Our Framework for Understanding Family Communication 3
Defining Family 5
Understanding Family as a System 9
The State of the Contemporary Family 22
The New Normal Family 30
Conclusion 32
Discussion Questions 32
Key Words 32
CHAPTER 2 What Is Family Communication? 39
The Communication Process 42
Social Construction and Co-Creating Family Relationships 47
Communication Patterns and Processes That Affect Family Outcomes 53
Supporting Functions Shaping Family Communication 62
Family of Origin Influences 68
Conclusion 73
Discussion Questions 74
Key Words 74
CHAPTER 3 Family Communication Theories 79
Communication Accommodation Theory 83
Communication Privacy Management Theory 86
Narrative Theory 89
Narrative Performance Theory 92
Relational Dialectics Theory 95
Conclusion 100
Discussion Questions 100
Key Words 101
CHAPTER 4 Communication Patterns and the Creation of Family Identity 106
Family Communication Forms and Relational Cultures 108
Family Communication Rules 111
Family Secrets 118
Family Communication Networks 124
Narratives and Storytelling 128
Conclusion 139
Discussion Questions 139
Key Words 140
CHAPTER 5 Relational Maintenance Within Families 145
Relational Maintenance in Different Family Relationships 147
Maintenance Through Confirmation 153
Maintenance Through Rituals 156
Maintenance Through Relational Currencies 164
Conclusion 172
Discussion Questions 172
Key Words 173
CHAPTER 6 Intimacy Within Partnerships and Families 178
Communicating Commitment 182
Self-Disclosure, Privacy Management, and Intimacy 185
Sexuality and Communication in Families 191
Intimacy Factors: Effort, Sacrifice, Forgiveness, and Sanctification 200
Barriers to Intimacy 204
Maintaining Intimacy Across Diverse Family Forms 206
Conclusion 207
Discussion Questions 208
Key Words 208
CHAPTER 7 Communication and Family Roles and Types 215
Specific Role Functions and Family Responsibilities 218 How Family Members Learn, Adjust, and Relinquish
Family Roles 231
Communication in Different Types of Couples and Families 239
Conclusion 245
Discussion Questions 245
Key Words 246
CHAPTER 8 Power, Influence, and Decision-Making in Families 252
The Development and Communication of Power in Family Relationships 254
Influence Strategies in Family Relationships 267
Decision-Making Processes in Family Relationships 273
Conclusion 287
Discussion Questions 287
Key Words 288
CHAPTER 9 Communication and Family Conflict 294
Family Conflict Is a Communication Process 297
Family Conflict Involves Patterns and Rules 310
Destructive Conflict in Family Relationships 319
Constructive Conflict in Family Relationships 329
Conclusion 335
Discussion Questions 336
Key Words 336
CHAPTER 10 Communication and Family Developmental Stresses 345
Developmental Stage and Life-Course Approaches 348
Family Stages and Life-Course Interactions 354
Transitions Between Life Stages 383
Conclusion 385
Discussion Questions 385
Key Words 386
CHAPTER 11 Family Communication and Unpredictable Stress 394
Unpredictable Stress and Family Coping Patterns 397
Communication and Specific Crises 408
Family Support and Communication 424
Conclusion 427
Discussion Questions 427
Key Words 428
CHAPTER 12 Family Communication and Well-Being 437
Family Communication and Physical Well-Being 440
Difficult Family Conversations About Modern Issues 448
Approaches for Improving Family Communication 461
Final Thoughts on Family Communication 469
Conclusion 471
Discussion Questions 472
Key Words 472
Subject Index 481
Index of Author Names Cited in Text 489
PREFACE
We are extremely pleased to be publishing the tenth edition of Family Communication: Cohesion and Change. When Kathleen M. Galvin and Bernard J. Brommel published the first edition 36 years ago, it was the first textbook to explore the family experience from a communication perspective. At that time, very few communication classes addressed the subject of family communication, and only a small number of communication scholars were yet doing research in the area. Much of the background information available for the early editions of the book came from family therapists, academic psychologists, and sociologists. Things changed starting in the late 1980s as family communication was becoming a distinct field of study. More classes dedicated to family communication were beginning across the country and the Family Communication Division was formed within the National Communication Association.
