Effective Family Functioning
Herbert Anderson

A systems approach to the care of families begins with a normative vision of family life. The family, we have seen, is a human system that maintains simultaneous commitment to the individual and to the community as a whole. We have already examined the three major purposes of the family‐procreation, social stability, and individuation. For the sake of discipleship in an increasingly complex world, individuation must, of the three, be regarded as primary because it is so essential for Christian vocation.

Change, interdependence, and diversity, we have also suggested, are three characteristics from creation that are necessary for family structure if the family is to be open to what God is making new. Because people change, the family always changes. Like the whole of creation, the family as a human system is a delicate balance of interdependent parts. The diversity of the parts is essential for its unity as a functioning organism. Any of these three characteristics can become a structural issue for the troubled family. Work with a troubled family is enhanced by attention to these structural issues.

In addition to family purpose and structure, there are three dynamics essential for effective family functioning‐flexible roles, adaptable rules, and dependable rituals. Each is essential for the functioning of a family, and yet each is relativized by the promises of the Christian gospel. Although from the Christian perspective we are not defined by family roles, or redeemed by family rules, or sustained by family rituals, all three of these dynamics are normative and necessary for effective family functioning.

A family is composed of interdependent members. Each member has assigned roles. These roles define an individual's place within the system and help to shape the family's structure. Roles in the family are related to biological functioning, status within the system, and the expression of emotions. Families function best when there is flexibility about the sociobiological roles, clarity about the structural roles, and equality with respect to the emotional roles.

The process of joining a marriage inaugurates a role shift that takes longer and is more traumatic than is usually realized. This role shift actually helps to make possible the emotional bond of marriage. If an individual is reluctant to give up loyalty to the role of son or daughter, the achievement of marital commitment will be postponed. It is true that when a son becomes a husband or a daughter becomes a wife neither gives up completely the former role status. But the very process of leaving home implies a beginning in the shift away from the primacy given to that earlier role.

The roles of husband and wife were once relatively clear and gender-specific: A husband was someone who was the primary wage earner, took out the garbage after two reminders, initiated sex, handled the finances, and walked the dog‐but never learned how to boil water. A wife was someone who did volunteer work at the church, cooked the meals, responded in sex, spent too much money, gossiped over tea, and cleaned up after the dog‐but certainly would not know how to fix a plugged sink.

While we continue to use the role labels of "husband" and "wife," the content of these roles is no longer predictable. Couples who wish to divide the marital roles and household tasks not according to sex but according to convenience or talent will require clear communication and willing negotiation. Where roles are not absolutely defined, such things as too little margarine, no baby sitter, overdrawn checkbooks, or an empty gas tank can generate conflict. There is less conflict among couples who either hold to traditional roles for men and women or else reject those traditions altogether, than there is among couples who disagree on what husbands and wives should do.

Attention to the marital roles is an important component of a counselor's premarital work. Couples can be helped to understand how jobs were apportioned in their families of origin‐as a way of initiating a consideration of their own division of marital roles. Even when we self-consciously decide on marital role patterns different from those of our parents, our parents' role modeling remains powerfully significant in our lives. Pastors who visit regularly with a couple early in the marriage will be able both to observe and to foster development of the marital relationship through repeated consideration of role adjustment.

In an effort to maintain systemic equilibrium, a family may resist the role changes that must inevitably accompany other changes in its life situation. In order to establish the family as a context for individuation, there needs to be maximum freedom for individuals to discover marital roles that fit. At the same time, the freedom needed for individuation must be accompanied by an accommodation to roles for the sake of the whole system.

Assuming the role of parent creates a whole new set of challenges and crises. Biological fathers and mothers do not automatically become parents. Nor are the parenting roles of father and mother biologically set. As long as the roles in marriage and family were traditionally drawn, it was relatively clear what mothering was and who did it. The same was true of fathering. It was believed that the social roles of father and mother were determined by biology. Fathers were distant and instrumental, while mothers were warm and expressive. Given that pattern it is not surprising that the father often was and is the family outsider.

