MULTICULTURAL AND CULTURE-SPECIFIC CONSIDERATIONS

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expectations, child-rearing practices, intergenerational relationships, family boundaries, and so forth, common in the dominant culture to which they have migrated. At the same time, immigrant families often must face changes in social level to lowerstatus jobs, ethnic prejudice and discrimination, the acceptance of minority status in the new land, and in some cases the fear of deportation.

Clearly, family therapists need to be culturally sensitive to the ever-increasing diversity among client families if they are to deal with such families effectively (Aponte & Wohl, 2000). On the other hand, they must be careful not to blindly adopt an ethnically focused view that stereotypes all members of a particular group as homogeneous and thus responds to a client family as if it were a cultural prototype. Here it is useful to note Falicov’s (1995b) reminder regarding ethnically diverse groups, that a variety of other factors—educational level, social class, religion, and stage of acculturation into American society, to name but a few—also influence family behavior patterns. Moreover, individual family members differ from each other in their degree of acculturation as well as in their adherence to cultural values (Sue, 1994).

Developing a Multicultural Framework

A multicultural outlook champions a general, culturally sensitive approach with families and urges therapists to expand their attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and skills to become more culturally literate and culturally competent (Sue et al., 1998). Culturally competent therapists take client cultural histories into account before undertaking assessments, forming judgments, and initiating intervention procedures. They assume

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there is no single theory of personality applicable to all families, but instead urge the adoption of a pluralistic outlook that calls for multiple perspectives rooted in, and sensitive to, particular cultures (Prochaska & Norcross, 1999).

More than learning about specific cultures, advocates of multiculturalism such as Pedersen (2000) urge the adoption of an open, flexible attitude about diverse cultures and cultural influences, but not one tied to any specific cultural group. At the same time, they advocate that therapists gain greater awareness of their own values, assumptions, and beliefs, understanding that these are not absolutes but arise from the therapist’s own cultural heritage. Sue and Sue (1999) emphasize the importance of adopting a broad viewpoint in working therapeutically with “culturally different” client populations, and the learning of a set of appropriate intervention techniques suited to diverse clients.

Cultural Specificity and Family Systems

Those family therapists who advocate a cultural-specific approach urge more detailed knowledge of common culturally based family patterns of unfamiliar groups.

McGoldrick, Giordano, and Pearce (2005), for example, have brought together several dozen experts to provide detailed knowledge about a wide variety of racial and ethnic groupings. Their description of different lifestyles and value systems underscore that we are increasingly a heterogeneous society, a pluralistic one made up of varying races and ethnic groups, as millions migrate here seeking a better life. One in every four Americans today is a person of color (Homma-True, Greene, Lopez, & Trimble, 1993).

In this regard, Hardy and Laszloffy (1995) have provided a“cultural genogram” to help clients and trainees alike trace their kinship (race, social class, gender, religion, family migration history) networks over several generations. Subjects are asked to explore their personal cultural issues and cultural identities by charting their family ethnicity going back several generations. What were their family’s migration patterns? Under what conditions did they enter the United States (immigration, political refugee, slavery, etc.)? Did race play a part? What is the family’s dominant religion? How are gender roles defined within the family? What prejudices and stereotypes does their family have about

itself and other groups? Answers to these and similar questions help therapists in training to better understand their own culture (“where they are coming from”) before attempting to work cross-culturally. In addition, individuals are urged to explore which aspects of their cultural heritage they feel most comfortable “owning” and which ones they have the most trouble“owning.”The technique can be used with client families to help broaden their self-understanding.

One way to assess the impact of a family’s cultural heritage on its identity is to learn as much as possible about that specific culture before assessing the family. This undertaking is valuable in determining the extent to which its members identify with their ethnic background and to ascertain the relationship of ethnicity issues to the presenting problem (Giordano & Carini-Giordano, 1995). Just as it would be a mistake to judge the family behavior of clients from another culture as deviant because it is unfamiliar, so therapists must also be careful not to overlook or minimize deviant behavior by simply attributing it to cultural differences.