The decisions to start new lines of research and create new college courses never occur in a cultural vacuum. In fact, as the early editions of this book were written in the 1980s, within U.S. American culture there were also significant changes happening in family life. For example, the marriage rate started to decline, people began marrying and having children later, if at all, and the divorce rate increased. The number of inter-ethnic families was starting to rise, and gay and lesbian persons began to “come out of the closet” and be more public about their sexual orientation. There were also very public debates over the status of the family—for instance, there was a highly publicized controversy when the Vice President of the United States criticized a television program that depicted a successful woman willingly becoming a single mother. By the 1990s, family communication research started to grow exponentially.
From the very first edition, the definition of “family” that anchored the book was broad and inclusive. This reflected a strong commitment to include families with same-sex partners and ultimately other family forms, such as international adoption and cohabiting families, that had not been included. Thus, from the first edition the book included a definition of family as “networks of people who live together over long periods of time bound by ties of marriage, blood, or commitment, legal or otherwise.” If members consider themselves to be a family, we honor their self-definition. Over the years, while the definition of family has been fleshed out, this core principle remains.
As the twenty-first century began, the Journal of Family Communication published its first issue and finally there was a research journal devoted to the breadth of family communication scholarship. Communication scholars Dawn O. Braithwaite,
Elizabeth Suter, and Kory Floyd have tracked all of the family communication studies authored by communication scholars since 1990. They reported 775 studies published, with about 70% of these studies coming after 2004. This means there is a wealth of recent information on which to build the content of our tenth edition of this book. In addition, a number of important theories centered in family communication began to develop over the same time period. At present, most communication departments in colleges and universities now offer one or more courses on family communication and several graduate programs have a specialty in family communication.
The subject matter of family communication has progressed from the time our book began as well. As work began on the first edition, communication in marriages dominated the research agenda. Today, scholars address questions related to family members’ interactions within a wide range of families and they study interactions across the lifespan and within multiple cultures. Current scholars take a greater focus on interaction within multiple family forms such as multi-ethnic, adoptive, LGBTQ, single-parent, and stepfamilies, as you will see throughout this tenth edition. You will also see that researchers use a variety of different quantitative, qualitative, and critical research methodologies that have grown increasingly sophisticated with each passing decade. As always, we cannot consume the news of the day, visit social media, or spend time with our own families and escape the questions, changes, challenges, and opportunities surrounding communication in all aspects of family life.
The advances in family communication research and theory have dovetailed with the development of the authorship team for Family Communication: Cohesion and Change as well. The first edition was published by Kathleen M. Galvin of Northwestern University and Bernard J. Brommel of Northeastern Illinois University in 1982. Prior to that, Bernard Brommel had been a consultant on Kathleen Galvin and Cassandra Book’s highly successful high school text Person to Person: An Introduction to Speech Communication, and that book helped to move the contributions of the communication discipline from a focus on public speaking to include interpersonal communication. The interest in family communication was an important next step and formed the goal of the first edition of Family Communication: Cohesion and Change to move beyond the focus on dysfunctional family communication, and to give teachers and students a way to understand and create functional and healthy communication patterns. The book bothsupported teachers and students in those early family communication classes and encouraged the development of more courses across the country. Now in its tenth edition, the book has left its mark on the field of communication.
Kathleen Galvin and Bernard Brommel collaborated on the first five editions and Carma L. Bylund was added as a co-author for the next three editions. Dawn O. Braithwaite joined Galvin and Bylund as the second author for the ninth edition and Paul Schrodt has become part of the current authorship team for this tenth
edition. This is Carma Bylund’s last edition due to her new commitments at the University of Florida. We are deeply grateful for the contributions earlier authors of the text brought to our understanding of family communication, just as we are excited to see what the future holds as new authors join us.
