Building Strong Families

1
Building Strong Families

• What function families fill in your life
• Roles and Responsibilities of Family Members
• How families Change
• What makes a strong family
• How can you get along better with your family
• Ideas to strengthen family ties

2
Family Quilt

• Imagine that your family is like a quilt.
• Each square in the quilt represents a different
  person in the family.
• There is an overall pattern to the quilt, but no
  two squares are exactly alike.
• What does you square of your family quilt look
  like?

3
Families are Important

• Meet Basic Needs
• Give Emotional Support
• Teach Values
• Pass on culture and tradition

• Family a group of people joined by blood,
  marriage, or emotional bonds, share common
  resources, values, and goals
• Used to be people connected by marriage or blood,
  now we realize that families can be created by
  people not related by blood

4
Types of Family Structures

• Nuclear family a family with 2 parents and their
  children living together
• Extended family other relatives live with
  parents and children (grandparents, aunts,
  uncles, and cousins live in 1 house)
• A husband and wife with no children are also a
  family
• Adoption permanent, legal process through which
  a child becomes part of a family into which he or
  she was not born
• Adopted children and their adoptive parents form
  a family
• Adopted children have the same rights as children
  born into a family part of a family forever

5
Continued

• Foster parents care for children who are not
  their own by either birth or adoption
• Foster children are only with foster parents
  temporarily
• Foster parents are almost always paid by the
  government to take care of foster children
• Single-parent family one parent (mother or
  father) and his or her children
• Can be a result of divorce or death of one of the
  parents
• Blended family a family that consists of a
  husband and wife and their children from their
  marriage and their previous marriages
• Other families can consist of single adults
  living together who form emotional bonds and
  perform the functions of a family

6
Roles Responsibilities

• Correlate with position in the family
• Each has more than one role
• Responsibilities depend on the number of people
  in your family and their other tasks
• Growing up means taking on more responsibility

7
Family Life Cycle

• Stages a family must go through in their life
  together.
• Worksheet understanding the family life cycle

8
Strong Families

• Have a positive attitude about life and family
• Enjoy spending time together
• Show appreciation and love for each other
• Share beliefs, values, and goals
• Are committed to each other and the family
• Show consideration and respect for each other
• Are tolerant and forgiving
• Take time for laughter and play

9
Get along with your family

• With very different or very similar
  personalities living under one roof, getting
  along can be challenging
• You relationships with members of the family
  change.
• Talk through any problems, do not hold a grudge

10
Your Parents

• Get to know them
• What has their life been like
• What responsibilities and problems do they have
• Learn and understand reasons behind actions
• How well do they know you, share your thoughts
  and feelings
• Show respect
• Words, tone of voice, body language
• Be responsible and dependable
• Be honest and take more initiative
• Show appreciation
• A simple (genuine) thank you goes a long way

11
Siblings

• Birth order your place in the family (first,
  middle, or last child born in the family) may
  have an influence on your personality
• Oldest children get a great deal of attention and
  are high achievers
• Middle and last-born children may tend to want to
  please other people
• They also feel very competitive towards their
  older siblings
• The age span of you and your siblings (the number
  of years between births) may also affect your
  place in your family
• Spaced closely playmates
• Further apart more individual attention for
  each child
• Sibling rivalry intense competition and fighting
  between siblings seen more in children who are
  close in age
• Age differences become less important as the
  children grow older

12
Twins

• Fraternal develop when 2 of the mothers eggs
  are fertilized at the same time
• Identical a single egg splits after being
  fertilized
• Even identical twins separated at birth can be
  reunited in adulthood and may still have many
  similarities
• Twins are somewhat rare so they receive a lot of
  attention
• Can be difficult establishing your own
  identity/individuality

13
Looking Ahead to your own Family

• You may treat your spouse the same way your
  parents treated each other
• You will probably treat your children just as
  your parents have treated you
• Most people do not realize this until they have
  children of their own
• May victims of child abuse end up becoming child
  abusers when they have their own families
• Reproducing patterns of your birth family is not
  a problem if your patterns were healthful
• If the patterns were negative, you can change
  your behavior when you create your own family
• May require professional help
• Families provide for the needs of their members
  one challenge is to learn how to balance family
  desires with the need to earn a living and
  running a family smoothly