initial PROJECT

responding to N.Y. Times Article and Peer webpages

1.) My definition of a family: “A family is a group of individuals who consistently interact in each other’s lives, who serve as a support system and benefit in some way by going through life together.”

2.) What makes a family is completely contingent on who specific individuals are interacting with on a regular basis. The boundaries for Laura and Jennifer, when they were younger, were formed by their connectedness as sisters. As they formed their new families and became even more interconnected, their relationship changed. The boundaries are now based on the decision that Laura is Mallory’s mother, and Jennifer is her aunt. However, when the children are at home, sometimes Jamison calls Mallory his sister, but at school she is his cousin. Through the lens of the systems perspective, this changing of names within different environments is explained through the idea of calibration. Jamison recognizes that at home it is okay to call Mallory his sister, but the boundary has been set that while he is at school, she ought to be called his cousin. The family has adjusted to it, and boundary ‘norm’ is set in place. At the end of the article, we can see how the little kindergartner boy stood up for the fact that he had a sister, thereby ‘reflecting’ or better yet, reinforcing the boundary his mother must have set regarding his sperm donor. This shows how just speaking about certain topics and/or ideas can start to form family boundaries. When I look at fellow student, Camie Purvis’s understanding of boundaries is that they are formed by the parent’s. I agree with this to an extent, the only thing I would add is that as well as parent’s serving as boundary formers, the narrative aspect pops into my mind again. Even if children just talk about things amongst themselves, let’s say for instance, at school during recess. They will eventually start to grasp ideas from other children. Now, boundaries could start to form based simply on hearing other narratives from other children.

3.) When I want to understand what happens when definitions of families clash, I try to look at it with the systems perspective of equifinality. I think this is essential in trying to understand that it is okay when definitions clash. When I look at the webpage my classmate Stacy Rhodes posted, I clearly see that her definition of family says, “[a]n alliance formed generally by blood.” Right away I disagree with her on several different levels. First, for me personally; my sister and I are both adopted. There is no blood between us or our parent’s. Yet we are very much a family. And in the article, Sue and Bob Battel have naturally conceived children, sperm donor children, AND adopted children. Yet, they still very much consider themselves a family. While I disagree with Stacy’s definition of family, I can also see that equifinality teaches us that a particular final state, or in this case a family, can be achieved from many different starting points. And with regard to Ms. Williams & Ms. Ashmore, it helps me to look through the broad lens of relational dialectics when I am trying to understand the struggle they went through in trying to come to an understanding on how they would talk about their children’s relationship to one another. In chapter 3, relational dialectical theory clearly shows us that it is out of the struggle of opposing discourses (the two sisters not knowing how to explain their children’s relationship) that meanings emerge. It is the struggle that eventually brought the idea that it is okay to call each other brother and sister in the home, but not okay out in public; this is referred to as segmentation under the relational dialectical theory.