family –consist of one or more children
include an unmarried man or woman and his or her
offspring.

7. Demographic trends
• Individuals continue to marry- currents trends indicate
that first marriages are taking place later in life.
• Divorce rate is stabilizing
• Remarriage rates, although high are dropping.
• Age and parenting responsibility affects the remarriage.

8. • Stepfamilies continue to increase through remarriage and
cohabitation.
• The number of single-parent families continues to
increase.
• Families continue to be constructed through adoption.
• Some families are constructed or expanded through
scientific technologies

9. • More adult children are living at home.
• The number of cohabitating partners is growing rapidly.
• Families of lesbians and gay males are increasing.
• Extended families continue to flourish
• Families increasingly represent four and five generation.

10. • Functional families
The four perspectives on so called normal- families
represent the evolution of related thinking (Walsh, 1993).

11. • Normal Families as Asymptomatic family functioning-
approach implies there are no major symptoms of
psychopathology among the family member.
• Normal Families as Average- approach identify families
that appear typical or seen to fit common patterns.

12. • Normal Families as Optimal –approach stresses positive
or ideal characteristics often based on members’
accomplishments.
• Normal Family Processes- this approach stresses a
system perspective focusing on adaptation over the life
cycle and adaptation to stresses and contexts

13. Framework
For
Family
Communication

14. The communication process
• Symbolic, transactional process of creating and sharing
meanings.
• It is used to create meaning and messages, words or
verbal behavior are the most commonly used and it
consist of mutual interaction

15. Communication
Patterns and Family
Functions

16. • Family cohesion – Family members are able to develop
and maintain or change their pattern.
• Family adaptability -focuses on how family manage
stability and change.
• Family communication – a facilitating dimension that
enables couples and family to move along the cohesion
and adaptability dimensions.

17. 2 primary function involves
• Establishing a pattern of cohesion or separateness and
connectedness
• Establishing a pattern of adaptability or change

18. • 4 levels of cohesion ranging from extremely low to
cohesion to extremely high cohesion.
1.Disengaged – Family member maintain extreme
separateness’ and little family belonging or loyalty.
2.Separated- Family members experience emotional
independence, with some joint involvement

19. 3.Connected- Family members strive for emotional
closeness, loyalty and joint involvement with some
individual
4.Enmeshed –Family members experience extreme
closeness, loyalty and almost no individuality.

20. Family flexibility - also referred to as adaptability
focuses on how family system manage stability and
change.

21. 4 levels of adaptability:
• Rigid – family members operate under autocratic
decision making styles and strict roles and rules.
• Structured –family members experience authoritarian and
equalitarian leadership stable roles and rule
• Flexible- experience negotiation and decision making and
easily changed rules and roles

22. • Chaotic – members have nonexistent leadership,
confused decision making and varied rules and roles.

23. Supporting Functions
• Establishing a satisfactory congruence of images –
relationship the pattern can be viewed as metaphors
which allow the people to understand one element to
other.
• Evolving modes of interaction into central family - viewed
as pattern of feelings motives, fantasies, and
conventionalized understanding.

24. • Establishing the boundaries of the family’s world of
experience – system as an entity by allowing it to create
a permeable separation between its interior elements and
its environment.
•
• Dealing with significant biosocial issues of family life,
such as gender, age, power, and roles- all families
operate in a larger sphere that provides conventional
ways of coping with biosocial issues.

25. Family of origin influences
-refers to how current relational experiences reflect a
unique combination and generally thought to be the
earliest, powerful source of influence on one’s personality.

26. Thank you!!