Social Work with Families

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Social Work with Families

• Lecture 1

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Definition of a family

• Definition of a family
• Gender Roles, Ideologies, cultural background and
  social class play roles in behavioral
  expectations and attitudes.
• Families Comprise a system which involves a set
  of rules, assigned and ascribed roles.

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Families Continued

• Families Continued organized power structure,
  developed intricate overt and covert forms of
  communication, and has elaborated ways of
  negotiating and problem solving. Within the
  family system individuals are tied to each
  other by powerful, durable, reciprocal,
  multigenerational emotional attachments.

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Ways Systems Are Shaped

• Race
• Ethnicity
• Social Class
• Family Life Cycle Stage
• Number of Generations in this country
• Sexual Orientation
• Religious Affiliation

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Ways Continued

• Physical and Mental Health
• Educational Attainment
• Financial Security
• Family Values and Belief Systems
• Family Entrance such as first birth, etc.
• Later and Earlier Marriages
• Foster Parenting

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Family Disruptions

• Families were disrupted by the early death of a
  parent, abandonment by a breadwinner, changes
  such as remarriage, child placed with relatives,
  foster care, and orphanages.

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Couples Living Together With or Without Children

• Now more long-term unmarried cohabitating couples
  live together with or without children. This is
  due to
• The high divorce rate
• Never married couples with children
• Step-families and adoptive families
• Same sex couples living together with or without
  children.

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Constantine (1986)

• Distinguishes between enabled and disabled
  family systems. In the enabled system it
  balances the needs as a family unit while
  operating on behalf of the interests of all its
  members as individuals.

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Nuclear or Step-Families

• All families must work to promote positive
  relations among members and attend to the
  personal needs of the members.
• The members must prepare to cope with the
  developmental or maturational changes such as
  children leaving home and unexpected or unplanned
  crises such as job dislocation or loss, divorce,
  death of a family member, a sudden severe
  illness.

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Gender Roles

• Changes have had powerful impact on the family
  structure and functioning. Dual career families
  face challenges. An Example is a sick
  child-which parent takes off to take care of the
  child? For dual earners, who are the
  working-class, the sick child may become a family
  crises if the jobs do not permit time off for
  either parent.

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Ethnicity and Family Therapy

• Different ethnicities have family issues that are
  important to them. They may have different
  assumptions about the therapeutic process. These
  families may bring different tools and resources
  in for dealing with the issues.

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Families in Poverty

• About 12 of the general American population and
  28 percent of households are headed by single
  women (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000).

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Theories

• Postmodern Outlook-There is no true reality, only
  the families collectively agreed upon set of
  constructions, that is created through language
  and knowledge. This is relational and
  generatively based that the family calls reality.
  (Harlene Anderson, etc.)

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Resilience

• According to (Walsh, 2003), resilience is the
  key, key family processes, positive belief system
  provides for shared values and assumptions to
  offer guidelines for meaning and for future
  action, familys organizational processes, how
  effective it organizes its resources) provide
  shock absorbers when confronted with stress. A
  set of family communication/problem solving that
  are clear forms resilience.

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Family Organization-Dyads Triads

• Dyads are two person relationships
• Triads are three person relationships
• These models can sometimes develop into family
  coalitions and can sometimes manifest into
  triangulation.
• Family therapy, alters the family system in that
  it helps families, replace their previous
  limiting and self-defeating, repetitive
  interactive patterns.

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Cybernetic Principles

• Palo Alto Group took cybernetic principles and
  applied them to communication processes including
  those associated with psychopathology.
• Gregory Bateson (1972).

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Double Bind Theory

• Looks beyond the symptomatic person to family
  transactions. The content language of linear
  causality where one event causes the next
  stimulus response
• Circular causality is emphasis on the forces
  moving in many directions simultaneously.

