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Description of our family

A family means many different things to different people. Traditionally, most people understand a family as the basic social unit that is made up of parents and their children collectively considers as a group, irrespective of whether they leave together or not. It may also consist of one or more adults taking care of kids. Such relations are basically base of legal marriages or relation through blood. Convention understanding however considers a family as a group of people with past history, a present reality, and a future expectation of interconnected mutually influencing relationship. In this easy I will define my family in traditional and conventional perspectives and also discuss the external and internal boundaries that exist in the family.

Our family is made up of seven members; two parents, three children a grandparent and an uncle. Though there are other person that would be considered members of this family at an extended level, I consider the above seven members to by my family since we stay together, support each other emotionally and share resources. We stay and middle income level neighborhood and use the same last name. Our family can fit in the traditional definition of a family since it consists of adults taking care of children. Our family can also be understood in convention terms through the fact that we share a past history, have a present reality and have the same expectations of the future.

Our sense of being family is also expressed in the way we define ourselves to the outsiders. This is visible in the way we us the four external boundary management techniques (i.e. labeling, explaining, legitimizing and defending). Labeling involves the use of “title and positions that give an orientation to a situation” (6). Through labeling, we are able to communicate to the outside parties clearly expressing who is who in our family. Timothy is my father and Magdalene my mother. Evelyn is our eldest sibling who was adopted by our parents following the death of their friend (biological parents to Evelyn). Wendy is our second born and am the third and last kid. Rosemary is my grandmother and Wilson my uncle. Explaining involves providing elaborations to make labels used on family members clear or understandable (7) We normally use explanations to tell other people how the labels come about, for example Rosemary is my grandmother because she is a sister to my father’s mother, and Wilson my uncle because he is my mother’s brother. Legitimizing on the other hand involves invoking law or custom to show that family relationships conform to set standards (7). We try to legitimize our relationships for instance; Evelyn is our sister because she was legally adopted by our parents. Last, defending is, basically, “shielding oneself or family from external attacks, maintaining and justifying its validity” (7). We defend our family relationship through telling of people who touch on sensitive issues affecting our relationships such as our parents’ marriage which was a forced marriage, the marriage worked!

Our family also receives great support from the way we define our internal relationships. Basically our internal relationships are expressed through the internal boundary management techniques (i.e. naming, discussing, narrating and rituals). Naming plays an important role the development of internal family identities as members struggle to indicate their family roles, status and connections (7). In our family naming helps to indentify people and their roles for instance we refer to our uncle as Uncle Wilson. Discussing is also important in defining internal family relationships. Discussing involves “reflecting on the degree of difference among family members that affects the amount of ambiguity in their family situation” (7). In our family setting the most common discussion is the discussion of Evelyn’s biological mother athletic talent and love for sports, which she apparently inherited. Narrating on the other hand involves stories on the emergence of families, family member tell and retell stories of how they came to their current status or existence (7). In our family, we frequently revisit the story of our parent’s marriage, their adoption of Evelyn and the complicated birth of Wendy. Finally, ritualizing allows families to accomplish their “emotional needs” as they enact their identity (7). In our family, ritual includes family celebration such as our parents’ anniversary and our birthdays.

In sum, our family exhibits both the traditional and conventional understanding of a family. Communication is important and it used to communicate information about our family to external parties and maintain relationships within. In handling external relationship external boundary management techniques while internal management technique are used frequently to define internal relationships.

Work Cited

“Families: Definition issues.”