Does family therapy promote what it sees as a ‘normal family'?

The previous point demonstrated that early versions of family therapy may have been in¯uenced by the context within which they emerged. This has continued to be an issue for family therapy. If we consider as an example the model of family transitions and the family life cycle that we discussed earlier, it would be easy to read this model as suggesting that `normal' families go through these stages. Therefore, it might imply that a family that does not do so is somehow `abnormal' and as such may be seen therapeutically as in need of `revision'. When we recognise that very few families in the western world conform to this model, and we notice the different types of family around the world, we see how absurd such a notion is.