FAMILY STRUCTURE AND LEGACIES

Symbols for drawing the genogram or family tree:

Female symbol - name, age

Male symbol - name, age

Unknown gender
Married - add the year or ages/ De facto relationship - commencement date
or ages
Separation - date or ages

Divorce - date or ages

List children in birth order and put names and ages either within the symbol or underneath.

Death - a small cross in the corner of the symbol (record date if known)
Dotted circle - this can be used to enclose the members living together
currently, for example, who the young person is living with.

Conflictual relationship

Very close

Distant relationship

FAMILY STRUCTURE
Different kinds of family structures:

• Nuclear family: A family unit consisting of at most a father, mother, and

dependent children. It is considered the “traditional” family.
• Extended family: A family consisting of parents and children, along with
either grandparents, grandchildren, aunts or uncles, cousins, etc. In some
circumstances, the extended family comes to live either with or in place of a
member of the nuclear family.
• Stepfamilies: Two families brought together due to divorce, separation, and
remarriage.
• Single parent family: This can be either a father or a mother who is singly
responsible for the raising of a child. The child can be by birth or adoption.
They may be a single parent by choice or by life circumstances. The other
parent may have been part of the family at one time or not at all.
• Adoptive family: A family where one or more of the children has been
adopted. Any structure of the family may also be an adoptive family.
• Bi-racial or multi-racial family: A family where the parents are members of
different racial identity groups.
• Trans-racial adoptive family: A family where the adopted child is of a
different racial identity group than the parents.
 • Blended family: A family that consists of members from two (or more)
previous families.
• Conditionally separated families: A family member is separated from the
rest of the family. This may be due to employment far away; military service;
incarceration; hospitalization. They remain significant members of the family.
• Foster family: A family where one or more of the children is legally a
temporary member of the household. This “temporary” period may be as
short as a few days or as long as the child’s entire childhood.
• Gay or Lesbian family: A family where one or both parents’ sexual
orientation is gay or lesbian. This may be a two-parent family, an adoptive
family, a single-parent family, or an extended family.
• Immigrant family: A family where the parents have immigrated to another
country as adults. Their children may or may not be immigrants. Some family
members may continue to live in the country of origin, but still, be significant
figures in the life of the child.
• Migrant family: A family that moves regularly to places where they have
employment. The most common form of migrant family is farmworkers who
move with the crop seasons. Children may have a relatively stable
community of people who move at the same time - or the family may know
no one in each new setting. Military families may also lead a migrant life,
with frequent relocation, often on short notice.

FAMILY LEGACIES
The Emotional Legacy
In order to prosper, our children need an enduring sense of security and
stability nurtured in an environment of safety and love.

The Social Legacy

To really succeed in life, our children need to learn more than management
techniques, accounting, reading, writing, and geometry. They need to learn the fine
art of relating to people. If they learn how to relate well to others, they'll have an edge
in the game of life.

The Spiritual Legacy

The Spiritual Legacy is overlooked by many, but that's a mistake. As spiritual
beings, we adopt attitudes and beliefs about spiritual matters from one source or
another. As parents, we need to take the initiative and present our faith to our
children.

The Emotional Legacy

Sadly, many of us struggle to overcome a negative emotional legacy that
hinders our ability to cope with the inevitable struggles of life. But imagine yourself
giving warm family memories to your child.
You can create an atmosphere that provides a child's fragile spirit with the
nourishment and support needed for healthy emotional growth. It will require time
and consistency to develop a sense of emotional wholeness, but the rewards are
great.
A strong emotional legacy:
 • Provides a safe environment in which deep emotional roots can grow.
• Fosters confidence through stability.
• Conveys a tone of trusting support.
• Nurtures a strong sense of positive identity.
• Create a “resting place” for the soul.
• Demonstrates unconditional love.
Which characteristics would you like to build into the legacy you pass along to
your children? Even if you don't hit the exact mark, setting up the right target is an
important first step.

The Social Legacy

In order to prosper, our children need to gain the insights and social skills
necessary to cultivate healthy, stable relationships. As children mature, they must
learn to relate to family members, teachers, peers and friends. Eventually they must
learn to relate to co-workers and many other types of people such as salespeople,
bankers, mechanics and bosses.
Nowhere can appropriate social interaction and relationships be demonstrated
more effectively than in the home. At home you learned and your children will learn
lessons about respect, courtesy, love and involvement. Our modelling as parents
plays a key role in passing on a strong social legacy. Key building blocks of children's
social legacy include:
• Respect, beginning with themselves and working out to other people.
• Responsibility, fostered by respect for themselves that is cultivated by
assigning children duties within the family making them accountable for their
actions, and giving them room to make wrong choices once in a while.
• Unconditional love and acceptance by their parents, combined with
conditional acceptance when the parent’s discipline for bad behavior or
actions.
• The setting of social boundaries concerning how to relate to God, authority,
peers, the environment and siblings.
• Rules that are given within a loving relationship

The Spiritual Legacy

Parents who successfully pass along a spiritual legacy to their children model
and reinforce the unseen realities of the godly life. We must recognize that passing a
spiritual legacy means more than encouraging our children to attend church, as
important as that is. The church is there to support parents in raising their children
but it cannot do the raising; only parents can.
The same principle applies to spiritual matters. Parents are primary in spiritual
upbringing, not secondary. This is especially true when considering that children,
particularly young children, perceive God the way they perceive their parents. If their
parents are loving, affirming, forgiving and yet strong in what they believe, children
will think of God that way. He is someone who cares, who is principled and who
loves them above all else.