There are biological factors that shape what is learned and the ease with which the sexes learn certain things about parenting. The fact that women bear and give birth to children cannot be disregarded in defining parental roles. Nor do men have the biological equipment necessary for nurture at the beginning of life. Men do not derive from nursing that physiological pleasure which is designed to insure that such nurturing will continue; for example, holding a bottle at 4 A.M. provides no intrinsic pleasure. If a society wishes to create shared parental roles, it must either accept the high probability that the mother-infant relationship will continue to have greater emotional depth than the father-infant relationship, or institutionalize the means for providing men with compensatory exposure and training in infant and child care in order to close the gap produced by the physiological experience of pregnancy, birth, and nursing. Although the sociobiological roles of parenting should continue to be redefined in the direction of greater freedom and flexibility for men and women, we must also steadfastly recognize the biological factors that shape what we learn. All perspectives on parenting must, in some fundamental sense, be biosocial.

Pastoral interventions with couples around the birth, baptism. or dedication of a child offer natural opportunities for being alert to any current difficulties the family may have in making role changes. The loss of a spouse by divorce or death while children are still living at home offers another occasion when people may be helped to reexamine parental roles. Whether or not the mother and father roles are both embodied by only one person, it is necessary that the parental role always include both closeness and distance.

One purpose for maintaining boundaries within a family is to insure proper differentiation between parents and children. We belong to only one generation at a time. Keeping the distance between the executive or parental system and the sibling system is essential both for family stability and for effective individuation. Families are likely to become troubled if parental authority is not clearly executed. That is not to say that all authority in a family resides with the parents. Nor does it imply that the way to save families is to reinstate rigid parental authority. What is most important is that parental rules be clearly defined and consistently executed. Where there is clarity about parental roles, however, and permeable boundaries exist between the executive and sibling subsystems, the family is likely to function well and children will be free to be children.

Clarity in structural roles might be disrupted in a variety of ways. One or both parents may be unwilling to accept the obligations of the father or mother role because they prefer being a son or daughter, or they resent the intrusion of children upon the marital bond. Sometimes one parent has usurped exclusive parenting responsibility, letting the other remain distant. Sometimes one parent abdicates all responsibility for parenting, preferring instead simply to play with the children. In such circumstances, or when because of death or divorce there is actually a one-parent family, one of the children may be elevated to the executive system as the "parental child."

The parental child is one who has been granted the privileges and responsibilities of a parent, a child who is included in the confidences of the parent in ways that the other children are not. In every family, authority may be temporarily given to one of the children, but clearly that authority is derivative and will be recalled by the parents when the circumstances change. If, however, with tacit parental approval a child assumes that authority permanently, the result is role confusion as well as unclarity of boundaries in the system. Generally such role confusion is related to disrupted communication between the parents and diffused decision making in the family. The parental child may have his or her individuation abbreviated by the premature assignment of adult responsibility.

The clarification of boundaries between parents and children is a central part of pastoral work with families. Where there is conflict between parents, one child may be drawn into a position of inappropriate authority as peacemaker or rescuer. This task of clarifying the parental role is particularly crucial for helpers working with single-parent families. Pastors or counselors who were the parental child in their own family of origin need to be cautious about assuming too much surrogate responsibility in their efforts to promote family stability. The pastor needs to be able to offer assistance to parents in their executive tasks without being drawn into the system in ways that undermine necessary parental authority.

The family as a system is also maintained by roles that are more emotional than biosocial or structural. Emotional roles are those patterns of behavior that accomplish the expressive tasks of the family. If the family is an organism with a life of its own, then it is appropriate to speak of the family as such being sad or troubled or happy. Sometimes particular individuals within a family are designated to express one or more of these emotions. Other emotional roles are often more instrumental than expressive; members are expected to organize the family's activity with a view to enhanced enjoyment or orderliness or virtue. All members of the family need an equal share in the distribution of significant emotional roles.

Although some emotional tasks seem to be common to all families, many emotional roles are peculiar to the particular system. Moreover, these emotional roles are not sex- or gender-specific, nor are they necessarily limited to one person in the system. Roles are assigned by the family in order to foster interaction and to maintain the emotional balance of the system. For example, families need a camp director who will organize picnics or visits to Grandma or summer holidays. Families need someone to bear pain or stop fights or make mischief. Larger families need a historian to keep the record straight and a switchboard operator to make sure proper connections are made. The family scapegoat (discussed in chapter 5) is a negative emotional role, but one that a family may nonetheless perceive to be necessary for keeping the system as a whole in balance.

