About Family Roles and Rules

    A role is an assumed or spoken agreement between two or more peo-ple about who is responsible to fill a set of specific needs among them. For example, family adults are responsible for providing food, shelter, safe-ty, guidance, and nurturance; and kids are responsible for learning how to leave home, and cooperating with their adults as they do.

    Rules are sets of shoulds, ought-to's, have-to's and musts that des-cribe how people are "supposed to" behave (perform their roles). All hu-man groups and personality subselves develop roles and rules automati-cally 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. 

    Family adults and kids must negotiate and stabilize many roles and re-lated rules over time, as they age and the environment changes. Unless adults are informed and effective communicators, this negotiation often causes stressful values conflicts and relationship triangles. Aware adults 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 adult job descriptions that spell out "who among us is responsible for what, and for whom?" Projects 9 (for stepfamilies) and 10 (all families) offer effective ways to do this over time.

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