Family stress can be challenging to deal with, but it is important not to ignore the problem. Family stress comes in many forms and affects emotional health in different ways. Some of the most common types of family stress are financial, caregiving, work-life balance and time management pressures. What causes these problems? The sources may include marital conflict or disagreements among siblings about parenting behavior and styles.
What is family stress?
Family stress is any source of stress that impacts at least one member of the family (or the whole household) at a particular time, including harmful effects on emotional attachments within the family and the emotional well-being of family members.
Family stress can also be considered equivalent to social strain with added dimensions such as an affective or cognitive appraisal of the experience.
Family stress is how a family member feels about a stressful situation. When there are problems, it affects everyone in the house, and their moods will be different for each person depending on who they’re close to or have the responsibility for caring about.
Whether it’s a family member passing away or just that nagging feeling of not doing anything right, stress can affect the entire family and one’s relationship with their spouse and children.
As a parent, sometimes, this manifests in anger towards others outside the home, while other times, we see these feelings bubbling over at home. When we’re feeling this way, it’s challenging to focus on anything, and as a result, the quality of our parenting suffers.
Family stress may also be defined as a broadly encompassing term with different dimensions, ranging from marital tension to parent-child conflict, siblings’ rivalry, to financial strain.
Family stress is generally seen as being manifested in the verbal and physical communications of its members. It has been documented that those with more family stress levels have lower health outcomes, such as higher level of chronic diseases or a lower sense of well-being.
Stressors include overcrowding and lack of privacy; change in the home or work environment; money problems; loss of employment or retirement benefits; domestic violence and chronic conflict with relatives.
Family stress occurs when the demands or expectations of family members exceed their abilities to satisfy those needs and maintain a healthy family relationship. The term does not refer to all stresses in families, but only that subset characterized by interpersonal tensions, power struggles, the distance between individuals and a sense of disappointment in one’s own family.
Family stress is the chronic strain of living in a family system containing one or more persons with mental illness, addiction, and otherwise unsafe to themselves or others. In addition, family members may also suffer from external stresses such as unemployment, single parenthood, domestic violence and parenting challenges.
Family stress is a type of chronic, ongoing emotional distress in which family members feel unable to cope with day-to-day life as caregiver duties pile up, partners fight more often than usual, parents’ health worsens, and children get more into trouble at school.
Pressures can be brought about by economic problems in the family, such as unemployment, underemployment or poverty.
Significant stress can also come from external sources due to the death of a spouse, separation or divorce, chronic illness and disability, among other conditions that affect the person’s ability to work outside of the home.
In addition, stress may be brought about by a lack of resources and support in the home. This can come from internal sources, such as mental illness or addiction among family members, external stressors, such as poverty or unemployment outside of the home. Outside factors can also create an atmosphere where children are neglected.
The more people who live under one roof with limited financial and emotional resources, the more likely family processes are compromised, leading to a lack of family cohesion.
To avoid becoming victims of an emotionally damaged familial system, one should incorporate healthy coping mechanisms into the daily family life. Also, one should try to implement more timeouts when things start getting heated up between individuals within the household, especially if violence is present during such incidents!
