Provides an overview of disability in families. The goal of the article is to raise awareness of the status of people with disabilities and their families to develop culturally relevant psychological support. An international literature review is provided with consideration of cultural meanings of disability, preparation for dealing with…

Humor is an important aspect of couple and family relationships. This article features a self-assessment questionnaire. Representative quotes and suggested activities follow. The article concludes by inviting couples and families to make humor an important part of their relationship. (Contains 11 references.) (Author)

Family therapists offer a valuable but underutilized resource for families affected by cancer. This article reviews a number of clinical interventions directed toward the following four core strategies: (a) enhancing communication and emotional contact, (b) accommodating structural changes within the family, (c) facilitating a sense of meaning,…

Purports that because family counselors are not yet sufficiently adept at dealing with families that have a member with some sort of learning disability, they are less likely to diagnosis and address it in the treatment process. Briefly describes the "Syndrome-L Family," and discusses the challenges of this syndrome for family counseling practice.…

A life-course development perspective depicts stages of family development with tasks for each stage. It addresses the diversity of family relationships and illustrates how human development includes individual, generational, and historical time. (Contains 14 references.) (SK)

Six Chinese-Canadian parent-adolescent pairs were monitored over 6 months, revealing characteristics of family involvement in adolescent career development: importance of parental agenda, adolescents' involvement, parent communication of reasoning, and adolescent withholding/withdrawing response. Family career development was central to other…

Presents a model of therapy called there-apy, which weaves together the use of task, symbolism, and imagery into an ongoing process. Concrete tasks take on symbolic meaning, and symbolism gets actualized through achieving concrete tasks. There-apy connects the individual's outside and inside worlds and often involves the partner or family in the…

Examines the impact of family support and relationship difficulties between the caregiver and the care recipient on caregivers' satisfaction and subjective burden. Findings showed that relationship difficulties were associated with both satisfaction received from caregiving activities and subjective burden. Family support was not associated with…

Conducted two longitudinal studies of marital interaction. Results suggest that some marital interaction patterns, such as disagreement and anger exchanges, relate to unhappiness and negative interaction at home concurrently, but are predictive of improvement in marital satisfaction longitudinally. Three interaction patterns were identified as…

Examined functional exchange of services, emotional (expressive) and tangible (instrumental), between noninstitutionalized Jewish grandparents (n=118) and adult grandchildren. The results indicated that the majority of grandparent-adult grandchild relationships were not reciprocal; grandparents perceived that they received more than they gave.…

Presents criteria for judging sexual health of families, based on ecosystemic model of family sexuality that emphasizes dialectical balance among certain influential family interaction variables. Concludes that professionals need to be able to help family members work toward positive expressions of sexuality as well as avoid sex-related problems.…

Hypothesized that family relationships in remarriage are importantly influenced by involvement in remarriage kin network, that network makes for boundary ambiguity and marginalizing of membership in remarried families, and that these affect system of relationships in remarried families. Analyzed interview data for husbands and wives in 232…

Describes Family System Test (FAST) as improvement over other figure placement techniques which offers assessment procedure that measures both cohesion and power, assesses several family levels, allows for interpretation and comparison of individual and collective perceptions, and yields more complex view of family dynamics by providing…

Developed Family Emotional Involvement and Criticism Scale (FEICS), self-report scale assessing perceived criticism and intensity of emotional involvement. Adult respondents (n=83) completed FEICS. Cronbach's alpha was 0.82 for Perceived Criticism subscale and 0.74 for Emotional Involvement subscale. Findings suggest that FEICS is reliable…

Examined whether 132 preschool children who varied in levels of body fat differed on psychosocial functioning. Children did not differ in self-esteem and family functioning as function of body fat. Prospectively, physical self-esteem weakly but significantly correlated with body fat at one and two years; father's perception of family functioning…