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What’s Your Family ‘Type’?
Researchers have found yet another way to categorize parents and their children. In addition to your parenting type, you now should consider your family type. Because how you interact as a family unit, they say, impacts far more than just what goes on inside your house. According to new research, your family type can influence how your kids do in school.
For a period of three years, researchers at the University of Rochester and the University of Notre Dame made bi-annual visits to 234 families with 6-year-olds. They looked at the parents’ marriage, the parent-child relationship between mom and dad separately and then the entire family together. What they discovered was three distinct psychological family types:
- Cohesive: Characterized by emotional warmth
- Disengaged: Characterized by cold, controlling and withdrawn relationships
- Enmeshed: Characterized by moderate warmth and emotional involvement, but also hostility and meddling
Obviously, cohesive is the preferred type. While a child’s own resilience and personality type comes into play, kids from cohesive families generally exhibit fewer overall behavioral problems in school.
No surprise, children from families that were considered disengaged suffered the most in school. They were more aggressive, exhibited more disruptive behavior and had more difficulty focusing and cooperating. These problems persisted and worsened as the kids progressed through school.
Children from an enmeshed family type were initially as well-behaved and suffered no more depression than children from cohesive families. But as they got older, they began to suffer from high levels of anxiety and feelings of loneliness and alienation.
Well, okay then. As much as I appreciate the desire to understand family dysfunction and determine how it impacts a child’s life, I really can’t see how narrowing down family types into three specific categories is even possible. What’s more, I think that most families are, at one time or another, a little bit of all three. And then some. Just this morning, my own family was disengaged. By noon, we settled into cohesive. And we are bound to find ourselves enmeshed around bedtime.
Image: Lili Vieira de Carvalho/Flickr
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The End of Perfect Parenting -- A Blogger Says Goodbye | Strollerderby commented on Aug 31 10 at 9:17 amMelissa commented on Jul 15 10 at 9:24 pmI’d be happy to talk with you about just why this research is interesting and important and informative to some extent. True, these are overarching patterns of family functioning and not one size fits all..but instead of being completely dispersive..it might help us to be able to categorize to some extent in order to understand kids better from a policy or school point of view. And, actually family patterns are somewhat resistant to change and stable over the long haul. You might think that it changes with the wind…or with the hour of the day…but from what I saw, that’s not the case.
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