Supporting Family Strengths: Orienting Policy and Practice toward the 21st Century

Abstract

Families today are under siege as they try to respond to economic, social, and cultural challenges beyond their control. The myths of economic self-sufficiency and psychological normalcy have engendered, in both public policy and family treatment, strategies that isolate, punish, and pathologize families. To move beyond these myths, it is necessary to draw more generous definitions of what constitutes family by placing families within the nurturing membrane of community life and actively seeking to support family strengths through imaginative and innovative policies and empowering practices.