• Provides a framework for understanding the amazing complexities of human organizations, including families.
• Because families are systems, a change in one individual affects every other family member.
• It is important to see the interdepence between family members and focus on relationships at the family system level
• Do not see problems as one person's fault, but a problem with the system.

1. Interdenpendence
2. Wholeness
3. Patterns/Self-Regulation
4. Openness
5. Interactive complexity/punctuation
6. Complex relationships
7. Equifinality

• Interdependence serves as a centre piece of a system.
• The parts are so interelated that they are dependent on each other.
• All members of the family can be affected by changes with other members and/or the family.
• If one member withdraws it could bring remaining members closer.

• The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Emergent properties start to appear at a systemic level.
• Just because a family is described as something, it does not mean each individual has those traits.

• Each family system develops communication patterns that make life somewhat predictable.
• Families are generally predictable but that doesn't it will always be the same, or exhibit the same behaviours.
• System theory maintains that cause & effect are interchangeable.
• Confusion occurs when people assign varied meanings to behaviours.

• Human systems need interchange with other people, ideas and institutions in order to remain psychologically & physically functional.
• Sometimes families become more closed to help protect family from the harshness of the outside world.

• A particular final state may be accomplished in different ways and at different starting points.
• An open and adaptive family demonstrates equifinality.

Families interact with multiple subsystems that contribute to the whole family's functioning.

Members interact with a variety of outside influences, further adding to the complexity

• Thoeries that emphasize the significance of symbols, primarily language and social interaction by which people co-create meanings.
• People make sense of the world by constructing their own model of the social world and how it works.
• Language is viewed as critical to human society; therefore conversations serves to create and maintain reality.

• Focuses on the connection between symbols, or shared meanings and interactions via verbal and non-verbal communication.
• GEORGE MEAD

• Humans act towards things on the basis of the meanings that the things have for them.
• Meaning arises out of the process of interaction between people
• Meanings are handled in, and modified through an interpretative process influenced by ethnicity, gender, religion, socio-economic status, etc.

• Relationships are complex, messy and difficult at times.
• The struggles between family systems of meaning in family relationships that emerge from the struggle of different, often opposing discourses
• Struggles are not always apparent and often don't control relationship.
• Often are in the background and come to the forefront occasionally.
• Become more evident during times of change.
• Communication is key in creating and navigating ever-changing family relationships.
• MIKHAIL BAKHTIN

• Relationships revolve around the issues of autonomy & connection
• Openness-closedness contradiction
• Predictability-novelty contradiction

1. SELECTION: Make choices between opposites.
2. SEGMENTATION: Involves denying the interdependence of the contrasting elelments by uncoupling/separating them.
3. NEUTRALIZATION: Diluting the intensities of the contrasting poles.
4. CYCLIC ALTERATION: When family members chose one of the opposing poles at varying times.
5. REFRAMING: Transforming a perception so the apparent contradictions are not viewed as polar opposites.

• Human experience life in narrative form and find personal meanings for their sotires through interpretation, not objective observation.
• Narrative theory involves verbal and non-verbal actions, words and/or deeds.
• WALTER FISHER

1. Essential nature of humans is rooted in stories
2. People decide which stories to accept/reject
3. Standards for narrative rationality are coherance and fidelity
4. As humans choose among their stories, they create and recreate their lives.

• Focuses on the actual performance or telling of the family stories.
• Context, props, elaboration, who is present, who gets to talk, making additions
• As family members contruct stories through collaborative efforts they may agree/disagree, contradict or question each other, clarify, etc.

• Every family and family member has their private information that is only to be shared with certain persons.
• information is something you own.
• Places communication at the core of understanding how family members negotiate private information.
• Regulation of private information depends on the family's system of privacy rules that develop over time.
• SANDRA PETRONIO

1. BOUNDARY RULE FORMATION: Factors that regulate the flow of information between and among others. Gender, culture, motivation, context, risk-reward ratio.
2. BOUNDARY RULE USAGE: Used to decide what topics can be talked about, how to approach topics, and timing.
3. BOUNDARY RULE COORDINATION: Co-owners of information may explicitly or implicitly coordinate their privacy boundaries.
4. BOUNDARY TURBULENCE:Arise when privacy boundaries have not been coordinated properly.