About Family Roles and Rules

    A role is an assumed or spoken agreement between two or more people about who is responsible to fill a set of specific needs among them. For example, co-parents are responsible for providing food, shelter, safety, and nurturance; and kids are responsible for learning how to leave home, and cooperating with their adults while they do.

    Rules are sets of shoulds, ought-to's, have-to's and musts that describe how people are "supposed to" behave (perform their roles). All groups of people and personality subselves develop roles and rules automatically to fill primal needs for order and security. How these develop, and how well the roles and rules fill everyone's primary needs determine a group's nurturance level, security, and harmony. 

    Co-parents and kids must negotiate and stabilize many new roles and related rules after re/marriage and/or cohabiting and merging three or more biofamilies. This complex, multi-year process always causes webs of major personal and interpersonal conflicts among adults and kids. Aware co-parents can minimize these conflicts by (a) expecting them, (b) learning how do identify everyone's primary (vs. surface) needs as teammates, and (c) learning how to resolve their role, rule, and other conflicts effectively. A valuable resource that can come from this challenging process is a set of collectively acceptable co-parent job descriptions that spell out "who among us is responsible for what, and for whom?" Projects 9  and 10 offer effective ways to do this over time.

Project 9 link-index  /  Project 10 link-index  /   merger guidebook   /  close