Evolving family roles
I generally reserve the lesson on family therapy late into the semester. As I told my class, if individual therapy was like playing chess, then family therapy was like playing 3D chess. Building a therapeutic relationship with one person is hard enough; imagine trying to maintain alliances with multiple members of the family, who (at present) do not like each other very much.
Family work is also when sociocultural and systemic factors become much more central to the picture. Family is sometimes defined as the basic social unit. Thus, it is inherently embedded in cultural, socioeconomic, and political contexts. We need to understand each member’s intrapsychic world, the relationships between them, and the broader ecological environment which influences the family’s core values and practices.
Family therapy is also a good small-scale representation of systemic work. One of our tenets is that “the problem is the problem.” It is not any one member that causes and maintains distress in the family; the entire system enables the dysfunction. For example, it would be easy for us to point to one family member and say, “If only they changed, our home life would be much better.” However, how we respond to their behavior helps maintain that behavior. Passivity in one member reinforces unchecked domineering behavior in another. Reacting with defensiveness and hostility only provokes countering reactions, leading to an impasse. Circular causality, which emphasizes the relational and reciprocal patterns over linear, one-way cause-and-effect, helps to ground us in seeing the big picture and how things are connected. Ultimately, this leads to more long-term and sustainable solutions.
It was in this context that a student asked about Filipino adult children who become primary breadwinners for their families, particularly the pressure to show respect to parents via financial support. Rather than blaming parents for their misplaced expectations or simply requiring the adult child to be more assertive, what are the reciprocal patterns that fuel this dynamic? Moreover, what are the broader systemic forces that influence how Filipino families view and practice respect and autonomy?
A family lens would highlight that families go through life stages; no family stays the same. Our family life changes when a baby enters the picture. As they grow, so does the family. Parents’ roles and responsibilities evolve as well, adapting to the changing needs of a child. While they may have to call the shots early on in their child’s life, their role progressively turns more facilitative and less directive as the child practices making their own decisions. The child also has a role to play in the family. Their task is, well, to be a child. This means that they focus on their growth, practicing skills and developing values and principles that will help them emerge into a fully capable and independent adult.
With every life stage, there is a corresponding distribution of power and responsibility, heavily informed by cultural and societal norms. More power is given to parents early on as they are tasked to keep the child safe from harm. A child is given more power (via autonomy) as they exercise more responsibility. A healthy family—and system—requires flexibility and a capacity to adapt to changing conditions. A system that is too rigid ends up breaking. In this way, how we understand and practice respect also changes. In early childhood, respect means complete obedience and following the rules. Later in life, however, respect could mean making space for differing opinions in the family or taking the family’s needs into serious consideration.
How, then, can we understand adult child breadwinners, and do we promote it or do we advocate against it?
As a family therapist, I check for whether the family has a current understanding of what the family—and all its members—need. I jokingly ask whether parents have updated their “OS [operating software]” when it comes to their children. Do they see them as they are, as adults, or do they still see them as young children? Do parents recognize the current developmental needs before them, or is the family still operating on rules that make more sense in early childhood?
Becoming the primary provider of the family is a big responsibility, one that an adult child can freely choose as a sign of respect. However, when they are given adult responsibilities yet only given the limited powers of a young child, this can cause distress, a sense of stagnation that can turn into hopelessness and loss of personal meaning. Not providing financially does not automatically mean disrespect, and doing the opposite does not necessarily mean losing autonomy. This polarity only exists when the family gets rigidly stuck in a set of rules that no longer serve them. It is not about any one member having to decide between respect and autonomy but about evolving together as a family that makes space for both.
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