Our basic premise remains constant over the years—to understand the role of communication as family members co-create and transform family systems. Relying on a range of theoretical perspectives, we examine the communication patterns enacted within families to demonstrate how these patterns affect, and are affected by, family life in the twenty-first century. Our objective remains to describe and explain family communication processes rather than to prescribe how family members should or should not communicate. Although it is tempting to want advice on how best to communicate in families, we are well aware there are multiple ways to interact and be a well-functioning family. Thus, we believe youwill be in the best position to make choices about your own family communication when you have in-depth and up-to-date information on family interaction processes to help you make informed choices about what to do and say to be a family.
FEATURES OF THE TENTH EDITION
A book project is always a work in progress. We are very delighted to have this book now published by Routledge as they have an excellent specialization in family communication with several books that serve scholars and students alike. We are glad to join their team.
We have made numerous updates and changes in this tenth edition based on detailed feedback from instructors using this book, as well as comments from our students. Each chapter has been revised to keep pace with new research and changes in the state of everyday family life. We updated the format of each chapter, starting with an overview of the major themes of each chapter and converting the citations of the research literature to endnotes at the conclusion of each chapter. We hope you find, as we do, that this makes the book more readable for students and instructors. You will find key terms bolded and listed at the end of each chapter, as well as other important concepts and definitions highlighted in italics. In this way, we hope that you will be able to locate and pay attention to this important information in each chapter.
To help you understand and apply the latest research and theory, we begin each chapter with twocase studies and throughout the text we present real-life first person examples. These examples come from our students, friends, and family members (with the names changed) to help ground the theory and research in real-life experiences. As you read the book, we ask you to compare these cases and examples to your own family life. New to this tenth edition, we have added a “Family Matters”
box to each chapter that summarizes the results of one research study in greater depth to highlight the theme of that chapter.
As in the earlier versions of the book, the first three chapters establish the theoretical foundations of the text. We have made significant updates to these chapters. In Chapter 1,we present an introduction to family communication and how we define a family, highlight the family as an interdependent, interactive system, and present a rearranged and updated overview of the current state of the family. In Chapter 2, we talk about family communication as a transactional process and then present two main perspectives on family communication that we develop throughout the book: family communication as social construction and co-creating discourse-dependent family relationships, and also as communication patterns and processes that affect family outcomes, including an expanded discussion of the circumplex model and the new addition of family communication patterns theory. We discuss supporting functions of the family of origin that influence life in family systems. In Chapter 3, we expand the discussion of what a family communication theory does and then present five family communication theories in greater depth. We added a new theory to the book—communication accommodation theory—in addition to updating our discussions of communication privacy management theory, narrative theory, narrative performance theory, and relational dialectics theory.
In Chapters 4 through 12, we continue to present major themes and trends that we believe are most central to an understanding of communication in family systems. We updated each chapter with new research findings, and throughout we paid special attention to highlighting issues of family diversity and the effects of technology and social media on the contemporary family.
In Chapter 4, we explore family communication patterns and the creation of family identity, including more depth on how a systems perspective, social constructionism, and the narrative theories discussed in the first three chapters influence how family members interact and manage their everyday lives and construct their collective identity. In Chapter 5, we focus on how families communicate to maintain their relationships and family system, both in their everyday interactions and via specific strategies of confirmation, respect, rituals, and relational currencies to keep relationships prospering. In Chapter 6, we center on communication to establish and alter intimacy in family systems, focusing on disclosure, sexual communication, and other factors that influence intimate relationships. We focus on communication and forgiveness and explore overcoming barriers to intimacy.
In Chapter 7, we discuss five essential family functions that serve as the basis for family roles, as well ashow roles are appropriated within families via family members’ role expectations, role enactments, and role negotiations. We then discuss how couple and family typologies provide useful tools for researchers and practitioners in their efforts to render family members’ interactions more understandable and predictable.
In Chapter 8, we look at how individuals develop and communicate power in their family relationships, and discuss different influence strategies and decisionmaking processes. After identifying five power bases, we explore factors that shape the kinds of influence strategies that family members use, as well as three broad types of decision-making processes in family systems.
In Chapter 9, we discuss five different conflict management styles, describe stages of ongoing conflict in family systems, and examine constructive behaviors that should help families communicate and manage conflict more effectively.
