Family form or Family Process? Reconsidering the Deficit Family Model Approach

This paper examines the utility of a deficit family model approach by questioning whether family form or familial process is more likely to contribute to children's positive personal and social development. A literature review of the recent work on the effects of alternative family forms (divorced families, father or mother absent families, remarriages, employed mother families) on children's personality, social behavior and school achievement suggests that it is more fruitful to consider the social interactional dynamics that lead to a given outcome than to focus on the form of the family as the critical independent variable.