Maintaining Balance within the Family System Discussion

Maintaining Balance within the Family System Discussion

Instructions/Descriptions

Maintaining Balance within the Family System Discussion

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Reply to 2 of your classmates’ threads from the last module/week. Each reply must be at least 200 words and meaningfully expand the discussion by focusing on the influence of community ecology on both risk and protective factors.

Discussion 1

Within the microsystem, family exists as a key component to understanding the adolescent growth and development process.  Family influences adolescents’ thoughts, behaviors, attitudes and views toward life.  The family system represents the members of a family, who function interdependently, while focusing on maintaining balance and influencing each other equally.

Maintaining balance within the family system is essential to the family’s functioning.  Families learn to function through their family life cycles, or progressive stages of development.  During the stages of development, families adapt to specific developmental tasks that prepare them for future stages (McWhirter, McWhirter, McWhirter & McWhirter, 2017).

Undergoing changes, challenges and crises are inevitable as families transition through the family life cycle.   The family’s ability to continue to propel forward amid the changes, challenges and crises speaks to the family’s resiliency.  A family’s resiliency may be strengthened by protective factors or may be weakened by risk factors.

In the lives of adolescents, protective factors are characteristics that occur to build resilience and lessen the chances of unhealthy growth and development.  Youth who experience positive parent-child relationships display resiliency.  Research indicates that of all the factors that build resilience, good parenting is most important.

Possessing a supportive, consistent primary caregiver is a significant factor in youth’s development (Weir, 2017).  Additionally, youth who display a healthy concept of self, a strong cultural identity and a firm belief/value system, while experiencing success at school, economic stability and strong social supports, exhibit resilience through the stages of life.

Outside of the family system, social supports within the community work to build resilience.  Strong social supports act as a buffer for adolescents facing trouble and stress.  Adolescents with greater social support will be less likely to become depressed than those with less support (Camara, Bacigalupe & Padilla, 2017).

Therefore, youth’s resilience depends upon their ability to draw from many resources.  These resources or protective factors serve as interventions to point youth down a promising path (Weir, 2017).

Opposite of protective factors are risk factors, which serve to weaken adolescents’ chances of healthy growth and development.  Risk factors contribute to problematic outcomes in the lives of youth.

Youth who experience a negative family environment, such as physical crowding, a lack of supervision, poor parenting, divorce, substance abuse and domestic violence are less likely to exhibit resilience during the stages of life.  Instead, they become at-risk youth whose families cannot model resiliency.

Their family systems may include parents who suffer from mental health challenges.  In this manner, youth must concern themselves with the possibility of mental health being perpetuated in their own lives.

Living with this level of dysfunction not only reinforces a poor sense of self, but also a lack of purpose in life.  These risk factors stifle connectedness as youth fear exposing their dysfunctional families.

Children and adolescents who lack connectedness undergo social isolation and rejection (CDC, 2011a; Karcher, 2004 from McWhirter et al., 2017).  Subsequently, with a lack of connectedness, support and purpose in life, at risk youth often display inadequate coping skills and poor decision making, which may encourage participation in risky behaviors.

For these youth, the community is not a source of social support, but rather a reservoir for risky behavior.  They do not expect much of themselves, so they are not concerned about participating in at risk behaviors, such as substance abuse, dropping out of school, unsafe sexual behavior and suicide (McWhirter et al., 2017).  With no concept of resiliency, these youth have low self-efficacy expectations and see the future as limited.

Camara, Maria, Bacigalupe, Gonzalo, & Padilla, Patricia. (2017).  The role of social support in adolescents: are you helping me or stressing me out? International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 22:2, 123-136, DOI: 10.1080/02673843.2013.875480

McWhirter, J.J., McWhirter, B.T., McWhirter, E.H., & McWhirter, R.J. (2017).  At-risk youth:  A comprehensive response for counselors, teachers, psychologists, and human service professionals (6th ed.).  Belmont, TN:  Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.

Weir, K. (2017, September). Maximizing children’s resilience. Monitor on Psychology, 48(8). http://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/09/cover-resilience

Discussion 2

Ungar et al. suggest resilience may account for both proximal and distal factors that predict successful development under adversity using a multisystemic social-ecological theory of resilience that contributes to positive development under stress among different contexts and cultures, and propose what is adaptive in one context or during one developmental period may be maladaptive during another (Ungar, Ghazinour, & Richter, 2013).

As resilience is conceptually linked to risk, it is logical that the nature of that risk will have sociohistorical (temporal) regarding changing social, economic and political contexts dimensions (McWhirter, McWhirter, McWhirter, & McWhirter, 2017).

Adaptive functioning in the face of adversity is not only dependent on the characteristics of the individual, but also greatly influenced by processes and interactions arising from the family within the environment.

Individuals who have been exposed to a wide variety of life experiences, including exposure to modeling of behaviors exhibited by parents and siblings when positively engaging adversity, benefit from those exposures when confronted with their own adversarial challenges (Clinton, Clark, & Straub, 2010).

Protective Factors within the family and community can assist with and encourage resiliency in adolescents include strong cultural identity, access to health care, stable housing, economic stability, social support, affiliation with a supportive religious or faith community (McWhirter, McWhirter, McWhirter, & McWhirter, 2017).

These factors counteract and deter the negative risk factors they currently face or will face in the future such as violence, gang activity, divorce, or any number of overwhelming obstacles they are faced with.

Last week’s readings from McWhirter et al. provided the metaphorical at-risk tree to illustrate the resilience components associated within an ecological framework to assist in associating risk-factors in adolescents (McWhirter, McWhirter, McWhirter, & McWhirter, 2017).

In this analogy the roots of the tree represented the factors within an individual’s ecosystem including family, school, and peer groups; which serve as anchors and provide a network of support by feeding the individual sustenance to survive (McWhirter et al., 2017).

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The behaviors, attitudes, and skills (referred to as the trunk) of the individual provide support for the tree’s branches that are indicative of the youth’s adaption to society.  Families offer positive influences through faith, forgiveness, love, and attachments that become protective factors (insulators) that buffer negative risk factors as well as serve as a basis for family unity (McWhirter et al., 2017).

I am reminded of God’s promises regarding resilience through our faith in the verse from James 1:2-4 , “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you are involved in various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. But you must let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing” (NIV).

References

Clinton, T., Clark, C., & Straub, J. (2010). The Quick Reference Guide to Counseling Teenagers. Grand Rapids: Baker Books.

McWhirter, L., McWhirter, E., McWhirter, B., & McWhirter, A. (2017). At Risk Youth: A Comprehensive Response for Counselors, Teachers, Psychologists, and Human Service Professionals: Sixth Edition. Boston: Cengage Learning.

Ungar, M., Ghazinour, M., & Richter, J. (2013). Annual Research Review: What is the Resilience Within the Social Ecology of Human Development? The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 54(4), 348-366.

Weaver, J. M., & Schofield, T. J. (2015, 02 29). Mediation and Moderation of Divorce Effects on Children’s Behavior Problems. Journal of family psychology: JFP, 29(1), 39-48.

Maintaining Balance within the Family System Discussion

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