Influence Factors
• Skills and Abilities - Considering your skills and abilities and how they may
fit a particular occupation comes out of one of the earliest career
 development fields, Trait-Factor theories, and is still used today. These
theories recommend creating occupational profiles for specific jobs as well
as identifying individual differences, matching individuals to occupations
based on these differences. You can identify activities you enjoy and those
in which you have a level of competency though a formal assessment.
• Interest and Personality Type - Holland's Career Typology is a widely
used to connect personality types and career fields. This theory establishes
a classification system that matches personality characteristics and personal
preferences to job characteristics. The Holland Codes are six
personality/career types that help describe a wide range of occupations.
• Life Roles - Being a worker is just one of your life roles, in addition to others
such as, student, parent, and child. Super's Lifespan theory directly
addresses the fact that we each play multiple roles in our lives and that
these roles change over the course of our lives. How we think about
ourselves in these roles, their requirements of them, and the external forces
that affect them, may influence how we look at careers in general and how
we make choices for ourselves.
• Previous Experiences - Krumboltz's Social Learning and Planned
Happenstance theories address factors related to our experiences with
others and in previous work situations. Having positive experiences and role
models working in specific careers may influence the set of careers we
consider as options for ourselves. One aspect of Social Cognitive Career
Theory addresses the fact that we are likely to consider continuing a
particular task if we have had a positive experience doing it. In this way, we
focus on areas in which we have had proven success and achieved positive
self-esteem.
• Culture- Racial and ethnic background, as well as the culture of an
individual's regional area, local community, and extended family, may impact
career decisions. Our culture often shapes our values and expectations as
they relate to many parts of our lives, including jobs and careers.
Multicultural career counselling has emerged as a specialized field to take
these influences into consideration when counselling clients and students.
We can't attribute the predominant characteristics of a culture to any one of
its individuals, but having an awareness of the values and expectations of
our culture may help us understand how we make our career choices.
• Gender - Both men and women have experienced career-related
stereotypes. Gender is a factor included in multiple career development
theories and approaches including, Social Learning and multicultural career
counselling. How we view ourselves as individuals may influence both the
opportunities and barriers we perceive as we make career decisions.
Studies of gender and career development are ongoing as roles of men and
women in the workforce, and in higher education, evolve.
• Social and Economic Conditions - All of our career choices take place
within the context of society and the economy. Several career theories, such
as Social Cognitive Career Theory and Social Learning, address this context
in addition to other factors. Events that take place in our lives may affect the
choices available to us and even dictate our choices to a certain degree.
 Changes in the economy and resulting job market may also affect how our
careers develop.
• Childhood Fantasies - What do you want to be when you grow-up? You
may remember this question from your childhood, and it may have helped
shape how you thought about careers then, as well as later in life. Career
counselling theories are expanding as programs related to career choice are
developed for all ages, including the very young. Ginzberg proposed a
theory that describes three life stages related to career development. The
first stage, fantasy, where early ideas about careers are formed, takes place
up to age 11.

SUPER’S CAREER DEVELOPMENT THEORY

Donald Super influenced the idea that developing a sense of self and
realize that you change over time is important when planning your career. One of
Donald Super's greatest contributions to career development has been his
emphasis on the importance of the development of self-concept. According to
Super, self-concept changes over time, and develops as a result of experience. As
such, career development is lifelong.
Super developed the theories and work of colleague Eli Ginzberg.
Ginzberg’s theory enumerated three stages in a person’s career development:
Fantasy (from birth to 11 years old), Tentative (from 11-17 years old), and
Realistic (after age 17). Super thought that Ginzberg’s work had weaknesses,
which he wanted to address. Super extended Ginzberg’s life and career
development stages from three to five, and included different sub stages.
Super argues that occupational preferences and competencies, along with
an individual’s life situations, all change with time and experience. Super developed
the concept of vocational maturity, which may or may not correspond to
chronological age: people cycle through each of these stages when they go through
career transitions.
Super’s five life and career development stages
 Super states that in making a vocational choice individual are expressing
their self-concept, or understanding of self, which evolves over time. People seek
career satisfaction through work roles in which they can express themselves and
further implement and develop their self-concept.