How can practitioners use family systems thinking to help families of young children with delays or disabilities? Give an example.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Using a family systems approach allows practitioners to realize that events and changes in one part (subsystem) of the family may directly or indirectly affect other parts (subsystems) in the family. Thus, practitioners need to look at the whole family system and how it interacts to understand more about the families and the children they are serving. For example, if a mother and father both used to participate in a children's education plan, but then the father gets a new job and cannot participate as much, this changes the family dynamic in both seen and unseen ways. Maybe the child seems more distracted or unengaged since the father has stopped participating. In this case, a practitioner might choose to bring in a sibling to participate in place of the father or he or she may rearrange meetings to a new time that accommodates the father's schedule.