Healthy family
Communication. An important aspect of a healthy
family is communication. This involves listening to and
supporting one another. It is important for parents to listen to
their children as much as they expect their children to listen to
them. Communication also involves conflict which is a part of every
family.
Dysfunctional family
A dysfunctional family is a
family in which conflict, misbehavior, and often
child neglect or abuse on the part of individual parents occur
continuously and regularly, leading other members to accommodate
such actions.
Some of the characteristics of dysfunctional family systems are
as follows:
- Blaming; failure to take responsibility for personal actions
and feelings; and invalidation of other family members'
feelings.
- Boundaries between family members that are either too loose or
too rigid. For example, the parent may depend excessively on the
child for emotional support (loose boundaries) or prevent the child
from developing autonomy by making all the decisions for the child
(rigid boundaries).
- Boundaries between the family as a whole and the outside world
may also be too loose or too rigid.
- A tendency for family members to enact set roles— caregiver,
hero, scapegoat, saint, bad girl or boy, little prince or
princess—that serve to restrict feelings, experience, and
self-expression.
- A tendency to have an "identified patient"—one family member
who is recognized as mentally unhealthy, who may or may not be in
treatment, but whose symptoms are a sign of the inner family
conflict. Often the identified patient's problems function to
disguise the larger family issues. For example, a child may be
regarded as a bully and a troublemaker in school and labeled a
"problem child," when he may in fact be expressing conflicts and
problems, such as abuse from home, by acting out and being
"bad."