ABSTRACT
In the opening lines of their seminal book, Inside the Family, Kantor and Lehr (1975) remark, “We shall understand families when we understand how they manage the commonplace, that is, how they conduct themselves and interact in the familiar everyday surroundings of their own households” (p. ix). They go on to state, “It seems to us that if a theory or model of family behavior is to be viable, it must be applicable to ‘healthy’ or ‘normal’ family processes as well as to pathological ones” (p. ix). These words should resonate with developmental psychopathologists who take as a basic principle the consideration of normal and abnormal together (Rutter & Sroufe, 2000). In this chapter, we consider how family management of the commonplace contributes to health as well as to psychopathology. In order to understand these contributions, one must not only “get inside” family life, attending to its subtle nuances and individualized meaning, but also take a look as outsiders at how behavior and emotions are regulated in the family context.