Family emotional roles are generally assigned with the individual's concurrence. Even one who has been selected as the family's scapegoat usually complies in some way with that selection. Because systems theory understands causality in a circular way, however, it seems both impossible and unnecessary for us to determine which came first‐systemic selection or individual concurrence. The determination of family emotional roles involves a combination of both systemic needs and individual proclivity. Not everyone can be the family clown or the family healer. Because individual proclivity contributes to emotional role selection in the family, equality of distribution has some limits.

There are four emotional roles that are frequently distributed within a family system: (1) being right, (2) being the bearer of righteousness, (3) doing wrong, and (4) being bad. In traditional marriages, not unlike the caricature in the television series about Archie and Edith Bunker, these emotional roles were often distributed in the following gender-specific way:

In this pattern, husbands were usually right ("Father knows best") but a little bad ("After all, men will be men"), while wives were the bearers of goodness and righteousness ("Her children rise up and call her blessed" [Prov. 31:28]) but basically wrong ("She thinks like a woman"). Although the rigid assignment of these roles was personally destructive, it provided a balance of power in the system. Part of the current upheaval in family life results from the disintegration of that traditional gender-specific alignment of emotional roles in the family.

While some emotional roles can remain relatively fixed without harm either to the family or to individuals within it, these four emotional roles at least must be rotated equally if each family member is to develop his or her gifts for service in the world. It is a matter of justice in the family. Being wrong and being bad are inescapable, but families often become troubled when these roles are unchangeably identified with particular individuals. If one child is the "bad seed" or another "cannot do anything right," the family system may be stable at the expense of the individuals within it. Positively, for the sake of the just distribution of self-esteem, everyone in a family needs to be right sometimes, and everyone needs to feel like a good person once in a while. People are likely to cling tenaciously to righteousness as a way of maintaining power in the system.

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House portrays a devastating variable of this quadrant of emotional roles. Nora is finally judged as both wrong and bad by her husband, Torvald, who assumes for himself both virtue and truth. What Nora thought she was doing as a gesture of love and kindness to her husband becomes the occasion for her banishment from the household as both wrong and bad. In his own commentary on the play, Ibsen suggests that Nora eventually loses all sense of right and wrong. Her natural feelings on the one side and her belief in authority on the other lead her to utter distraction. With this quadrant, as with all other emotional roles in the family, it is essential for the well-being of both the individuals and the system that each emotional role be available to everyone.

Roles are necessary for family functioning. Human systems cannot function without clearly identified roles. Our roles, however, do not define our value. Roles can never be more important than the individuals who fulfill them. Freedom from being defined, even by roles that are necessary for the system, is guaranteed by the gospel promise that God's love transcends what human institutions require. Each family member has received gifts that are to be discovered and nourished within the family with a view to that individual's service in the world for Christ's sake. Our family may name us, but it is God who particularizes us in our baptism. Each of us is placed in a family and then called out of that multi-membered organism to be a unique child and partner of God.

The family has a life of its own. It is an organism made up of interacting and interdependent parts. These parts are identified according to assigned roles. The action of these parts, their role within the family system, is governed by rules that establish the norms of conduct and patterns of interaction within the family organization.

Family rules are both explicit and implicit. The rules about brushing teeth, going to bed, cleaning up, doing chores, spending money, and coming home are generally explicit. In rule-oriented families these explicit rules may be evoked regularly in order to exercise power or settle disputes. Other family rules‐about the expression of emotions, behavior in the world outside the family, bringing home odd ideas and people‐may be equally clear but never spoken. These implicit rules are the most powerful. Precisely because they are implicit they are not negotiable. Implicit rules are evoked in a family only after they have been transgressed.

Rules are necessary in order to govern any human system. Within the family, rules regulate the proper use of authority and the just distribution of roles. They are essential in order to clarify boundaries, enhance communication, and facilitate change. Family rules work best when they are flexible, explicit, and unambiguous. Families are likely to become troubled when the rules are rigid, when they are unspoken but assumed, and when they embody double-binding messages. Often the task of the helping person is to make hidden rules explicit. The absolute power of hidden rules can usually be diminished only by breaking them.

