Family Systems Flashcards
7 cards from real SSW practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Family Systems flashcards as text
Which family lifecycle stage is most relevant when a school social worker assists a family with a child transitioning to kindergarten?
Answer: Families with young children
Carter and McGoldrick's family lifecycle model identifies 'families with young children' as the stage involving tasks related to school entry and early childhood.
A school social worker learns that a family recently immigrated and the child translates for parents in all official situations. From a family systems lens, this PRIMARILY represents:
Answer: A parentification dynamic that may create stress on the child
Language brokering places adult-level cognitive and emotional demands on the child, creating parentification stress even when it is culturally normalized.
According to Minuchin, a family where members are overinvolved in each other's lives with diffuse boundaries is described as:
Answer: Enmeshed
Enmeshed families have boundaries that are too diffuse, with members overly involved in one another's functioning and limited individual autonomy.
When using narrative family therapy with a school-aged child, the social worker helps the child 'externalize' the problem. This means:
Answer: Separating the problem from the child's identity so the child can address it
Externalization (White & Epston) positions the problem as separate from the person, empowering the child to see themselves as capable of confronting it.
A school social worker is conducting a family assessment. Which indicator suggests HEALTHY family functioning?
Answer: Clear boundaries with flexibility to adapt to change
Healthy families maintain clear but permeable boundaries that allow for both structure and adaptability in response to developmental and environmental demands.
In Bowen theory, 'emotional cutoff' refers to:
Answer: Managing anxiety by physically or emotionally distancing from the family of origin
Emotional cutoff is Bowen's term for handling unresolved attachment to parents by distancing — physically or emotionally — which does not resolve the underlying fusion.
A school social worker notices the school-aged child always mediates between divorced parents who refuse to communicate directly. The child is MOST likely functioning as:
Answer: A parentified go-between caught in a cross-generational triangle
The child is triangulated into the parental subsystem, acting as a messenger and buffer — a cross-generational coalition that burdens the child inappropriately.