10/13/2014 Conger and Conger

10/13/2014 Conger and Conger: Understanding the processes through which economic harship influences families and children

Intro

• Lower SES is related to health disparities.
• Economic hardship and disadvantage impair the functioning of parents and threaten the physical, intellectual, social and emotional health of children and adolescents.
• Links between lower SES and physical health, social-emotional well-being, and cognitive functioning for both children and adults.
• There is a clear connection between poverty and mental health.
• Two theories which explain the process through which economic problems affect parents and children.

Theories of Economic Stress and Investment

• Social Causation Perspective: Argues that the social and economic circumstances in people's lives directly influence their emotions, beliefs, and behaviors.

The Family Stress Model of Economic Hardship (FSM)

• This model says that financial difficulties have an adverse effect on parents' emotions, behaviors, and relationships, which, in turn, affects their parenting abilities or strategies.
• FSM proposes that economic pressures include:
• unmet material needs involving necessities such as adequate food and clothing
• The inability to pay bills or make ends meet
• having to cut back on even necessary expenses
• More financial pressure, more emotional distress.
• The FSM is pictured below

The Investment Model (IM)

• Proposes that economic resources increase the investments parents make in their children's development, which create academic and social opportunities that benefit the child.
• So this model is more about the advantages that you get with more money.

Empirical Findings Related to the Family Stress and Investment Models

The Family Stress Model of Economic Hardship

    The following are a bunch of studies that support this model

• The Iowa Youth and Families Project (IYFP)
• all married parents with economic hardships, had negative impact on children
• The Family and Community Health Study
• tested a variety of races and single, married households
• The New Hope Project
• studied if financial assistance and job training would improve the life conditions of poor families.
• The Panel Study of Income Dynamics
• looks at younger children, ages 3-5.
• The Finnish Replication Study
• replicated IYFP, but in Finland.
• The Riverside Economic Stress Project
• A Review of the Findings
• basically "all generated findings reasonably consistent with the overall model".

The Investment Model

• Not many studies test the actual proposed meditating  role of parental investments in the connection between family income and child development.  

Overview and Discussion

• Overall "we expect that the FSM and IM are not incorrect, but they more than likely are incomplete". 
• 
  

Social Class- Implications for Family Therapy

Even if unacknowledged, society in the United States IS divided by social class.

A contradiction in American Society is that there isn’t an “acknowledged” division in class, and yet… the American Dream is ultimately having the ability to move up in class.

Myth:

What each person has or does not have is the direct result of her or his effort and perseverance.

 -This causes those with economic privilege to feel self-righteous and deserving of all that they have…and that hard work alone produced their success. For the economically disadvantaged, this causes everything they don’t have to be the result of not giving as much effort or persistent and ultimately their fault.

Three myths

1.We’re a classes society

2. yet we akk gave an equal chance of upward mobility

3. therefore we are all individual responsible for what we have or do not have

These myths obscure our understanding of the realities of how class shape our society. This leads to further myths,..

“Blessed are the poor”

-Judeo-Christian heritage help shape the myth that poverty is synonymous with virtue. Aka: lack of material wealth underpins spiritual abundance and is the pathway to spirituality.

-This is isn’t the reality of what people believe or strive for.

-being poor is to be loathed and treated poorly by those with privilege and to be marked as inferior and the poor come to loath themselves.

-poor people learn to devalue themselves like the broader society devalues them.

-It is more accurate that the poor are cursed.

“I’m Middle-Class”

-Most people identify themselves as middle-class but the factors that cause them to define themselves as middle is different than their actual class location.

-Wealthy people justify themselves as middle-class by looking upward at those who have more than them and see their “deprivation” rather than abundance.

-the poor say there are middle class in response of the shame of poverty and wanting to distance themselves from that.

-Both poor and rich promote the myth of middle class.

-Most Americans are somewhere between being neither rich or poor, but middle-class is a myth because of the extreme diversity of circumstances and opportunity that may exist between two families that both consider themselves middle class.

“All Black People are Poor and All White People are Rich”

-Most Whites see the face of poverty as Balck and for Blacks, Whites are wealthy.

-This myth is fueled by the mass media that portray reality in these terms.

-Extremely famous/successful black people are usually seen as exceptions.

“Only the Poor Receive Welfare”

-The reality is that an array of government programs exist that provide support to Americans of all socioeconomic levels.

Implications for Family Therapy

-The field of family therapy hasn’t given much attention to class issues

-Class is like the air we breath, we cannot see it or touch it but it is all around us and influencing our lives and relationships at all times

-Factors shaped by class: parenting styles, political affiliations, approaches to finances, temporal orientation, perceived locus of control.