In Chapter 10, we cover family communication and stress across different stages of the lifespan with a greater focus on how family members interact and co-create relational meanings. Throughout our discussion of stresses across different life stages, we focus on the central role of communication in understanding how family members experience, understand, and adapt to change.
In Chapter 11, we take a special focus on expected stress and how families communicate and cope with stress across a number of different crises they may face.
Finally, in Chapter 12, we talk about family communication rules and difficult conversations about health and physical well-being. We also summarize research about new technologies that present opportunities and challenges for family communication and physical and mental health and well-being.
INSTRUCTOR AND STUDENT RESOURCES
New to this edition, we invited family communication scholar Kelly Rossetto of Boise State University to develop online ancillary materials to support the work of instructors and students. We are indebted to Kelly Rossetto for the outstanding tools that you can use to enhance your use of the text. You will find these in the companion website at www.routledge.com/9780205945238
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We want to express appreciation to the Routledge editors and editorial staff, specifically Laura Briskman, Nicole Solano, and Nicole Salazar. We thank our insightful reviewers who provided thoughtful feedback on the last edition and helped crystalize our planning for the tenth edition. First, we asked Kristen Carr of Texas Christian University, Colleen Warner Colaner of the University of MissouriColumbia, and Kelly Rossetto of Boise State University to keep weekly logs across an entire semester as they used the previous edition. We are grateful for their detailed feedback and vibrant ideas. Second, Routledge commissioned reviews of the book by Karen L. Daas, Lisa Menegatos, and Margaret A. Wills and we appreciate their thoughts and suggestions.
We appreciate the assistance of Lisa Hurwitz of Northwestern University and Esther Liu of Wheaton College on several chapters. We are most grateful to Heather Voorhees of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for her very substantive and skillful support and editing work on this tenth edition and Carol Tschampl-Diesing of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for proofreading assistance.
Our own family lives have changed significantly over the past decades, a reality that continually teaches us the importance of studying and understanding family communication. We are grateful to our own family members, related to us by biological, legal, and discursive ties, and appreciate their patience, support, and unwitting contributions to some of the examples in the book. Through our ongoing interactions with our students, who stimulate and challenge our thinking, and through our own research projects, we continue to learn firsthand about family interaction patterns in multiple contexts. As each year passes, we learn more what it means to function as members of complex family systems.
We hope that you will also be captured by the importance and complexity of family communication and that you will find the study of family interactions to be a relevant, thought-provoking and meaningful experience.
Kathleen M. Galvin
Northwestern University
Dawn O. Braithwaite
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Paul Schrodt
Texas Christian University
Carma L. Bylund
University of Florida
He was devastated to hear that Staci had no interest in having more children and, although they tried to continue their living arrangement, Adam’s pressured pleas “for children of his own” led Staci to announce that she and the girls were leaving. The girls were distraught at losing Adam and, although he tried to maintain contact, Staci discouraged the girls from seeing him.
After six years of career success and struggles as a single parent, Staci married Angelo, a widower with two grown sons, whom she met online. Angelo is considerate of the girls but is mostly distant from them. It is clear to Staci and her daughters that he is looking forward to the time they will leave home so he and their mother can begin a life with just the two of them.
GOALS AND FINANCES
Last week, Lacy’s boss announced a company-wide cutback in hours and selected benefits due to poor sales figures and the faltering economy. Lacy feels like she has been punched in the stomach. As a 27-year-old wife and mother of her autistic son, Sean, Lacy is also providing economic support for her mother, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. Any drop in income will create major challenges for Lacy and her family. Lacy’s husband, Will, has a position at a local factory that pays less than her income, but both incomes are necessary to keep the family afloat.
On top of the income loss, Lacy’s company dropped the tuition benefit she has been using to take classes at the local community college to become a registered nurse in respiration therapy. Lacy has four more classes to complete before finishing the program and starting on a new career track that pays better. Graduation would represent a major life milestone as she has been struggling to complete the program for five years, attempting to balance Sean’s needs and therapy, her work, motherhood, home, and school, with little support.
