Healthy families are able to maintain a consistent level of involvement with one another, yet at the same time, not become too involved in each other’s lives. Therefore, the focus is on how much, and in what ways, family members show their interest and investment in each other.

The ways in which family members emotionally respond to each other reveals a lot about the quality of their relationships.

Family patterns of behavior are often handed down from one generation to the next. For example, have you ever caught yourself saying or doing something your parents did and wondered why you were doing it?

Effective communication is an important characteristic of strong, healthy families. Research identifies communication as an essential building block of strong marital, parent-child, and sibling relationships.

Roles play an extremely important part in healthy family functioning. Most researchers agree that the establishment of clear roles within a family is directly connected to a family’s ability to deal with day-to-day life, unforeseen crises, and the
normal changes that occur in families over time.

Problem-solving is the family’s ability to resolve problems on a level that maintains effective family functioning.