7 - Relationships in the extended family and diverse family forms

Summary

Introduction

The great variety of familial relationships and the significance of kinship contacts are often underestimated, because most disciplines, including psychology, tend to view the family simply as the nuclear family. Yet the family includes not only parents and children but also a more or less extensive number of relatives who belong to various generations and form a variety of relationships. These are augmented by the special family relationships in stepfamilies, which are gaining in significance as a result of increasing divorce rates, as well as the relationships in foster families and adoptive families.

In this chapter I shall concentrate on these somewhat neglected relationships between not directly related family members. This raises questions about living conditions, structures, and constellations that contribute toward the satisfactory functioning of the respective families. After first making some clarifying preliminary remarks on family psychology, I shall then consider the somewhat rudimentary theoretical and empirical studies of the most important kin relationships and discuss the perspectives of future research.

Family psychological foundations

The family should be understood as a group of persons with a communal past, present, and future, the members of which are formally linked to one another by blood relationships, marital or nonmarital companionship, fostering, or adoption – directly or via relatives. Informal family members may be nonrelated persons with whom close, stable connections exist (e.g., cohabitants). Depending on the degree of relationship or bonds, the members have more or less intensive social and emotional relationships, often combined with a high density of interaction (see Kramer, 1985; Mühlfeld, 1984; Nave-Herz & Markefka, 1989; Neidhardt, 1975; Schneewind, 1987).