The Family Focus section of this issue of NCFR Report — "Families as Catalysts" — includes articles that address how families are able to contribute to their own wellbeing and to their communities and the larger world.

This study assessed secondborn adolescents' perceptions of changes in the allocation of family resources following their firstborn siblings' departure from home after high school, and whether perceived changes were related to changes over 1 year in secondborns' academic functioning. Participants were secondborn siblings (mean age = 16.58, SD = 0.91) from 115 families in which the older sibling had left the family home in the previous year. Allocation of resources was measured via coded qualitative interviews. Most (77%) secondborns reported increases in at least one type of family resource (i.e., parental companionship, attention, material goods), and many reported an increase in multiple types of resources in the year following their older sibling's departure. Consistent with resource dilution theory, perceptions of increases in fathers' companionship, fathers' attention, and mothers' companionship were related to improvements over time in secondborns' academic functioning.

Research on children’s and early adolescents’ time use indicates that siblings are fixtures in each other’s lives. Given their ubiquity, it is surprising that the ways in which brothers and sisters influence each other’s development has been relatively neglected. In comparison, over the past 25 years there has been over 45 times more work on parenting processes and nearly seven times more on peer influences (McHale et al. 2012) than on siblings. An emerging body of work, however, documents that siblings are indeed important and can influence one another in a variety of ways. The goals of this essay are to review the main pathways through which siblings influence each other’s development. Specifically, we highlight two broad avenues through which siblings influence each other: (a) directly – through observation and daily interactions with one another, as well as modeling and differentiation processes; and (b) indirectly – by virtue of their impact on the larger family system, in ...

This article will address how a physiological understanding of trauma can be applied to working with couples in which an affair has initiated trauma symptoms. A brief introduction related to trauma symptomology, as well as its impact on the body, will be included. A case example will demonstrate how a counselor worked with a betrayed partner struggling with ongoing trauma symptoms. Finally, a brief discussion on why this process is particularly fitting for Adlerian clinicians will be presented.

Excerpt: Dr. Augustus Napier, a respected pioneerin the field of family therapy, received his doctral degree in clinical psychology from the University of North Carolina.

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Family clinicians and researchers speculate that stepparents’ ability to bond with stepchildren may be critical to couple, family, and stepparent-stepchild relationships. Using an Actor-Partner Interdependence Model to analyze data from 238 married stepfamily couples we evaluated how repartnered parents’ and stepparents’ perceptions of stepparents’ affinity-seeking behaviors were associated with their own and their spouse’s marital satisfaction, perceptions of stepparent-stepchild conflict, and stepfamily cohesion. Preliminary results show significant actor effects for parents across all outcomes and two significant partner effects. For stepparents, there were no significant partner effects, but some actor effects. Implications will be discussed.

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