Thankfully, Lacy has her godmother, Belle, in her life. Belle is Lacy’s best friend from the little town where they grew up in a neighboring state. Belle is like an aunt to Lacy and served as a support and sounding board for her as she grew up. Whenever things piled up, Lacy knew she could count on Belle to talk her through the problem and give her practical advice. Lacy had a long chat with Belle today via Skype to pour out her problems. After two hours of talking, Lacy feels better and now has some website links for government-supported tuition and loan programs that might allow her to finish her education and be in a better position to help her family.
Family life is a profound and central aspect of being human, yet no two people share the exact same experience, in part because of the unique communication patterns that emerge in each family system. Even when we share the same family, each of us has our own reactions to family experiences, as you can see in the first case above, which highlights the different ways that Staci and her different partners over the years conceptualize what they want in a family. Because family is such a
powerful influence in our lives, our goal in this book is to examine family interaction and relationships to better understand ourselves and our own family experiences. As you read this book, we want you to ponder how family communication patterns serve to build, reflect, and change your family experience. Through communication, we co-create our families, just as we are co-created by interaction in our families. As you read this book, you will encounter some content about which you have expertise because you have spent your life in a particular type (or types) of family arrangement. Yet, because you have lived in only one or a small number of family structures, your direct experience is limited compared to the range of potential family experiences. Your reading and personal reflections should expand your understanding of the diversity of family life experience and family communication. In this opening chapter, first we will explore our framework for understanding family communication. Second, we will discuss how we are defining a family. Third, we will talk about understanding the family as a system. Fourth, we will overview the state of the contemporary family. Last, we will reflect on family functions and “the new normal” for family communication.
OUR FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING FAMILY COMMUNICATION
Throughout this book, you will see a framework for understanding families based on two guiding principles. First, we highlight the family as a system of interconnected relationships, which we detail in Chapter 1. Second, we see communication as the primary way families develop, create, maintain, and alter identity. One of your authors, Kathleen Galvin, explains that contemporary families are discourse dependent,1 meaning they rely on communication to create and define themselves over the life course, which we will discuss fully in Chapter 2. Keep these two guiding principles in mind as you read the book.
Overview of the Book
Once we better understand family systems and family communication in Chapters 1 and 2, in Chapter 3 we highlight a number of family communication theories, which are practical tools to help us understand, function within, and bring about change in families. In Chapters 4–12, we cover important communication processes that create and guide family life. Our goal throughout the book is to help you understand and apply what you learn about communication dynamics to your own family or others’ family experiences. Within each chapter, you will find a box labeled “Family Matters,” which will summarize one relevant family communication study in more depth. We end each chapter with Discussion Questions and a list of Key Words that you will find bold-headed and defined throughout the book.
You will find two case studies at the beginning of each chapter and short, firstperson family communication examples that were written or suggested by the real experiences of our students and friends. We have, of course, changed the names of the characters to provide anonymity. With all of the examples throughout the book, we encourage you to put yourself in the characters’ situations and apply family communication concepts to your own family or to families you know. Some of the examples will remind you specifically of your own family experiences, whereas others will seem quite different from your own background. We hope these narratives demonstrate the diversity and complexity of today’s families and the multiple ways to communicate and live a functional family life, as in the following example:
I guess you could say I’ve had three “moms” and two-and-a-half “dads.” My parents divorced when my twin brother and I were about 3 years old. My dad remarried and, after two more sons, got divorced again. Then, he remarried and now I have a baby sister young enough to be my daughter. My mom remarried and got divorced again when we were about 7. The “half-father” that we had was a man who lived with us for 10 years, who recently moved out at my mother’s request. The reason my brother and I are still sane is because our mom and dad have always remained friends. We were never treated like pawns in the middle of a battle.
Core Beliefs About Families
All of the authors of this book are family communication teachers, researchers, and, of course, family members ourselves. We hold certain basic beliefs that undergird our writings. Like you, our own personal backgrounds have given us particular perspectives that affect how we view families and their communication patterns. To follow, we share eight core beliefs about families to establish a context for understanding how we approached writing this book:
1.There are many ways to be a family. Family life is as diverse as the persons who make up families. The “perfect” family does not exist.