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Identified Patient

• Virginia Satir (1964) contended that the IP was
  expressing the familys disequilibrium or the
  familys pain Jay Haley (1979).
• Michael Zielenziger, 2003, described disturbed
  young people who do not leave home as unwillingly
  sacrificing themselves in order to protect and
  maintain family stability. (Shutting Out the
  Sun).

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Family Loyalty

• Family loyalty may evoke symptomatic behavior
  when a child feels obligated to save the
  parents and their marriage from the threat of
  destruction (Boszormenyi, Nagy and Ulrich, 1981).
• Salvador Minuchin (1981), viewed symptomatic
  behavior as a reaction to a family under stress
  and unable to accommodate the changing
  circumstances, and not particularly as a
  proactive solution to maintain family balance.

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Watzlawick, Weakland, Fisch (1974)

• The use of the same flawed solutions rather than
  being a sign of family system dysfunction.
  Problems are created and maintained because of
  the repeated attempt to apply the unworkable
  solution that only serves to make matters worse.
  Ultimately the solution becomes the problem. The
  family therapist must come up with new solutions
  for the original problem. Think of the adage if
  you do the same things over and over-gets the
  same result.

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Post-Modern

• Represents a break with the cybernetically based
  notions which raise skepticism in regard to the
  meaning attached to symptomatic behavior. They
  do not believe that a family members problem is
  a reflection of underlying family conflict.
• Constructivist-tell themselves stories, develop
  beliefs about themselves, constructions organize
  experiences and play a powerful role in shaping
  their lives.
• Stories can represent dominant and burdensome
  discourses-belief in limited options and doomed
  to repeat self-defeating behavior.

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Oppression in families

• Michael White (1989) observed that families feel
  oppressed rather than protected or stabilized by
  symptomatic behavior in the family.
• Therapeutic effort known as Narrative Therapy
  which consisted of deconstructing questions. It
  represents a collaboration with the family
  directed at helping them explore their on-going
  stories. They can then construct new stories
  with new possibilities.

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Oppression cont

• Family members should unite and take back control
  of their lives from the oppressive set of
  symptoms. Families are free to view themselves
  as a healthy, unit struggling against a
  troublesome external problem rather than seeing
  themselves as inherently flawed and disabled
  group of people.

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Second Order Cybernetics-Lynn Hoffman (2002).

• She advocates for second-order cybernetics, a
  post-systems reappraisal of cybernetic theorizing
  that insists that there can be no outside,
  independent observer of the system, since anyone
  observing and trying to change the system is a
  participant who influences and is influenced by
  the system.

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First Order cybernetics conceives of two separate
systems.

• The therapist system
• The problem-client family system in which the
  therapist remains an external observer. He/She
  is an expert who attempts to affect changes by
  means of interventions.

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Second Order Cybernetics

• Believes in doing family therapy-Therapist must
  be aware that several individuals are present,
  each with his/her own view of reality and
  description of the family.
• According to cybernetics, objectivity does not
  exist.

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Social Constructivists

• Believe that the therapist can no longer be seen
  as an outside observer or expert on the problem
  situation. He/She has a part in constructing the
  reality being observed.
• Therapist does not operate as if any single
  family member can tell the truth about the family
  or its problems. There are multiple truths and
  not one universal truth.
• The therapist and family together create a new
  narrative which transforms the pathological take
  that brought the family into therapy (Doherty,
  1991).

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Batesman(1972), Maturana, (1978), Varela, (1979),
Foerster, (1981), Glaserfeld, (1987).

• Urged the abandonment of simple cybernetic notion
  that a living system can be
• Observed
• Studied Objectively
• Changed from the outside. They placed the
  observer in that which was being observed. The
  therapist and family members together search for
  meaning and in the process re-author lives and
  relationships.

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Salvador Minuchin (1991).

• Questioned the extent to which the new approach
  recognized the institutions and the socioeconomic
  conditions that influence how people live,
  pointing out that families had been stripped of
  much of the power to write their own stories.
• An example of this is families living in poverty.