BA in ECE: Parent- Child Communication
Lesson 01
Rukshana J Manoharan
Family Communication Patterns
• Families create a shared reality using a combination of two
orientations, conversation and conformity. Those emphasizing the
conversation orientation encourage members to share thoughts,
feelings and opinions in an attempt to understand one another’s
view of a topic. Families emphasizing conformity expect that all
family members will view a topic similarly. This shared view is
often determined by a dominating and influential family member,
such as an authority figure.
• Combining the conversation and conformity orientations
produces four communication patterns. Consensual families
achieve shared reality by balancing high levels of both
conversation and conformity. In these families, members talk
often about their views and opinions, but typically an authority
figure makes the final decision with the expectation that
everyone’s behavior will then conform to the decision. Protective
families rely heavily upon conformity to achieve shared reality,
emphasizing deferral to a dominating family member’s view over
conversation.
• Pluralistic families emphasize conversation, putting little
emphasis on conforming to a single view.
• Laissez-Faire families are less interested in sharing reality and
thus emphasize neither orientation. Family members are highly
individualistic and may appear disengaged.
• family communication patterns share similarities with other
typologies, including parenting styles. Consensual families often
have Authoritative parents. Parents in Protective families are
typically Authoritarian, and Pluralistic families tend to have
Permissive parents. Also, Laissez-faire families show the
disengagement of Neglectful parents. Associations between
family communication patterns and adolescent adjustment are
also consistent with research showing a strong link between
warm, firm parenting and healthy child adjustment.
Sociological Perspectives on the Family
• Functionalism
The family performs several essential functions for society. It
socializes children, it provides emotional and practical support for
its members, it helps regulate sexual activity and sexual
reproduction, and it provides its members with a social identity.
Family problems stem from sudden or far-reaching changes in the
family’s structure or processes; these problems threaten the
family’s stability and weaken society.
• Conflict theory
The family contributes to social inequality by reinforcing
economic inequality and by reinforcing patriarchy. Family
problems stem from economic inequality and from patriarchal
ideology. The family can also be a source of conflict, including
physical violence and emotional cruelty, for its own members.
• Symbolic interactionism
The interaction of family members and intimate couples involves
shared understandings of their situations. Wives and husbands
have different styles of communication, and social class affects
the expectations that spouses have of their marriages and of
each other. Family problems stem from different understandings
and expectations that spouses have of their marriage.
Social Functions of the Family
• Recall that the functional perspective emphasizes that social
institutions perform several important functions to help preserve
social stability and otherwise keep a society working. A functional
understanding of the family thus stresses the ways in which the
family as a social institution helps make society possible. As such,
the family performs several important functions.
• First, the family is the primary unit for socializing children. No
society is possible without adequate socialization of its young. In
most societies, the family is the major unit in which socialization
happens. Parents, siblings, and, if the family is extended rather
than nuclear, other relatives all help socialize children from the
time they are born.
• Second, the family is ideally a major source of practical and
emotional support for its members. It provides them food,
clothing, shelter, and other essentials, and it also provides them
love, comfort, and help in times of emotional distress, and other
types of support.
• Third, the family helps regulate sexual activity and sexual
reproduction. All societies have norms governing with whom and
how often a person should have sex. The family is the major unit
for teaching these norms and the major unit through which sexual
reproduction occurs. One reason for this is to ensure that infants
have adequate emotional and practical care when they are born.
• Fourth, the family provides its members with a social identity.
Children are born into their parents’ social class, race and
ethnicity, religion, and so forth. Some children have advantages
throughout life because of the social identity they acquire from
their parents, while others face many obstacles because the
social class or race/ethnicity into which they are born is at the
bottom of the social hierarchy.
Social Class and the Family
• A growing amount of social science research documents social
class differences in how well a family function: the quality of its
relationships and the cognitive, psychological, and social
development of its children. This focus reflects the fact that what
happens during the first months and years of life may have
profound effects on how well a newborn prospers during
childhood, adolescence, and beyond. To the extent this is true,
the social class differences that have been found have
troublesome implications. social class profoundly shapes how
children fare from conception through early adulthood and
beyond.
