¶ … Solution-Focused Approach to a Two-Career Home: What are the sources of stress in dual-career lifestyles of families? Apply a solution-focus approach to help these families cope effectively with stress.
Solution-focused therapy is a problem-based schema of family therapy that can offer an ideal way to help dual-career families cope with some of the inevitable stresses of hectic modern life. Rather than focus on the 'deeper issues,' in the family dynamic, such as relations between the genders or generations, solution-focus approaches are based in therapeutic inquiries that attempt to help couples find practical approaches and solutions to everyday problems. These problems may be as mundane as who does the chores or who is responsible for ferrying around the children to different activities. A counselor taking a solutions-focus approach might help the couple allocate chores and responsibilities in such a fashion that one parent is not always the burden-bearer or the person who says 'no' (usually the mother) while the other parent is absolved of such chores as the 'fun parent,' or the under-involved and under-informed parent.
However, unlike modalities of feminist therapy, rather than focus on the male-dominated structures of family life, the solutions-focus therapeutic rubric stresses that there is no one single agent of change, no single person who can be held primarily responsible for a positive treatment outcome in therapy or family life -- in other words, both parents must change and reallocate their responsibilities and time schedules to create a more viable life scenario for the two of them. A solution-focused counselor further assumes that change is constant and inevitable in family life -- thus the relationship between the couple that may have existed previously may shift with the introduction of a new child, or new responsibilities for one of the partners.
The successful solutions-oriented counselor does not stress that there must always be a 50/50 split of childrearing responsibilities for example -- this may not be desirable for a new mother, or for a woman who suddenly has more career stresses than her husband, despite the presence of a new baby. Rather, a workable model must be achieved that is unique to the couple, in their particular and immediate situation, and this situation may evolve and change over time, with new additions to the family and their career and personal schedules.
Works Cited
Goldenberg, Herbert. Counseling Today's Families. New York: Wadsworth, 2001.
