Assignment: Family Assessment
In this week’s Discussion, you focused on how a specific barrier or set of barriers might affect a family system. Now, you turn to a more holistic view of a family system. Consider your experience both within your own family of origin and when interacting with other families. What is different between these examples of families?
In the field of social work, it is imperative that you know how to assess families. When trying to identify what is happening within a family, a social worker must learn about the family’s structure, identify their strengths, review their communication style, and understand the family’s dynamics. Families are influenced by the unique individuals within the family, as well as by the larger cultural context in which the family exists. Families vary in how they define who is a member of the family unit, what role each family should play, and what the family dynamics are based on an individual member’s contributions to the family system. Often, the social worker’s role is to help identify trouble spots and help the family re-adjust to healthy system dynamics.
In this week’s Assignment, you provide an assessment of a family and provide an analysis of the family using a social work perspective with consideration to strengths, cultural values, and social work theory.
To Prepare
Consider a family system in a holistic manner. You can use the same family system as in the Discussion. However, in the Discussion you focused on a specific set of challenges. In this Assignment, think about all other aspects of the family system.
By Day 7
Submit a 2- to 3-page paper in which you further analyze a family system. Support your analysis by using the Kirst-Ashman and Hull text to do the following:
Describe the structure of a family.
Identify the strengths in the family.
Explain where in the life cycle this family is located and how that may influence family dynamics.
Describe the specific roles of two family members, and explain if the various roles work well together for the benefit of this family.
Explain how understanding the family’s challenges will help a social worker working with this family.
Analyze this family using systems theory or the ecological perspective.
Support your paper with examples from the Kirst-Ashman and Hull text, in addition to other resources used to complete this Assignment. You are expected to demonstrate your understanding and ability to apply concepts from the course by paraphrasing resources and providing specific examples of how a concept is evident in the family system you identified for this paper.
Submission and Grading Information
To submit your completed Assignment for review and grading, do the following:
Please save your Assignment using the naming convention “WK3Assgn+last name+first initial.(extension)” as the name.
Click the Week 3 Assignment Rubric to review the Grading Criteria for the Assignment.
Click the Week 3 Assignment link. You will also be able to “View Rubric” for grading criteria from this area.
Next, from the Attach File area, click on the Browse My Computer button. Find the document you saved as “WK3Assgn+last name+first initial.(extension)” and click Open.
If applicable: From the Plagiarism Tools area, click the checkbox for I agree to submit my paper(s) to the Global Reference Database.
Click on the Submit button to complete your submission.
Due to the nature of this assignment, your instructor may require more than 5 days to provide you with quality feedback.
Discussion: Working With Families
I chose a nuclear family comprising a white father, a white mother, and six children, one Asian child, two blacks, and three white kids. The three white children are the biological children of the white couples, with the other three being adopted from birth. I consider this family as very diverse, and again it does not fully conform to what society regards as a traditional or normal family. However, the family fits into the family definition. A family is described as the primary group of people whose members assume particular obligations to one another and live in one residence (Umberson & Thomeer, 2020). It is also a group of one or more parents and their kids living as a unit together. Per the definition, my choice meets the threshold of being a family, even if some members do not share ethnicity, race, or genetic makeup. Most times, society regards normal families as people who share biological parents and live together. It tends to view adopted children as visitors in the unit, but this does not necessarily determine what a family must be.
Diverse families face many challenges, especially when it consists of members of different ethnicities (Chen et al., 2022). Among the challenges that this family may experience include prejudice and racial discrimination targeted at the kids from their classmates and peers. While playing with other children in school, the children of the minority ethnicity are likely to feel discriminated against compared to their brothers and sister of white ethnicity, which can affect their self-esteem. The parents in the family are equally likely to receive negative reactions from other parents and people in the society concerning their family makeup.
Normally, when people encounter families in public, they are naturally concerned or look for physical characteristics that can show the relationship between members of the family. The most common characteristics looked at are the shared skin color, ethnicity, and physical features such as the same eyes, color, and nose (Desai et al., 2020). In this family, the mother could be internationally traveling with her adopted African American children and naturally draw unnecessary speculation and attention that the kids are not hers and maybe raise unnecessary questions.
Because human trafficking has become prevalent in the world, sometimes, the mother could be accused of engaging in that illegal business, giving her the burden to prove that she is a mother to the children. This brings distress to the family, as the parents could have never looked at the adopted children differently from the other biological kids. Additionally, the world forces both the parents and children to acknowledge they are different. Increased incidents of racism, reported in mainstream media and even in the normal social setting, growing among children from different races poses a serious challenge in the current world, where particular races feel more superior to others. Although this family setup is becoming popular in the United States, the associated challenges do not allow the family to have a fully comfortable life.
The family might face the challenge of racial identification, especially for kids of diverse ethnicity. Identities are grounded on the extent to which people have an awareness of, knowledge of, competency with, and comfort with the culture of their racial groups, that of their parents, and different cultures (Lichter & Qian, 2018). Family diversity can lead to issues of self-esteem for the three children sharing different ethnicity with the parents. There may be a concern about the racial identity of the children in the family. For instance, what race should the kids identify with? This concern can bring problems for the kids, particularly during the adolescence stage. The parents would be required to keep explaining to the children about the diversity than makes their family unique. The parents would have the burden to elaborate on the real meaning of family and let the children understand despite their different skin color, they are one family, and they should take pride in their diversity as a family.