-Therapists need to be in tune with how class has shaped the lives of their clients

Exploring Class Stories

-We all have a class story

-Class is often seen to be a product of income, but also reflects a complex interaction of factors like income, education,  occupation, and wealth (assets that result from an accumulation of income.

-Class stays can change throughout our lives, but class identities tend to remain more constant.

-Therapists need to explore their own class stories and identity

-recognize gaps between class status and class identity

Naming Class

-therapists need to bring awareness to class dynamics and integrate them into the therapy process (aka: find ways to talk to your clients about class)

-you can ask questions and have your client identify their class identity and status

Confusing Class biases and Prejudices

-it important to be aware of our class-based biases

-we are more likely to harbor negative biases against the poor, but it can be against any class

-media tries to convince us that our worth is determined by our material possessions

-We shouldn’t remain silent when prejudices and biases are voiced.  

-devaluation of the poor can be implied or explicit

-We can challenge our client’s stereotypes by questioning in ways that are not threatening and cause them to examine the stereotypes they are expressing. Through this, we can introduce another way of seeing things in addition to the client’s view

*For Clinical Examples, read the articles.

Re-visioning Class in Family Therapy

-FIRST STEP: Acknowledge that class matters!

There are a few more points on this one that I am working on typing up...

10/14/14: Principles and Practice SSA

Principles and Practices in Responding to SSA

Best Practice Standards

Essentially, be very respectful and careful to not ostracize any gay or lesbian clients.  Explore their sexuality with them.  Understand that the church doesn't condone acting on homosexual feelings, but still loves these individuals.  Lots of statements like:

1. Understand that experiencing SSA or identifying as LGBT does not constitute a mental illness
2. Strive to understand the unique problems and risks that exist for youth who experience SSA or gender dysphoria, including those who identify as LGBT. 
3. Understand and be able to differentiate between (1) the qualitative experience of same-sex attraction with varied and complex etiology and varied levels of persistence; (2) the persistence of such feelings in what might be termed an enduring sexual orientation; and (3) a subjective social identity that is adopted or formed around an individual’s sexuality. 

Specific Therpuetic Practices

• Why are clients in therapy?
• Help clients write a personal history
• Instead of "what's wrong with me?", change it to "what's wrong?"
• Extensive sexual history interviews.  Be cautious of making inferences.  
• Explore the distinctions between attraction, arousal, aversion, desire, intention, orientation, behavior, and identity in considering sexuality and sexual identity. 
• Treat any underlying conditions, or symptoms of the struggle-anxiety, depression, etc.  

Consideration for Spouses:

• It's NOT the spouse's fault. 
• Help spouse to not force intimacy, it'll make things worse.
• Individual therapy for spouses is really helpful.
• Psychoeducation about SSA

Considerations for Parents and Families

• Encourage love, empathy, and support.
• Help families try to understand and be curious about it.  Don't prejudge it.
• Remember, SSA doesn't constitute one's whole personality.  There are other facets of themselves to still relate to.
• Don't preach or blame!
• Explore how families will deal with holidays and big family gatherings with the partner of their SSA child.  
• Remember, family is a safe base for ALL its members.  

Hardy 2001: Soul Work - It's not our job to change the world, or is it?

This started out with a story of when the author was pulled over by a police officer.  The police officer was very demeaning.  For example, he'd say things like "Listen here boy" "You gettin' smart with me boy?" and other things like that.  He wouldn't refer to the author by his first name.  The cop used excessive force (e.g. calling for multiple cops to come back him up when there wasn't any problem.  Telling the author "Now you're gonna behave" once that happened) and was really demeaning.  He even referred to him as a nigger.  He got sassy with the cops and they beat him with their nightsticks until he blacked out.  He said he thought he was going to die.  He was taken to prison and charged with things like disturbing the peace, disorderly conduct, and "making terroristic threats against a police officer."

Survival Mentality
As a bit of background, the author was an executive director in AAMFT and was considered to be successful in his field, at yet he would come home and be a nervous wreck.  He had a ton of anxiety about what it would be like in prison.  His Dad would tell him to try and make a deal so that he wouldn't go to jail.  Admit to anything to avoid jail time.  That was the mentality in his family.  Don't mouth off to a white man.  If you do, they need to feel some sort of justice, even if what they are doing isn't just.  His Dad said "I had fashioned a life of caution and prudence, a ice dedicated to making myself inconspicuous to offending no one.  If I witnessed injustice, I rationalized it:  It hadn't been that bad."