Because people and systems change, rules that govern a system such as the family need to be flexible. Bedtime rules invariably change as children grow older. Managing the comings and goings of adolescents requires less dexterity but more adaptability than putting a four-year-old to bed. A family rule about being home for the evening meal may need to be replaced by a rule that requires advance notification regarding who is eating when. Rules about cleaning one's room may be replaced by new rules about shutting the bedroom door. Although these few illustrations are drawn from the world of children's rules, the same principles apply also to adult rules. Children quickly learn in matters involving family interaction to disregard rules that the parents themselves disobey. It is difficult, for instance, to insist that children never interrupt a conversation or speaker when the parents themselves are always doing precisely that.

Flexibility in family rules does not mean that families should have no standards. Every human community is organized around shared values that establish coherence and order interaction. Because of the pluralism of values in our society today, one can no longer count on an easy harmony between social ideals and family rules. For this reason one must pick one's absolutes carefully. Parents should be clear about which values and rules they regard as essential.

In order to insure that rule flexibility obtains within the family, everybody must learn the art of compromise. The process begins with parents who can settle their differences about family rules without choosing up sides within the family. Effective parenting may best be described as the art of selective accommodation. It is necessary of course that parents be clear about the values they wish to transmit to their children. But rigid rules are counterproductive far effective family functioning since they do not allow for growth and change. Indeed rigid rules often mean a basic disregard of individual growth and of change for the family as a whole. Rigid family rules often substitute uniformity for loyalty. They may fix family interaction at a particular juncture in the family's history; changes that have occurred beyond that favored time are simply ignored or repressed because they disrupt the stability of the system. Rigid rules are generally designed to maintain systemic equilibrium and to prevent change. Recognizing the place of change in creation and in the family means that rules need to be flexible.'

The rules that usually have the most power in a family are those that are implicit and hidden. They shape the family's behavior unwittingly. As long as family rules remain implicit, they cannot be criticized, debated, or negotiated. There is usually also a metarule that even forbids asking about the rules. As long as the rules remain implicit, family members have no way of challenging the authority figures who have the power to enforce them. Only after the fact does one learn that a family rule has even been broken.

Implicit family rules have many purposes. Sometimes they protect secrets known only to a few. Sometimes rules that are implicit limit diversity by rejecting, or more likely disregarding, anything new that comes into the family. Some rules, like many expectations in marriage, are kept hidden because of fear that they will be rejected as silly. Sometimes implicit rules are designed to limit individual growth by discouraging participation in any activity that might foster autonomy. Sometimes a family will seek to guarantee moderation by limiting the expression of certain emotions. One can often identify implicit rules simply by asking about which emotions were regarded as acceptable and which were unacceptable in one's family of origin.

Rules remain implicit in order that the people who hold the power may be able to keep it. Any change in hidden rules threatens the power of those who are the keepers of the rules. Keeping rules implicit is therefore one way of preserving the status quo in a family. The breach of a family rule often has the indirect effect of publicly identifying those who substantively have the power to make and keep the rules. It also poses a direct challenge to the hidden power center within the family. The helping person who wishes to expose and break implicit rules must therefore be prepared to exercise legitimate authority. It is usually possible to name a forbidden subject or ask an unacceptable question so long as the helping person is able to remain outside the emotional sphere of the family.

Pastors who regard themselves or are publicly regarded as upholders of the good may find it difficult to be naughty enough to break a family rule. But precisely because of their moral integrity, pastors are in the best position to help families discover that the family will not collapse if its rules are made explicit, or even broken. Such breaking of family rules, however, should be done with great care. Families that hold on most tightly to inflexible and implicit rules often live in fear that they will be shattered if a rule is transgressed. Helpers who work with families also need to be sure that each family discovers a new and more constructive source of stability to replace the loss of power that is experienced when an implicit rule is made explicit.

Families are often immobilized by a lack of clarity regarding family rules. Ambiguity as to family rules can keep everyone guessing about what to obey. Children are sometimes told not to do one thing, the assumption being that they will then know automatically that this means they are not to do something else as well. Lack of clarity, like hiddenness, is a mechanism for resisting change. As long as the rules are ambiguous, people are likely to keep things the same. Sometimes unclear rules unexpectedly obligate people. For instance, everyone in a family may agree to change vacation plans without realizing that this also obligates them to attend father's golf tournament.

