ABSTRACT
All families experience stress from time to time. Stressors may cause the family to increase their interactions with each other in order to cope with the event and to reorganize their relationships. In some cases, stressors pull family members away from each other physically and/or psychologically, thus decreasing their interactions. In either case, family stressors are a powerful force in shaping family communication and relationships. As discussed in chapter 10, family stressors can be roughly organized into those that are normative, or predictable, versus those that are nonnormative, or unpredictable. Earlier we noted that this distinction is somewhat imperfect as certain “nonnormative” family stressors such as divorce are fairly common and predictable, whereas other “normative” family stressors such as raising and launching children do not happen in every family. Nevertheless, this distinction is prominent in the family science literature and provides a useful framework for organizing and understanding the unique aspects of different family stressors.