2.Each family must work, and at times struggle, to create its own identity as it experiences good and stressful times over many years. All family systems are influenced by the larger context in which they exist.
3.Through communication, we construct and reflectfamily relationships. In words and actions, individuals define their identities and negotiate their relationships with other family members and with the rest of the world. In addition, talk serves to indicate the state of family relationships to family members and, sometimes, to others.
4.Communication is the process by which family members create and share their meanings with each other in unique relational cultures.
If you share your definition of a family with others, you may be surprised to learn that your definition likely has some parts in common with others, but may diverge in some important ways. For example, would your definition have room for thinking about a person who is not a blood or legal relative, like Lacy’s “aunt” Belle in the second case at the start of this chapter? Would you consider cohabiting romantic partners to be a family? Are married couples without children a family? Would you include a beloved dog as part of the family? Reaching agreement on the meaning of familymay present a greater challenge than you might suspect. In the end, defining who is and is not family will involve some very important choices in your life. In short, no single definition of the term family exists.We might think about families as persons who have biological (blood, birth) and/or legal ties (such as marriage), but that would be quite limited for many families. If we only thought about family in terms of biological and legal ties, we would be ignoring other important family relationships: for example, a family formed around a cohabiting, unmarried couple and their close friends, who support each other and periodically live together over several decades.
Even today, public debate persists about what a family actually is and who should be included as family: We see discussions about disintegration of the family or calls for a return to traditional family values. The problem is that a singular, U.S. American family does not exist. Family historian Tamara Harevan expressed her concern with the notion of the idealized family, claiming that U.S. society always has contained “great diversities in family types and family behavior that were associated with the recurring entrance of new immigrant groups into American society”.3 Likewise, family scholar Stephanie Coontz explained that most Americans move in and out of a variety of family experiences across their lifetimes.4 The idealized view of the American family, as one we need to return to, never existed in the first place.
We know that factors such as race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, finances, geographic location, and educational levels affect the different paths families take.5 Although families may change in size and shape over the course of their lifespan, throughout these changes, we continue to recognize them as families.6 In the end, you might think that the definition of family is just an academic exercise, but it is much more than that. For example, after the 9–11 destruction of the World Trade Center, there were difficult decisions made about who would be entitled to family/ survivor benefits.7 Over your lifetime, you will also likely need to make choices about who you consider to be family and not. For example, is the biological child of your sister’s longtime cohabiting partner family to you? If you are in a stepfamily and your father divorces, are the stepbrothers you lived with for a time still family?
As we consider how to define a family, we can look at a number of factors. For example, some scholars stress that all families have a sense of relatedness in common.8 So, rather than define a family around biological or legal ties, perhaps it makes more sense to define them around how they function—what they do, or how
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Title: "Boy" the Wandering Dog: Adventures of a Fox-Terrier
Author: Marshall Saunders
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Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "BOY" THE WANDERING DOG: ADVENTURES OF A FOX-TERRIER ***
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THE WANDERING DOG MARSHALL SAUNDERS
I AM AN OPEN-FACED, WIRE-HAIRED FOX-TERRIER
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Thisstoryisdedicatedtomyfellow-membersof THE AMERICAN HUMANE ASSOCIATION, which has its headquarters in Albany, New York an associationwithwhichIhave beenconnectedfor many years, and which is carrying on a noble work for childrenandanimals.
I AM AN OPEN-FACED, WIRE-HAIRED FOX-TERRIER Frontispiece
“YOU MUST HAVE A DRINK FIRST,” SAID GRINGO HOSPITABLY
BEANIE WAS QUITE HANDSOME NOW
THE LADY GAY CAT
IN THE HOUSE NEXT TO ME WAS A FINE LITTLE TOY S
KING HARRY, THE BEST SPECIMEN OF A BLOODHOUND I EVER SAW
“I HEARD SIX YELPS FROM THAT IMP YEGGIE”
REDDY O’MARE CAME TROTTING ROUND THE CORNER OF THE BARN