The most powerful examples of ambiguous rules are those that involve the sending of a double-binding message. The recipient is then torn between two conflicting messages. To obey half the rule means that the other half must be disregarded or disobeyed. Such a double bind involves a distortion in family communication that confuses and eventually immobilizes. If a mother's words to her child are filled with warmth and invitations to intimacy while her nonverbal messages push the child away, she places the child in a double bind. The child cannot respond to the invitations to intimacy without violating the nonverbal signals about keeping distance.

Breaking a family's pattern of sending double-binding messages is a complex therapeutic task. Pastoral intervention with double-binding families can occur naturally in a couple of ways. A pastor may help a family recognize the problem by reporting his or her own experience in being confused by the family's rules; this can be done gently by making clear that it is the pastor's own experiencing of the family that has led to the reported confusion. The family is then free, if it wishes, to disregard the observation as that of an outsider who does not understand. Second, in their own general pastoral work pastors can convey the message that unambiguous communication is a form of truth telling in human relationships. We may never know all the truth there is to know and tell, but in our communication with others we can be clear about what we do know, making sure that our "yea means yea" and "nay means nay."

Because many of the rules that govern a family are implicit and hidden, people have difficulty identifying them. Encouraging people to recall family sayings or maxims, which are generally carriers of family rules and behavioral expectations, is one way to make them explicit. Both rules and maxims exist to support the myths around which a family organizes its self-understanding. A family myth is like an emotional coat of arms reflecting the principles or values that influence the way a family functions. Both family rules and family myths are likely to be less available for examination than maxims or sayings commonly repeated in the household. There is generally a consistency between maxims, rules, and myths that help the family as a system to hang together.

Eliciting family maxims is helpful in at least two ways: (1) it helps a family to make explicit the rules that actually have power; (2) it identifies divergent traditions that come into conflict at the formation of a new family. My maternal grandfather would often say: "You can laugh your way to hell but you can't laugh your way out." Though I do not remember the maxim being used in my family of origin until it was told to me recently, and though the rules about levity in his family were largely implicit, the meaning of my grandfather's maxim continued: Making jokes and having fun are dangerous. The overwhelming seriousness that has constantly characterized my family was fostered also by another maxim that reflected the urgency of time, one that I often heard father repeat: "Too soon we grow old and too late smart." The rule carried by that maxim was that in a family which lives with the awareness of the temporality of all things one should not waste time, so even if levity is not all that dangerous it would nonetheless be a waste of time. The hidden rules embedded in such maxims have an ongoing influence, so making them explicit can ease the path of change.

There is a wide variety of maxims from which families can choose. Some reflect the value of hard work: "A winner never quits, and a quitter never wins." Others the value of frugality: "A penny saved is a penny earned." Or efficiency: "Don't go to the kitchen empty-handed." Some maxims promote high expectations in the family: "If you want to get something done well, do it yourself." Still other maxims prescribe interpersonal behavior: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say it at all," or: " The best way to get along is to be quiet." Some sayings promote family togetherness: "Just think, this is the last time we will all be together." Others diminish individual self-esteem: "You're not worth the salt that goes into the bread." Whether they are original with the particular family or borrowed from a more universal collection, such maxims usually reflect the unvoiced rules that prescribe behavior and govern the system in the interests of fulfilling its myth.

Exploring maxims can be particularly helpful to pastors as they work with couples in the process of forming a new family. It is both enjoyable and beneficial to use maxims as a way of identifying the different rules that people bring to marriage from their own families of origin.

Families need rules in order to function effectively. Yet neither individuals nor families are saved by their obedience to rules. Families need clear structures and appropriate authority in order to create the context in which people can grow. But families are not preserved either by rigid rules or forceful parental discipline. Even flexible rules are not enough because all of us‐people within families as well as people not in families‐fail to be what God intended for us to be. Rules in the family do not eliminate sin. As a matter of fact, they may even make our sinfulness more apparent. Probably in no other context of human life does our sinfulness show as clearly as it does in the family. None of us can escape the recognition of our sinfulness by those who see our vulnerability most clearly‐the other members of our family.

Living in a family should make us realistic. In this way the family continues to perform its responsibility for criticism as well as care. In family interaction tough love and tender love are blended together in ways that allow us to see ourselves as we are. It is sometimes a frightening truth that we are re-created in our own family members, especially our children. Marriages sometimes fall apart, and families become troubled because in the family the find out more about ourselves than we can bear. The family needs to be a context without pretense, in which we can openly confess our fault and then hear a forgiving word from those who know us best and love us most.