The Anatomy of Silence
Talking about working with a hispanic client and the frustration that came with the power imbalance from the client's work.  The client said he always felt undervalued by his boss and even had his boss tell him "I come up with the ideas, you're here to haul the fertilizer."  The hispanic client felt voiceless.  Large groups don't have voices because their voices have been taken from them or they don't choose to use their voices.

The author was found not guilty on all charges, but he considers himself one of the lucky ones because he could afford 2 lawyers to help him with his case.

10/8/2014 Color Lines by Eubanks

10/8/2014 Color Lines by Eubanks

So when the author was a young child, found a picture of a man in the back of his parent's closet .  He didn't find out until later that the white man in the picture was his grandfather.  So he grew up identifying himself and his family as black, however, his mother was actually half white.

He talks about how when his mother was growing up she had potential to pass as a white person, her black mother had passed away and her white grandfather could have moved them and they could all have "passed as white".  But grandpa decided not to move and hide their mixed racial identity and although his mother's birth certificate said "white" she grew up identifying as black and going to black schools.

He also grew up in the American South in the 1950s and 1960s "where the idea of race and identity determined who you were and your place in the world--you were either black or white".  Also "Claiming mixed status meant you were either trying to be white (implying that black was inferior) or trying to pass for white (a dangerous business few spoke of openly) and doing so carried the risk of being labeled a racial traitor."

His mother never tried to "pass", in fact she got very upset when she saw one of her old school-mates who was working in a job a black man could never get.  She was so angry because "she saw this man as a traitor of the highest order.  He had turned back on the philosophy of racial uplift he had been taught at Tuskegee; the oppressed had assumed the role of oppressor."

So later he gets his DNA tested and he was really impacted by this.  The study he was part of showed that we are all so similar DNA wise and that most all of us identify as a race, but we are all mixed and have lots of "races" that are part of us.

So then he talks to his son about getting tested and he does.  However, his son isn't all the excited about the results.  Again the test showed nothing too crazy, but his son really didn't think about race the same way his father had.  He told his father, "they don't change the way I think of myself or the way I view the world.  When people ask me, 'what are you?' I generally tell them that I am American.  And given how diverse my background is, it's in my way of thinking, a background that could only come about in America.

Crazy fact: Alabama removed the constitutional prohibition against interracial marriage only in 2000, with 40 percent of Alabamians voting to keep the prohibition in place.

With Hispanics moving into America, it has made the "white" and "black" racial identities difficult as they fit into neither category.

The Touch of Human Kindness: Women and the Moral Center of Gravity

I've finished reading this article and I still can't decide how I feel about it.  Much of this article seemed to be a commentary on the feminism movement swinging too far the other way and actually devaluing women and men.  I'll write some of the best quotes in here, but most of it will be my thoughts.  I think this talk was given at a devotional or something like that.

There is a shift taking place.  "And so today, many people are skeptical about the very idea of "belonging" to a family.  After seeing family bonds as valuable ties that bind, some now see those ties as sheer bondage.  It feels like vast forces are eroding our foundations of personal peace, love, and human attachments.  Whatever held family relationships together suddenly feels weaker now.  At times it feels like a kind of ecological disaster, as if a vital organism somewhere in the environment is disappearing."

The moral influence of gender-specific gifts is being devalued in 4 main ways.

1. Motherhood is being devalued
1. This is pretty straight forward.  Motherhood is the spirit of self-sacrifice and that doesn't seem to be valued anymore.  Feminists are almost making the choice to be a mother out to be a negative.  Almost as if that women is choosing bondage.  This isn't true.  Really, men and women are suppose to be interdependent.  There were lots of good quotes on motherhood that I'm just too tired to type.  Sorry!
2. The gifts of sexual behavior is being devalued
1. This one was tough for me.  It almost seemed to reinforce the idea that women are the gatekeepers for sexuality.  It went on to say that wasn't the case, but then seemed to follow it up with all sorts of "Women, by demanding that a man can be chaste and now allowing it to be otherwise, you can change the world"
3. Society has stopped prizing women's innate yearning for permanent marriage bonds
1. Women are no longer demanding more permanent relationships from men and this has caused men to not want to be in permeant relationships.  The authors said that men naturally don't want to be in relationships and women should demand that of them.  I don't agree with that.
4. We are devaluing the gift of women for nurturing human relationships.
1. Women are great at nurturing human relationships.  Pitting women against each other makes this tough.  We aren't playing into the strengths of women.

There were more stories and examples in there, but that's the general idea of it.  It was pretty wordy, but that's the meat.