The Darker Side of Family Communication ─ The Harmful, the Morally Suspect, and the Socially Inappropriate

This volume brings together 14 essays on harmful, socially inappropriate, exploitative, or morally suspect communication in families. Contributors working in sociology, psychology, and mass communication in the US and Belgium first address individual traits, characteristics, and behaviors, such as mental health problems, parental communication patterns and children's levels of depression and suicidality, the effects of parents' and siblings' behaviors on children's eating disorders, decisions whether to medicate children for ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), and the effects of children's temperament and maternal well-being on the reliance on television to soothe children. They then consider dyadic relationships and family dynamics, including the relationship between marital hostility and parent-adolescent hostility, hurt feelings, intergenerational communication and elder abuse and neglect, and abused romantic partners' preferences for types of love communication; social, cultural, and historical structures like the coming-out process in religious families, the gendered nature of communication used by domestic violence victims, and the role of economic pressure in communication; and methodological issues. Annotation ©2016 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

Loreen N. Olson (PhD, University of Nebraska) is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is the lead author of The Dark Side of Family Communication and was previously the editor of the Journal of Family Communication.
Mark A. Fine (PhD, The Ohio State University) is Professor and Chair in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was previously the editor of Family Relations and the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, and he is the author or editor of numerous books on families, family diversity, divorce, and family theories.