The recognition that our sinfulness is most evident in the family makes forgiveness an essential component of being children and parents together. It is the promise of forgiveness that transforms a rule-oriented system into a laboratory for living with grace. It is the practice of forgiveness within the family that overcomes resentment and deters conflict.

Because the family is a part of creation, that creation which is not all that God intended it to be, we are frequently disappointed and sometimes destroyed by our families. In any family there is often more criticism than care, more judgment than grace, more rancor than love. The incidence of family violence throughout human history is further evidence that evil exists inside as well as outside the family. Families are dangerous. At one level, our pastoral task may be to help individuals know just how the family works in order that they can protect themselves from harm. While I do not share David Cooper's uniformly gloomy judgment of the family as the enemy of autonomy, I do believe in the need to have a realistic appraisal of the family as a flawed but necessary institution. Those who regard the family as a new source of salvation, or who see evil only in the world outside the family, or who find the family a useful metaphor to describe any nurturing relationship or context, are asking more of the family than it can possibly provide.

As a human system the family is composed of interdependent members, each of which has assigned roles. The action of these roles is governed by rules that establish the norms for conduct in the family. The interaction of these roles within the system generally occurs according to predictable patterns or rituals that provide continuity and stability for the family as a structure.

A ritual is an action, or series of actions, sometimes accompanied by formulae, that regulates transactional patterns within a family. A ritual may be overtly prescribed in terms of time, place, and participants; for example, in connection with a family reunion or birthday celebration it may be fully spelled out who is to come, what they are to bring, and how long they will stay. A ritual, however, may also be more covert: Family routines like putting children to bed or eating a meal usually evolve in a less explicit way.

A ritual is a symbolic process that unites or otherwise influences its participants so that they act in a way that is supportive of the organism as a whole. A ritual's first purpose is in relation to the system. It focuses the behavior of all participants in the direction of a common goal. If the goal is that of welcoming Father back home from his trip, that goal will determine what ritual is necessary and normative. Excessive noise or jumping on Father‐otherwise unacceptable behavior within the family‐may in this instance be an approved part of the ritual because it furthers the goal of welcoming. A ritual is a patterned transaction governed by a delicate feedback system in which each part triggers and monitors the behavior of every other part and all behavior is influenced by previous behavior. In the broad sense in which it is being used here ritual includes such interactional patterns as cultural customs, life-cycle rituals, and family traditions as well as daily routines.

The preservation of particular ethnic or family customs increases diversity in the larger society while at the same time regularizing the life of a particular family. Cross-cultural studies of families reaffirm the need to recognize the validity of cultural customs in matters of mate selection, extended family involvement, and care of the aged. Although every society has seen family structure change in the direction of a more nearly universal uniformity, there is at the same time a growing recognition of the unique contribution each culture makes in the overall understanding of individual and family life. As the capacity to tolerate diversity increases, it seems likely that particular cultures will be encouraged to preserve their own ways of ritualizing significant events in the family's history.

The way a family navigates through difficult moments in its life cycle is frequently determined by external factors. Some life-cycle rituals are shaped by cultural custom; others reflect contemporary social patterning; still others are formed by the sacramental structures of a religious tradition that may also be culturally linked. Family traditions are more likely to be specific with respect to an extended family or clan. The transference of these traditions provides stability and continuity from generation to generation. Such traditions are a sign of identification for families, and sometimes a test of loyalty in the process of leaving home. Every new family is forged out of emotionally charged traditions relating to birthday celebrations, Sunday meals, entertaining guests, the raising of children, or the giving of gifts. For this reason it is necessary that premarital work by pastors help to foster an awareness of the power and validity of family traditions so that the process of negotiation about traditions may be initiated.

Cultural customs, life-cycle rituals, and family traditions all seek to keep a balance between continuity and change. Because they generally transcend the particular family, they also link each family with a larger human community. We keep traditions alive in order to maintain continuity with our own history; without traditions and family customs, it is difficult to connect with one's past. When traditions become paramount, however, there is increased likelihood that the system will remain closed to its environment and to change as well. People do not serve traditions; for the family, as for any human community, traditions exist to serve people.