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Taking gender, social class position, sexual orientation, religion, and racial or ethnic identification into account, a comprehensive understanding of a family’s development and current functioning must assess its cultural group’s kinship networks, socialization experiences, communication styles, typical male-female interactive patterns, the role of the extended family, and similar culturally linked attitudinal and behavioral arrangements (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 1993).

Family therapists must try to distinguish between a client family’s patterns that are universal (common to a wide variety of families), culture-specific (common to a group, such as African Americans or Cuban Americans or perhaps lesbian families), or idiosyncratic (unique to this particular family) in their assessment of family functioning. That is, they must discriminate between those family situations where cultural issues are relevant and those where cultural issues are tangential (Falicov, 1988). In this regard, Boyd-Franklin (2002) notes that as is common with many ethnic minority families, and unlike the dominant cultural norms, African Americans adhere to cultural values that stress a collective identity, family connectedness, and interdependence. More specifically, Boyd-Franklin’s research (Boyd-Franklin, Franklin, & Toussaint, 2000) with African American parents reveals their special concerns about their children, particularly their sons: survival issues such as racial profiling, the disproportionate number tracked into special education and juvenile justice programs, drugs and alcohol abuse, gangs, violence, and so forth.

Family therapists also must keep in mind that while it is typically helpful to gain awareness of differences that might be attributable to ethnicity or racial characteristics of a specific group, there is also a risk in assuming a sameness among families sharing a common cultural background. Thus, as Fontes and Thomas (1996) caution, a culture-specific family therapy outlook offers useful guidelines, but these guidelines should not be considered recipe books for working with individual families. Even if they share the same cultural background, different families have differing histories, may come from different social classes, or may show different degrees of acculturation. As an example, these authors observe that members of a Mexican American family may identify themselves primarily as Catholic, or Californian, or professional, or Democrat; their country of origin or cultural background may actually be peripheral to the way they live their lives. Ultimately, the therapist’s task is to understand how the client family developed and currently views its culture.

Family therapists must exercise caution before using norms from the majority cultural matrix in assessing the attitudes, beliefs, and transactional patterns of those whose cultural patterns differ from theirs. Beyond an appreciation of individual cultural influences, the family therapist must pay attention to what is unique about living as an ethnic minority—the language barriers, the cultural shock, the prejudice and discrimination, the feeling of powerlessness, the suspicion of institutions, the hopelessness, the rage. For example, in working with African American families, Thomas and Sillen (1974) point out that for White therapists to be insistently “color blind” to racial differences is no virtue if it means denial of differences in experiences, history, and social existence between themselves and their clients. The myth of sameness in effect denies the importance of color in the lives of African American families, and thus closes off an opportunity for therapists and family members to deal with sensitive race-related issues (Boyd-Franklin, 2003a).

Further, in working with acculturational and adaptational issues with immigrant families (Berry, 1997), therapists need to take care to distinguish between recently

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arrived immigrant families, immigrant American families (foreign-born parents, American-born or American-educated children), and immigrant-descendent families (Ho, 1987). Each has a specific set of adaptational problems—economic, educational, cognitive, affective, emotional. In regard to immigrant groups per se, their adaptation or acculturation is likely to be a function of four factors: (a) how long ago they arrived;

(b) the circumstances of their arrival; (c) the support system they found upon arrival; and (d) the degree of acceptance by the dominant culture that they found here. An added challenge in working therapeutically with an ethnic family is in understanding the process of change in their values, attitudes, and behavior as they continue to have contact with the new dominant culture and its different values and expectations (Santisteban, MuirMalcolm, Mitrani, & Szapocznik, 2002).

