Family Stress And Coping Theory

Family organization patterns looks at how a family is able to handle challenges they face with anything from catastrophic events to daily life. For a resilience to occur in the family, a family’s organization patterns needs flexibility, connectedness, and social and economic resources. Flexibility is how well a family can “bound back” from stressful situations and regain normalcy again. Life events will occur, and new “uncharted” areas will occur in the family as it grows. Connectedness means how cohesive the family is for family functioning (Walsh, 2003). This means if the family is able to rely on one another for help and mutual support. Without connectedness, a family is not resilient because their family bonds are not strong, and family functioning will be weak. Finally
These areas include family functioning, understand normal and abnormal stressors in the family, major and minor arguments and disagreements within the family, family interactions with each other, the family’s capability of their psychosocial resources, and coping behaviors (Patterson, 2002). With the Family Stress and Coping Theory, it allows therapists and social workers to better understand the weaknesses in a family’s resiliency. If for some reason services are needed for the family, having a better understanding at where the weakness is very helpful for the social workers and therapists. Even more interesting, the Family Stress and Copying theory looks at a families ecosystems: individual family members, the family unit, and the family’s community (Patterson, 2002). This allows social workers and therapists look at the family’s systems and if the weaknesses in resiliency. Such as a family who lives in a community that is high levels of criminal activity. A family living in those situations could have a harder time being resilient than a family where crime in