ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 considers the effects of gendered communication on family relationships. Because the family provides its members with their earliest socialization experiences, the chapter recognizes the family as a gendered-person factory and a primary source of gender identity.
The chapter defines what a family is, explores different kinds of families, and discusses how a family’s themes reveal its values and serve as a basis for the kinds of communication that the family enacts. Also looked at are the family’s role in influencing sex-role development, parent–child attitudes, and interaction preferences, along with issues of empathy, power, intimacy, and autonomy or dependence.
The nature of the family unit is diversifying, and the chapter offers alternative models of family interaction observing that families continue to reinvent themselves to reflect the dynamics of twenty-first-century life.