Ethnicity and the Transmission of Culture

Ethnicity refers to “the unique characteristics of a social grouping sharing national origin and linguistic and cultural traditions, with which members may or may not identify” (Kliman, 1994, p. 29). Members of an ethnic group are likely to share a common ancestry or country of origin, as well as a common group history. As in the case of racial membership, ethnic background profoundly affects a family’s everyday experiences; it surely is a fundamental determinant of how families establish and reinforce acceptable values, attitudes, behavior patterns, and modes of emotional expression. Transmitted over generations by the family, ethnicity patterns may surpass race, religion, or national origin in significance for the family, particularly because they represent the individual’s and the family’s psychological needs for identity and a sense of historical continuity.

Our ethnic background influences how we think, how we feel, how we work, how we relax, how we celebrate holidays and rituals, how we express our anxieties, and how we feel about illness or life and death. Ethnicity patterns, reinforced by family tradition and community membership, may operate in subtle ways, frequently outside of our awareness; but their impact may nevertheless be broad, deep, and potent. These patterns are apt to play a significant role throughout the family life cycle, although that influence may vary between groups as well as within a group itself. In some families who hold on to traditional ways, clinging to cohorts from their religious or cultural background and excluding all others, ethnic values and identifications may be particularly strong and likely to be retained for generations (Goldenberg & Goldenberg, 2002). In Box 3.3 we illustrate a culturally sensitive approach to a family of Mexican heritage. What is presented by the family as a school truancy problem can be seen in a broader social context as a sociocultural problem.

As we noted earlier, even the definition of family differs in different ethnic groups. For some (Anglos) the ideal is the intact nuclear family; for others (African American) kinship and the extended community of “brothers”or“sisters”take precedence. Latino American families maintain a web of relationships that extends across generations and provides a support network sustained by rules of mutual obligation. By way of contrast, intergenerational ties are less important for Irish American families, who tend not to call upon extended family members when in need because of a sense of shame or embarrassment (Hines, Garcia-Preto, McGoldrick, Almeida, & Weltman, 1999).

Family loyalty, unity, and honor, as well as family commitment, obligation, and responsibility, characterize most Latino American families, so much so that sacrifices of family members’ own needs or pleasures for the sake of the family are often encouraged, if not expected (McGoldrick, Garcia-Preto, Hines, & Lee, 1991). Similarly, the

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role flexibility. Beyond actual relatives, other non-blood“relatives”(neighbors, family friends, godparents, preachers) may be intimately involved (Diller, 1999). Especially among the poor, different family members may reside in different households, or two or more families (or parts of families) may live in one household for periods of time. The danger in these generalizations, of course, is that they run the risk of stereotyping. As we have noted earlier, and as Ho (1987) reminds us, there is not only considerable interethnic group diversity but also marked intraethnic group heterogeneity. It is important to remember that some families are more assimilated than others; some have long histories of intermarriage; some individuals rebel against their cultural mandates; and social class differences play a decisive role. The importance of delineating common family patterns is in emphasizing the oftenoverlooked role of ethnocultural factors in behavior (McGoldrick, Giordano, & Pearce, 2005).

What about families formed by intermarriage between partners from different racial or ethnic groups? In such cross-cultural arrangements, the inevitable accommodations in any marriage may be longer and more complicated as the differences in background between the pair widen (Falicov, 1995a). Diverse outlooks, differing expectations, differing experiences with societal rejection or acceptance or being marginalized, differing culturally determined gender-role experiences, and in some cases differing social class upbringings all need to be considered if the cross-cultural couple is to establish a balanced partnership that acknowledges and respects their cultural similarities and differences. A glimpse at the potential set of misunderstandings can be seen in the following passage:

An Italian American may interpret her Vermont Yankee husband’s and in-laws’ (unsolicited) respect for her privacy as cold and unloving; he may respond to his wife’s and in-laws’ (unsolicited) advice and emotional displays as incursions into his privacy. My WASP husband used to wonder why I phoned my brothers without news to relate; it broke my Jewish heart how rarely he called his sister. Even family members with similar backgrounds may need help in distinguishing assumptions based on culture, class, or family idiosyncrasy. They may interpret similar cultural norms differently, or expect partners and in-laws to share beliefs unique to their own families of origin. (Kliman, 1994, p. 31)

