The Family System’s Theory is used in social and behavioral research and practice to understand the workings of family life. The social group that seems to be most universal and pervasive in the way it shapes human behavior is the family. For social workers, counselors, and psychologists, the growing awareness of the crucial impact of families on their clients has led to the development of the Family Systems Theory.

So, how the Family System’s Theory could be relevant to our daily work as early childhood educators?  To address this question I would say that in a similar way as any other child development theory works. For instance, in order for us to understand how children grow and develop, we study theories of child development; for understanding how the individuals within a family (including the child) make up the family unit, we study the Family System’s Theory.

The family systems approach is based on several basic assumptions:

• Each family is unique, due to the infinite variations in personal characteristics and cultural and ideological styles;
• The fundamental belief that a family is an interactional system whose component parts have constantly shifting boundaries and varying degrees of resistance to change; this interactional system is unique in characteristics and needs.
• Families must fulfill a variety of functions for each member, both collectively and individually, if each member is to grow and develop.
• Families pass through developmental and non-developmental changes that produce varying amounts of stress affecting all members.

These assumptions are diagrammed in the figure below. The components and their relationship to the whole system are as follows:

1. Family structure/characteristics consists of the descriptive characteristics of the family. This includes the nature of its membership and its cultural and ideological style. These characteristics are the input into the interactional system. They are the resources and the perception of the world that shape the way in which the family interacts. Some examples are the family’s cultural background, the family size, the age, their geographic location, the abilities, and the disabilities.
2. Family Interaction is the hub of the system. It is the process of interaction among family members on a daily basis that determines the rules by which the family is governed. This is the family’s level of cohesion, its adaptability, and its communication style. Finally, these interactions work together to serve individual members and collective family needs.
3. Family Function is the output of the interactional system. Utilizing the resources available through its structure (input), the family interacts to produce responses that fulfill its needs.
4. The Family Life Cycle introduces the element of change into the family system. As the family moves through time, developmental and non-developmental changes alter the family structure and/or the family’s needs. These, in turn, produce change in the way the family interacts

Understanding something as complex as a family unit is not an easy task. What does it mean to say that the family is a system? Webster (1979) defines a system as a “regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole.”  Certainly members of families are interrelated and interdependent parts of a whole.

Many writers in discussing the family as a system use the analogy of the heating system of a house. As Haley (1963) explains it, the furnace responds to the signal from the thermostat, but the thermostat responds to the temperature of the room which responds to the heat from the furnace. Each element serves a function in the total heating system. The elements are interdependent. For example, when the air becomes “too cold” the thermostat signals the furnace to give more heat, and when the air is “warm” the thermostat signals the furnace to shut off. The temperature in the house fluctuates within a narrow range around the setting of the thermostat.

The heating system has a kind of balance, or homeostasis, and all of the elements of the system (the furnace, the thermostat, the room temperature) are involved in maintaining that balance. As long as the setting remains the same, the temperature remains stable. Even when the setting is changed the elements of the heating system still relate to each other in the same way. There are rules which govern this process, and all parts of the system work to maintain the rules, in this case, the setting.

This analogy is comparable to the family system in which the elements, the family members, are dependent upon one another. In a similar manner, families develop a kind of balance in their relationship patterns.