Rules Marriage and Family Interaction HPERF258 Kathleen R. Gilbert

Social Norms Cultural beliefs that prescribe (order or direct) certain behaviors and proscribe (prohibit) others. Group norms of acceptable behavior Include Laws Mores Folkways

How Rules Emerge in Families Imported from family of origin/earlier family experiences Created new to meet novel situation of your new family form Influenced by media and other social systems Because family is a social system, they are created through negotiation and collaboration

Purpose of rules Provide system accountability Provide boundary maintenance External and internal Maintain regularity in system Patterns of relative predictability Reinforce family beliefs/ideology Reinforce family paradigm

Family Rules Act as guidelines for behavior and develop interactively with family beliefs Develop interactively with family ideology Begin at birth and develop through process of socialization

Redundancies Rules come to be known through redundancies, repetitive patterns of family interactions that reinforce the rules What are some examples of redundancies? Are all rules purposeful/ useful to the continuing existence of the family?

Small Group Work (pt. 1)  Draw up a list of at least ten rules you learned when you were a child.  Think specifically of rules that were generic to the family and those that were uniquely yours  for example, did you have rules about curfew that no one else did? Were there unique "girl rules" and "boy rules"? Then, discuss the following:

Small Group (pt. 2) What do these rules tell you about expectations and role assignments in your family? Have they changed as you have gotten older? How? Who made the rules in your family? How were the rules enforced? How easy or hard was it to change the rules? How were you affected by your family's rules as a child? What other kinds of rules were/are there in your family? (e.g., birth order rules, family role rules, age rules, etc.)