Introduction
In early care and education, individuals make an effort to a full family engagement. Therefore, it is important to understand the frequency with which they face emotional problems and challenges with over-demanding families. In most cases, young people have issues with their closest peers. These events usually lead to anxiety and depression, which may, consequently, result in emotional distress (Thomas et al., 2017). Thus, living in harmony with others, especially in the family setting, is important for their wellbeing. Moreover, it is paramount to consider children as equal partners, especially by providing them with the best care to address their psychological needs. Families and caregivers are required to offer positive support, which is essential for developing good relationships among family members through ensuring quality care for new generations in early education programs.
The failure to do so would indicate severe consequences for the children in over-demanding families. They are related to the lack of proper guidance, which is essential for personality formation in the long run, and the attempts to substitute it with an excessively strict approach. As a result, the obsession with perfection transmitted to youngsters by their relatives brings harm to their socialization. In addition, these cases can be frustrating since communicating with disgruntled individuals and their parents who cannot understand the problem’s nature is not an easy task (Thomas et al., 2017). Therefore, it is vital to know how to cooperate with guardians with such high requirements and unduly rigid rules.
In most societies, parents tend to protect their children from external threats. Therefore, early care education experts are required to be sensitive to their perspectives. However, in some situations, parents feel overwhelmed, vulnerable, and even anxious to ensure adequate care for their children (Thomas et al., 2017). Besides, even if the family environment is generally favorable, there are instances when a child erroneously perceives their relatives’ help and rejects it. In this situation, this person’s family members develop a feeling of being threatened as they perceive it as a loss of control. They might also face the problem of reversed roles when children are better at taking care of others than their parents.
Subsequently, the adults become seemingly helpless and ascribe the emerged problem to their incompetence in the matter. This feeling adversely changes their attitude towards their children and leads to new conflicts. Parents may get angry over simple issues, which can be resolved peacefully, thereby worsening the relationships within a family. In some cases, waiting for the crisis to pass is the best strategy, whereas most events require timely intervention for finding a solution for the benefit of all participants.
Purpose and the Topic Selection
The purpose of the paper is to evaluate the frequency with which participants experience emotional problems and difficulties with over-demanding families. This topic has been selected due to the interest in why youngsters face this challenge and how they affect their lives in society. It was underpinned by the importance of revealing the number of individuals who believe that their family members’ demands are too high or irrational in terms of distributed responsibilities. This initiative can help detect the general tendency and predict the consequences of such improper conduct of parents for their children’s wellbeing in the future. Thus, the study will assess the events participants struggle with challenges concerning emotions and their correlation with the perceived strict rules.
Literature Review
Family ties are directly connected to one’s wellbeing over the life course. Therefore, it is essential to understand the quality of these relationships and their diversity when explaining the impact of parents on children in the long run (Thomas et al., 2017). It is also necessary to examine the effect of the proposed study on the complications, which might arise in the process, alongside its unexpected benefits in the context of varying family structures. These considerations should be complemented by particular attention to the social status of all participants.
Several pathways link family relationships to wellbeing of their members. There is a life-course perspective, which describes the characteristics of their connection and interdependence throughout their lives regardless of external circumstances (Thomas et al., 2017). This phenomenon is usually analyzed by the communication patterns at each stage, depending on their age and other conditions. For example, parents’ interactions with a child with his transition to adolescence remain interdependent, but the degree of their closeness differs. As a result, society begins to play a more significant role in developing young people, and the failure of adults to establish good relationships in advance leads to conflicts.
The quality of individuals’ communication in the family setting and, more specifically, parents’ support influence the future of their offspring. According to recent research, these factors alongside stressors are viewed as the core components of the stress process theory (Thomas et al., 2017). As follows from this approach, stress can affect mental health, while social support can be used as a protective resource. In addition, previous studies show that this negative factor is the main trigger of severe family issues (Thomas et al., 2017). Therefore, it should be carefully monitored to prevent complications promptly.
Individuals who experience emotional challenges or those who are victimized usually grow up in dysfunctional families. Most often, they are innocent and have no control over their toxic living environment. Besides, these people’s situations are characterized by the same set of emotional scarring problems caused by over-demanding families and the pain from their parents’ actions, words, and attitudes (Neppl et al., 2016). These circumstances lead to impairments in their self-development since the affected persons have to take care of themselves without outside assistance. What is more important, the ones suffering from the specified issues will likely accept the role of a caregiver and a parent for others instead of enjoying their childhood (Neppl et al., 2016). This reversed perception of duties might lead to the inability of a grown-up child to build healthy relationships.
