Overview

Family Stress: Understanding and Helping Families in Diverse Circumstances equips future helping professionals with the knowledge and skillsets they need to assist families in facing a variety of stressors and challenges. The text helps students learn key concepts related to family stress and enhances their abilities to make connections among theory, practice, and diverse family circumstances associated with stress. They explore their own experiences related to stress and trauma, build their personal resilience, and learn to empathize with and empower families from various backgrounds and situations facing stressful circumstances. Opening chapters introduce theoretical, personal, and professional elements of family stress and also familiarize students with contextual influences related to gender, ethnicity, sexuality, age, class, religion, and other characteristics that can distinguish the life experiences of diverse families. Subsequent chapters highlight specific topics that illustrate various foundational and contextual concepts and help prepare students to work with diverse populations in culturally sensitive ways. The book provides students with a deeper understanding of family stress as a result of minority status, economic hardship and poverty, infertility and adoption-related stressors, intimate partner abuse and child maltreatment, family structure complexity, disability, addiction, loss, large-scale disasters, and more. Written to help students better understand the complexities of contemporary family life and its related stressors, Family Stress is an ideal textbook for undergraduate and graduate-level courses in family studies, social work, and other disciplines related to families.