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People and the media label some families as dysfunctional, often without knowing what that means. Premise: families have existed in every age and culture because they fill members' needs better than other human groups. To nurture means "to fill someone's needs." So a "functional" or high-nurturance family is one that consistently fills all members' needs (not just kids' needs) well enough, in someone's opinion. What needs? All healthy adults and kids have core primary needs. Minor kids in any family also have a mix of developmental needs which require competent adult help to fill. Children of divorce and abandonment and typical stepkids also have sets of concurrent family-adjustment needs. A high-nurturance family consistently fills all these adult and child needs well enough. Any family may be judged to be somewhere between "very low nurturance" (dysfunctional) and "very high nurturance" (functional). Typical high-nurturance families have characteristic traits - can you name them? Young kids raised in families with too few of these traits survive by developing up to six psychological wounds. The wounds have significant impacts on their adult contentment, relationships (like psycho-logical or legal divorce, or never marrying); co-parenting effectiveness; wholistic health; and longevity. Family Project 1 in this site provides an effective way to assess for significant wounds, to reduce them over time, and to break the ancestral cycle of family dysfunction. example / Project-1 index and guidebook / related info / close |
About Family "Functioning"