The outcomes of this deviation from the normal development of a child include inner nervousness and the emergence of feelings, which they cannot explain or ascribe to a person or an event. These people also tend to report difficulties with their self-esteem and trust issues resulting from distress (Masarik & Conger, 2017). Meanwhile, the situation is less critical for relatively healthy families since they can successfully return to an appropriate communication style after working with a therapist. In contrast to them, over-demanding parents and their children have long-lasting problems as the latter’s needs were not met in the past due to toxic parental behavior, and this effect remains in their adulthood. Considering the above, it is necessary to understand that every family might face challenges of this nature, but their resolution for dysfunctional families is complicated by their specific characteristics.
Methods
For the purposes of this study, the GSS data is obtained in several ways. It is accepted through face-to-face interviews, and the GSS replicate score’s survey questions are regularly administered to be part of each GSS (Almquist et al., 2019). The core items comprise the background information about the respondents. The participants are random people whose addresses are selected scientifically across random households within the United States. The sample represents the general population of non-institutionalized English or Spanish American adults. The present study is funded by the National Science Foundation. Besides, the data are collected every two years and made available six months after collection. As for the two variables, an emotional problem and on-demand families, they were examined in 2018. At the time, each individual was sampled to respond to the survey questions through in-person or telephone interviews.
Hypothesis: Over-demanding families cause individuals to experience emotional problems and difficulties.
Findings
The frequency table for the emotional problem survey indicates that most answers were “never,” “rarely,” and “sometimes,” and they amounted to 727, 686, and 601, respectively. Besides, the number of options mentioned together was 2014 among the 2329 choices in total. Again, the valid percentages associated with the first three categories of the answers were 31.2%, 29.5%, and 25.8%. Moreover, the count and the good rates revealed a general tendency not to have noticeable issues or small numbers.
The frequency table for the demand survey indicated that most answers were “no, never,” because it amounted to 696 among the 1169 choices in total. Besides, the valid percentage of this category of responses was 59.5%. The count and the good amounts of answers showed that the general tendency was the lack of feeling of an inadequate number of responsibilities and the participants’ families’ demands to meet their expectations.
Table 1. Response Frequency Table for Emotional Problem Survey
Table 2. Response Frequency Table for Demands Survey
Discussion
The study evaluated the frequency with which the participants experienced the emotional problems and feelings of an inadequate number of responsibilities their families demanded to fulfill. The first survey questions reflected on how often the participants had been affected by emotional issues. The answer categories were as follows: “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” “often,” and “very often.” The total number of valid answers presented with a percentage of individuals in each category excluding the missing data was 2329. Besides, the frequency of answers “never” was 727, with a good percent of 31.2. The response “rarely” was given by 29.2% of respondents, whereas other categories amounted to 25.6%, 10.0%, and 3.4%, respectively.
The second survey questions demonstrated how often the participants experienced too many demands from their families. The answer categories were: “no, never,” “yes, but seldom,” “yes, sometimes,” “yes, often,” and “yes, very often.” The total number of the answer “no, never” was 696, with a good percent of 59.5. The response “yes, but seldom” was given by 19.5% of participants, whereas other categories accounted for 15.1%, 3.8%, and 2.1%, respectively.
Therefore, the survey shows that emotional problems are more common in the case of an unfavorable environment. It means that over-demanding families cause individuals to face difficulties of this nature more often than others. In this case, future research is necessary for expanding on the methods for improving relationships. A significant number of studies are devoted to examining this aspect of family life, and they report the interrelation between finding a solution to these issues and better health outcomes (Thomas et al., 2017). Thus, it is critical to understand how to ensure the wellbeing in the home setting for young generations and help them develop appropriate behavior.
References
Almquist, Y. B., Kvart, S., & Brännström, L. (2019). A practical guide to quantitative methods with SPSS. Department of Public Health Sciences: Stockholm University. Web.
Masarik, A. S., & Conger, R. D. (2017). Stress and child development: A review of the family stress model. Current Opinion in Psychology, 13, 85-90. Web.
Neppl, T. K., Senia, J. M., & Donnellan, M. B. (2016). Effects of economic hardship: Testing the family stress model over time. Journal of Family Psychology, 30(1), 12. Web.
Thomas, P. A., Liu, H., & Umberson, D. (2017). Family relationships and wellbeing. Innovation in Ageing, 1(3). Web.