FAMILY NARRATIVE

Family Narrative

Family Narrative

Overview of the topic

Family systems theory describes the active interplay between family members such as spouses and parent-child relationships. Parental involvement with grown children takes many forms, including emotional support via telephone conversations or face-to-face interactions, as well as tangible assistance. In terms of patterns of support for adult children, mothers continue to be the main support providers for adult children, while fathers play an assisting role. Stated another way, processes at a family level cannot be reduced to an individual family member level. From this perspective, it is important to operationalize and study family level constructs instead of relying on a single family member to make inferences about family functioning. The importance of family is very high. The reason is that the family becomes a major source for the identification of a household. Therefore, all the issues and aspects related to Family Narrative will be discussed in detail.

Historical Perspective of Family

The historical perspective of family has a lot of importance in every society. Every family has their own memories that are shared by them at different points of time. Like for any family, there are some sweet memories but some bitter memories as well. This is very natural and things are not always very good for the family. Family systems theory suggests that different processes take place in different families. However, family studies often rely on variable-centered analysis methods such as regression or factor analysis. Indeed, recent research on family relationships has moved beyond a variable-specific approach, which assumes a linear relationship among variables, to a pattern-analytic approach that takes into account the combination of parent-child and spousal relationship patterns (Leanne, 1993).

The role of Family Members

In early parenthood, mothers play more essential roles than fathers in the parent-child relationship by providing physical care giving and emotional support for children, which contribute to positive parent-child relationships. During this period, fathers have been found to play rather peripheral roles in their children's lives. Similarly, fathers have been found to display less positive and more negative effect in their interaction with children than with mothers. Some scholars suggested that the strong mother-child bond and the nature of parent-child relationships change as offspring become adults and as their needs change. It has been proposed that there are fewer gender differences in the parent-child relationship in late adulthood because of the reduced emphasis on care giving for children. In contrast, other researchers have suggested that with increasing age, gender differences in parent-child relationships remain the same or become stronger. There are many noted that mothers maintain strong relationships with adult children and they continue to provide more emotional support and spend more time with them than fathers. The researchers also found that gender differences in parent-child relationships are similar in adulthood, with fathers being more negative, firm, and restrictive and mothers being positive, warm, and affective with children (Lloyd, 2009).

In sum, the extant research on this topic is inconsistent in terms of gender differences in the parent-child ...