My Family Differences: Characteristics Of A Family

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Family Characteristics
The United States Census Bureau defines family as "a group of two people or more (one of whom is the householder) related by birth, marriage, or adoption and residing together; all such people (including related subfamily members) are considered as members of one family (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011).” I define family as a system of people who usually live in one house with one another that care about each other. To me a family is a system of people working together to support, love and take care of each other. Many different characteristics make up a family. These characteristics include size, form, cultural background, socioeconomic status, geographic location, characteristics of individual members and special challenges. …show more content…

Within my family my parent’s martial subsystem can be defined as my mom and dad married and functioning as co-parents to my brothers first. My parents built their marital subsystem before having children together. My parents had been married for five years before they had my sisters and I. My parents have a strong marriage parenting their children together. My parents interacted within their parental subsystem displaying their different parental characteristics. Within their parental subsystem my mom was the stay at home mom into my childhood. With my mom at home she was the main caregiver, she acquired a lot of stressing taking care of my sisters and I as babies. Taking care of three babies was a lot stress on my parents as a married couple and as parents. My mom’s parental stress overlapped to their martial stress. My parents had to overcome challenges, just as families with children disabilities too. Families that have children with disabilities are likely have high levels of stress within in their family subsystems. Families need to identify the stress to overcome difficulties within parenting and marriage. My parents were able to overcome stress by having additional family members help my mom with caring for us during the

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