Families and Social Interaction
• Social interactionism perspectives on the family examine how
family members and intimate couples interact on a daily basis
and arrive at shared understandings of their situations. Studies
grounded in social interactionism give us a keen understanding of
how and why families operate the way they do. Some studies, for
example, focus on how husbands and wives communicate and the
degree to which they communicate successfully
• According to the symbolic interactionist perspective, family
problems often stem from the different understandings,
perceptions, and expectations that spouses have of their
marriage and of their family. When these differences become too
extreme and the spouses cannot reconcile their disagreements,
spousal conflict and possibly divorce may occur
Culture Family and Communication
• Family is the fundamental structure of every society because,
among other functions, this social institution provides individuals,
from birth until adulthood, membership and sense of belonging,
economic support, nurturance, education, and socialization. As a
consequence, the strut of its social role consists of operating as a
system in a manner that would benefit all members of a family
while achieving what is considered best, where decisions tend to
be coherent, at least according to the norms and roles assumed
by family members within the system.
Family: Theoretical Perspectives
• Even though the concept of family can be interpreted
individually and differently in different cultures, there are also
some commonalities, along with communication processes,
specific roles within families, and acceptable habits of interactions
with specific family members disregarding cultural differences.
This section will provide a brief overview of the conceptualization
of family through the family communication patterns (FCP)
theory, dyadic power theory, conflict, and family systems theory,
with a special focus on the inter-parental relationship.
Dyadic Power
• For the theory of dyadic power, power in its basic sense includes
dominance, control, and influence over others, as well as a means
to meet survival needs. When power is integrated into dyadic
intimate relationships, it generates asymmetries in terms of
interdependence between partners due to the quality of
alternatives provided by individual characteristics such as
socioeconomic status and cultural characteristics such as gender
roles.
• This virtually gives more power to men than women. Power
refers to “the feeling derived from the ability to dominate, or
control, the behavior, affect, and cognitions of another person [;]
in consequence, this concept within the interparental relationship
is enacted when one partner who controls resources and limiting
the behavioral options of the other partner”. Ergo, this theory
examines power in terms of interdependence between members
of the relationship: the partner who is more dependent on the
other has less power in the relationship, which, of course, directly
impact parenting decisions.
• The analysis of power in intimate relationships, and, to be
specific, between parents is crucial because it not only relates to
marital satisfaction and commitment, but it also it affects parents’
dyadic coping for children. Parents’ dyadic coping as a predictor
of children’s internalizing symptoms, externalizing symptoms, and
prosocial behavior in three independent studies that show there is
a positive relationship among all three factors, the results
indicated that the strongest correlation was the first one. Again,
the quality of the marital and parental relationships has the
strongest influence on children’s coping skills, communication and
future well-being.
• In addition to the inter-parental and marital power dynamics
that delineates family communication patterns, the familial
interaction is distinctive from other types of social relationships in
the unequaled role of emotions and communication of affection
while family members interact and make decisions for the sake of
all members.
• For example, family research studies provided evidence that
fathers tended to perceive that all other family members agree
with his decisions or ideas. Even when mothers confronted and
disagreed with the fathers about the fathers’ decisions or ideas,
the men were more likely to believe that their children agreed
with him. When the children were interviewed without their
parents, however, the majority of children agreed with the
mothers rather than the fathers.
• There is a myriad of everyday family activities in which parents
need to decide the best way to do them: sometimes they are
minor, such as eating, watching TV, or sleeping schedules; others
are more complicated, such as schooling. Certainly, while
socializing and making these decisions, parents may agree or not,
and these everyday situations may lead to conflict. Whether or
not parents live together, it has been shown that the extent to
which children experience their parents as partners or opponents
in parenting is related to children’s adjustment and well-being.
• The familial socialization of values encompasses the distinction
between parents’ personal execution of those social appraisals
and the values that parents want their children to adopt, and both
are different things; nonetheless, familial socialization does not
take place in only one direction, from parents to children.
• From a family perspective, school adjustment problems and the
drift into nonconventional peer associations are outcomes of
interactions and behavioral processes that originate in the parent
child relationship.
• Specifically, maladaptive behaviors and coercive/aggressive
interaction styles that are learned in the family are accentuated
and amplified when these behaviors and interaction styles are
taken outside the family into school rooms and onto playgrounds.
From a family perspective, therefore, the primary socialization
model would be more linear and less circular even when the child
reaches adolescence.
