3 Mindfulness and Family Stress
Suzanne Klatt and Anthony G. James
Families and Mindfulness
The area of family stress includes many components, but central in the study, understanding, and explanation of the scholarship on family stress is how families respond to stress and stressors. This chapter focuses on the role of mindfulness, one of several contemplative practices, in how families and their members respond (or react) to stress and stressors. We approach this chapter with a discussion of the current family science literature on stress and coping (or change) followed by an introduction to mindfulness. We then bring this discussion to life by providing two case studies highlighting how mindfulness practices can be an effective tool to help families cope with stress and stressors.
Key to this discussion is the effectiveness of the tool, mindfulness in this case. All families face stress, and thus, have to respond to that stress (or stressors) in some way or another. What matters is the effectiveness of the tool being tried. We hope to make a case for the value of mindfulness as a tool to help families best adapt to changing environments. First, we review some models for understanding family stress.
Family Stress Literature
Family stress is neither inherently positive nor negative; but rather an event (stress) initiating the need to change or respond (See Price, Bush, Price & McKenry, Chapter 1 in this Volume). The influence that a particular stressor (or pressure to change) has on a family system depends on a wide range of factors. These include, most importantly, the family’s perception of the stressor, the coping ability of individual members and the family system as a whole, access to resources both within the family system and external to the family, and characteristics of the stressor itself (Lavee, 2013; McCubbin & McCubbin, 2013).
As previously mentioned the family stress literature consists primarily of two broad components: (1) stressful events or experiences that families may have, and (2) how families respond to or cope with said experiences. This chapter will focus more on how families adapt or respond to stressful experiences, whether chronic or acute. The prevailing thought is that the more tools or resources that families have to adapt to stress the better off they are going to be. Mindfulness is one such tool at the disposal of families, and we will discuss here the research and theory that place mindfulness in the context of family stress literature. Moreover, our approach will show how mindfulness can fit into prominent family stress theories (ABC-X and AaBbCc-Xx; Hill, 1958; McCubbin & Patterson, 1983).
ABC-X Models
For both models, resources to adapt to stress are prominent features. Because both are covered in more depth earlier in the current volume, we only briefly describe them here. The A in the ABC-X model represents the stressful event, the B represents the resources that families have to respond to said event, the C represents the perspective of the event that the family has, and “X” represents the resultant crises that the family experiences having undergone the stressful event. An extension of this model was put forth by McCubbin and Patterson (1983) and essentially has the same components except it adds to it the fact that families can experience multiple stressors overtime. One of the assumptions of the ABC-X model is that families experience a stressful event, they address it or adapt and move on. However, many would agree that families can have chronic stressors or that one stress can lead to another stress and this causes what is known as stress pileup. Thus, a new model was needed to account for the multiple stressors that families can experience, the demand on existing resources from previous or other stressors family experience, how the new plus existing stressors changes the perspective of the current stressful event, and the accumulation of family adjustments to the combined stressors (McCubbin & Patterson, 1983).
Minority Stress Models
A prominent framework for understanding how minority families (in the United States) experience stress is the mundane extreme environmental stress theory (MEES; Peters & Massey, 1983). This theory used mundane in the sense that bigotry and discrimination was so common and ubiquitous, that it become mundane in the daily lives of minority groups, but also created an extreme environment for families embedded in such a context (Carroll, 1998). To be sure, the previously cited studies focused specifically on African American families, and how existing in such a mundane extreme environment deteriorates the health and well-being of these families. McNeil Smith and Landor (2018) expanded on this framework, via the sociocultural family stress model. This model included an intersectional approach, which allows broader application to many structures of families and the many processes within them.
Adjacent Explanatory Theory and Concepts
Several other theories or concepts, beyond specific stress models, will be important to content presented in this chapter. We want to provide readers with some background information on this content prior to the application of it later in the chapter.
Bioecological Theory
Though bioecological theory is a theory of human development, and not specifically a family stress theory, it can be used to understand how stress potentially influences stress that people experience or how they respond to said stress. Within this theory is the PPCT (proximal processes, person characteristics, context, time) model, which specifies the variety of human development (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006). Proximal processes refers to the daily interactions people have that shape their development. Person characteristics refers to the idiosyncratic qualities people bring to human interactions that regulate their developmental and lived experiences. For instance, being a woman walking alone at night has different potential relative to a man repeating that action under similar conditions. In this case, the person characteristic gender presents different potentials under the same action. Context, in the model, refers to the multiple layers of context people are embedded (e.g., micro, meso, exo, macro). Finally, context can refer to the opportunities and constraints presented to individuals in a given historical time or in a given developmental period.
Stress Duration
Again, many people experience stress but how they experience stress varies. Two concepts important to this literature concern how long individuals or families experience stress. Stress can be chronic (e.g., a person living with asthma is a chronic stressor) or acute (e.g., a person fractures their arm, which is treated and then healed). Whether stress is chronic or acute has implications for the extent to which it influences family dynamics.
Conceptualizing Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a difficult concept to define (Van Dam et al., 2018) and there is not a full consensus on its definition (Anaˉlayo, 2016). Contemporary messages about mindfulness lead us to believe it is a panacea for all of our woes. The term frequently appears in media and pop culture as a noun, verb, adverb, and adjective. Time magazine covers (2014, 2016) featuring young thin white women seemingly meditating in ethereal poses, and media messages reproducing consumerism via individual wellness panaceas is not the message we hope to reproduce here. We recognize mindfulness as connected to a rich, deep cultural and religious history, and endeavor to shift toward a critically conscious (Freire, 1970) approach to mindfulness and family stress by recognizing the systems of oppression particular families face. In this chapter, we acknowledge cultural representations of mindfulness and do our best to conceptualize some of the ways mindfulness is situated within a Western secular format as a program, informal or formal practice, state (Lau, Bishop, Segal, Buis,