The rituals that most frequently influence a family's interaction are those daily routines that are idiosyncratic to each family. At the beginning of any marriage, the couple usually accomplishes certain delicate tasks related to the setting up of a household by establishing specific routines. Spouses develop routines for going to bed and getting up from bed, for setting and clearing the table, for making and drinking coffee, for being naked and having sex, for sharing the bathroom and the morning paper, for selecting programs and watching television, for prayer and worship. These routines will be influenced by patterns from each one's family of origin as well as by habits acquired on one's own. It takes time and a willingness to accommodate in order for couples to develop routines that will insure both private space and mutual accessibility within their marriage. The process is often complicated by their differing needs and expectations with respect to privacy and accessibility. Such development of routines, however, is an essential part of their task in developing and fostering intimacy.

The addition of children to the family often disrupts many of the routines a couple has previously established. Sleeping routines are altered to accommodate nocturnal rendezvous with hungry infants. Cleaning up the children may preempt the routine of clearing the table. Routines for leaving and coming home become more elaborate because more people need to be guaranteed accessibility to one another. It is no longer possible for Alice just to kiss Martin before going to work because there are also Jennifer and Michelle, and Per, each of whom wants at least two kisses. The capacity to develop new routines that take into account changes in the family will make it possible for the system to keep connected despite the growing autonomy of its members.

Bedtime rituals are frequently good indicators of a family's ability to adapt to the changes that occur as children and parents grow older. The capacity to establish clear and enforceable bedtime rules, rules that are nonetheless flexible, can be a significant indicator of the family's adaptability. It is unfortunate when the time for bed becomes a struggle for power instead of a recognition of emerging autonomy.

In the early years, structural clarity is decidedly helpful but rarely sufficient to make bedtime rituals go easily. Parents also need to be comfortable with one another so that the children will be free to retire from their activities when adult time begins. Children who use "just one more story." or "another drink" as a delaying tactic may be colluding with one or both parents in limiting adult time for intimacy. In ways that are not easily understandable, a child quickly learns that mommy or daddy does not want to be too intimate; so the child's evening interruptions function to stabilize the system by avoiding conflict over adult intimacy needs. Parents who argue about how to handle the request for one more drink of water often do so as away of coping with their own discomfort with one another.

Ideally, the conversations, stories, and prayers that accompany going to bed are rituals for the termination of the children's day. The bedtime ritual may also provide an occasion for rehearsing the children's next-day activities‐such things as when the sitter should come, who will get home first, and who needs to see the dentist. Bedtime rituals are equally important for adults, but establishing a pattern for pillow talk or ways of closing the day will vary greatly and usually requires hard work to maintain. The Pauline admonition not to let the sun go down on our wrath (Eph. 4:26) is sound marital advice: Don't go to bed mad. The prayer that closes the day for Christians in families needs to include confession and thanksgiving as well as intercession.

The vitality of family life is in large part determined by the family's capacity to change and adapt. Because people and families change, the roles and rules that govern human interaction in a system must be both clear and flexible. Neither individuals nor families, however, can be infinitely flexible. We have already identified the family's need for human continuity in the midst of change. Stories, traditions, and rituals are means by which families seek to certify their future against the contingencies created by change. Family rituals conserve the past in order to maintain the stability necessary for the family to function as a system. Three particular purposes of family rituals merit special mention.

In the first place, the inheritance that each new generation receives from its past provides an identity and a vocation. Identity is formed by the stories and traditions that pass from one generation to the next. Intergenerational relationships within the family provide each new generation with an emotional inheritance that lends stability and purpose for the future. Families that are separated geographically often become increasingly intentional about collecting or tape-recording family stories as a way of preserving for each new generation a continuity with its pasts

This process of passing on a family's legacy for the future is sometimes disrupted by secret keeping. Traditions may be aborted in order to maintain the secret, and the family story is in consequence lost or abbreviated. I once asked an aunt for some information regarding my mother's childhood. "There is no point in digging up old bones;" she said. That was that‐nothing more was said, but a piece of my own history had been cut out and locked away in the deep, dark past.

A family's identity may be fixed at a particular point or in a particular way in order to make sure that secrets are kept inviolate. The fixed ways of functioning that families develop in order to keep their secrets buried also interrupt the natural transmission of the family's story, by which its identity is formed and its vocation in the world is shaped. Family rituals help to keep that story alive and available for succeeding generations.