Before closing this section, it is necessary to remind ourselves that each therapist’s values are inevitably embedded in that person’s gender, ethnic, religious, and social class experiences and current circumstances. Since therapists inevitably expose these perspectives (biases?) in their interactions with their clients, they need to be aware of their own values and beliefs as they help client families to sort out theirs. Rather than oversimplified pictures to be taken at face value, the diverse ethnic profiles presented here are intended to call attention to the rich variety of human experiences and behavior—to emphasize that family therapists cannot ignore the influence of cultural idiosyncrasies in assessing and treating families they might otherwise label deviant or dysfunctional.

Poverty, Class, and Family Functioning

Every cultural group has social class divisions, and each social class is made up of members from different cultural groups. Men and women in each class experience life differently from one another, differently from their counterparts in other classes, and differently from others of the same class but from another cultural group.

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No one group is monolithic: not all African Americans are poor; not all Whites are middle-class. In actuality, most of the nation’s poor are White, although African Americans and other people of color are disproportionately represented among the poor. Increasingly it takes two parents—and two paychecks—to maintain a household’s grip on middle-class status in the United States today.

Social class differences act as primary dividers within a society. Not only do they largely determine access to many resources (including therapy), but they also are influential in shaping beliefs, values, and behaviors (Fontes & Thomas, 1996). As Kliman and Madsen (1999) illustrate, poor families do not expect grandparents to help with down payments, and middle-class families do not expect the parents of 18-year-olds to be their grandchildren’s caregivers. Despite our society’s cherished myth that we are all middle-class (or have equal opportunity to become middleclass), the facts indicate otherwise: over 14 percent of all American families live below the poverty line, and many more live just above it. According to Columbia University’s National Center for Children of Poverty, children living with unmarried mothers are five times more likely to be poor than those living with married parents. However, living with both parents offers no guarantee of clearing the poverty hurdle: more than one-third of children living in poverty were living with both parents (Healy, 1998).

Access to power is also largely determined by class membership. As Aponte (1994) observes:

The poor are dependent upon and vulnerable to the overreaching power of society. They cannot insulate themselves from society’s ills. They cannot buy their children private schooling when the public school fails. They cannot buy into an upscale neighborhood when their housing project becomes too dangerous. When society stumbles, its poorest citizens are tossed about and often crushed. (p. 8)

Poor African American families, embedded in a context of chronic unemployment and discrimination, are particularly limited in their abilities to function in ways that permit family members to thrive. The decline in marriage rates among African Americans, coupled with the increased number of teenage mothers, has added to their family crises.

Marian Edelman (1987), founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, argues that the interrelated factors of poverty, male joblessness, and poor, female-headed households operate together to perpetuate generations of membership in America’s underclass. In a seemingly endless cycle, the loosening of family structure has led to increased out- of-wedlock births and, correspondingly, increased child poverty; joblessness and its resulting poverty have led to a decline in the number of marriageable males and the further weakening of the family structure. Thus children are poor, according to Edelman’s analysis, not only because many live in fatherless homes but also because the single parents with whom they live are likely to be unemployed or, if employed, to earn low wages.

Aponte (1987), too, emphasizes the erosion of family structure and the creation of what he terms underorganized (rather than disorganized) families. Living in such situations through generations, families of whatever racial background“learn to view as normal their own impotence” (p. 2). They are forced to accept their dependence upon the community’s network of social institutions (welfare, public housing, publicly funded health care) without the necessary political or economic power to influence outcomes. Where fatherless homes predominate, roles lose their distinctiveness, and children may grow up too quickly while being at the same time intellectually and emotionally stunted in development.