Chapter 8

Click on the following links - please note these will open in a new window

Article 1: Miall, C. E. & March, K. (2005). Open Adoption as a Family Form: Community Assessments and Social Support. Journal of Family Issues, 26(3), 380-410

1. How is the issue of “open adoption” a communicative issue?
2. How does the concept of being “discourse-dependent” relate to families who engage in open adoption? How might these families be discourse-dependent in ways that non-open adoptive families or non-adoptive families aren’t?
3. How might open adoption configurations affect family narratives and family identity?
4. How might open adoption practices influence the family as a system? Are there implications for the internal system? Are there implications for the families’ external systems?
5. How might privacy and boundaries be negotiated in open-adoption families? Might these communicative issues be negotiated in ways different from non-open adoptive or non-adoptive families?

Article 2: De Mol, J., & Buysse, A. (2008). Understandings of children’s influence in parent--child relationships: A Q-methodological study. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 25(2), 359-379. doi:10.1177/0265407507087963

Questions that apply to this article:

1. Find where the authors note that “recent proposals on bidirectionality in parent-child relationships emphasize the equal agency of parents and children.” Do you feel that this explanation is on track with what you read in the textbook chapter? Why might bidirectionality be garnering this attention?
    
2. Read the section in which the authors note that, for the influence that children have over their parents, “it is surprising that the influence of children on parents is hard to describe--there is no word for it.” Why do you think this is? Have we not come up with a word for it because parents do not what to admit that it occurs? Do we, as a society, fee that we don’t need a word for it?
    
3. Find where the authors cite the notion that “bidirectionality stresses the co-occurrence of both directions of influence--from parent to child and from child to parent--in a complex reciprocal system.” This seems to coincide with what Duck and McMahan suggest in Chapter 8. What examples can you think of with regard to this concept?
    
4. Find the passage in which the authors point out that “research on children’s agency shows how children drive the interaction with their parents (e.g., Kerr & Stattin, 2003), influence their own socialization by influencing parental strategies (Grusec & Goodnow, 1994), and influence many aspects of the parent’s personality (Ambert, 2001; Palkowitz, Marks, Appleby, & Holmes, 2003)." How might a child influence the personality of the parent? Should it not be the other way around, or do we simply not consider the child and his or her influences on the parent and socialization?