The second purpose of family rituals is to mediate between individual and communal needs in order to foster appropriate bonds of intimacy. Every family needs to protect its membership from manipulation and the abuse of autonomy. For that purpose we have insisted on clear boundaries. Rituals are necessary in order to ensure privacy. Likewise a family system must structure rituals for the purpose of being together so that moments of intimacy may happen. Rituals do not guarantee closeness in a family. Some family rituals connected with play or lovemaking may actually make intimacy difficult if they are rigidly enforced. When they function well, however, family rituals make intimacy possible by ensuring accessibility. It is unwise to kiss your spouse only when you feel like it, or make love only when you are already close, or hug your children only when they seem particularly lovable. Rituals like going to Grandma's are important precisely because they do not depend on good intentions or warm feelings. Human systems need rituals that structure accessibility in order that gracious moments of intimacy may happen.

The third purpose of rituals is to mark out individual development in such a way that a family can adapt to individual changes. Families may have ceremonies surrounding the start of school, the beginning of menstruation, the receiving of a promotion, the recognition of achievement, or leaving home. Every major event of an individual's life is in a sense a family affair. Rituals are one way by which the family as a system can adjust to the changes that will be occurring in its life because of the ritual event. Families that function best will never allow the system's needs for stability to disrupt the individuating moment for one of its members. Rituals that work best will honor autonomy and celebrate community simultaneously.

In chapter 2 I identified five epochs in the family life cycle that mark out periods of significant change in a family's history. In each of these five epochs, as suggested in the table below, there are rituals in the church's life that correspond to the family's principal task. Pastoral work is enhanced by these ritual moments. They provide a structured access to people at those times of transition when family systems are likely to get stuck. They offer an opportunity for the pastoral care of families that encourages and supports adaptability. If the family is able to adapt to the transitions precipitated by individual change, that very adaptation will in turn create an atmosphere conducive to the kind of individual growth that can proceed without fear of jeopardizing the stability of the family unit.

I agree with Murray Bowen's suggestion that a life-cycle format may provide "one of the most practical and effective ways to help people find a quicker understanding of the family as a unit." Understanding the family life cycle also provides the pastor with a framework for thinking about how ordinary pastoral interventions around the church's ritual life correspond to critical moments of transition in the family's life history. The pastoral care of families begins with attention to the family's developmental tasks, which in each epoch correspond to the church's rituals. The ritual life of the church is generally understood to focus on incorporation into being-in-community: (1) we are baptized into the whole company of the faithful in the context of a particular believing community; (2) the Eucharist is a community meal; (3) it is the community as a whole that confirms an adult believer or welcomes a confessing Christian. Although our communities change and enlarge, they are never eliminated; the Christian is forever understood as part of a people. This emphasis on the sociality of life, however, is not uniquely Christian: human life at its best and deepest is always and irrevocably corporate.

The rituals of the church are also moments that foster individuation: (1) we are particularized by being named in our baptism: (2) the Christian affirmation of faith is always an "I believe"; (3) throughout the Christian life, each of us is identified as a distinct and unique child of God. The family dialectic of being separate together also occurs in the ritual life of the church. The Christian life, even in its rituals, is always both individual and corporate. Understood in this way, the rituals of the church can undergird the family's task of helping people learn how to be together separately. At the same time, the rituals of the family that maintain this same dialectic between separateness and togetherness also make it possible for people to claim their uniqueness as a gift from God for service in the world.

Epoch

Task

Pastoral Opportunities

Forming the family

Setting boundaries between the generations and within the marriage that are clear but permeable

The focus of premarital pastoral work is that leaving comes before cleaving

Enlarging the family

A craziness about kids that makes it possible to transcend the inconvenience of child rearing

Pastoral visitation at the time of baptism should include a focus on the family's adaptation to the child

Expanding the family

The family needs to be a system that is open enough for people to discuss their own gifts and distinct self

Participation in first communion and confirmation are ways by which the church's rituals enhance the process of individuation

Extending the family

Parents and children alike need to understand that children need to leave home in order to come home again

Visiting with parents after the wedding is a way to help them let go of the child who has gone

Re-forming the family

New intimacy in the original marital pair creates freedom for all members of the system

Pastoral intervention is necessary because the death of a parent may have a profound impact on middle-aged sons and daughters