(e.g., e-mails, texts, social media), financial challenges, and everyday hassles (e.g., errands, commuting, appointments) are frequently identified as making daily life more complicated and impersonal. Family roles are more fluid than the past, resulting in fewer social norms and a lack of support. Families have become more diverse as a result of changing family structures (e.g, divorce, single-parent families, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer-parent families, custodial grandfamilies, remarriage, cohabitation, intergenerational reciprocity), immigration, economics (e.g., increased cost of living and two earner families), geographic mobility, and other macro level factors. In addition to natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes) and societal stressors (e.g., discrimination based on race, religious beliefs, gender, and sexual orientation), U.S. families are facing the reality of wars involving American troops overseas, the threat of nuclear attack, and the reality of an ever-changing, and often divisive, political landscape. Additionally, contemporary families are still experiencing economic insecurity and stress due to the Great Recession and the associated economic downturn in the global economy (see Bartholomae & Fox, Chapter 11 in this volume). Sobering financial losses in pensions, investments, and savings accounts, employment instability, income volatility, and rising unsecured debt contribute to the financial struggle of individuals and families. Consider the accumulation of these events and it quickly becomes apparent that stress is a part of everyday life.
Families often face many unique problems, not because of one identifiable crisis, event, or situation, but because of continuous everyday societal change. Technology, for example, has enhanced everyday life in many ways but it has also brought about an increasingly overextended population that is bombarded with ongoing tweets, texts, and work-related demands. From an economic standpoint, members of the younger generation, in many families, are struggling with an increase in cost of living and overwhelming debt as they establish their independence. They are also faced with the reality that their life experiences may involve fewer opportunities and resources as compared to their parents and grandparents. At the same time, due to medical advancements improving longevity and quality of life as we age, a demographic of adult children is faced with the undefined responsibilities of caregiving for their elders. Finally, the fluidity of family structures requires most families deal with cumulative, and sometime coinciding structural transitions during the life course (Teachman, Tedrow, & Kim, 2013; Walsh, 2013b).
All families experience stress as a result of change or pressure to change, whether or not change is “good” or “bad.” The impact of change or the pressure to change depends on the family’s perception of the situation as well as their coping abilities (Boss, 2013; Lavee, 2013; McCubbin & McCubbin, 2013). Boss (1988, 2002) defines family stress as pressure or tension on the status quo—a disturbance of the family’s steady state. Life transitions and events often provide an essential condition for psychological development, and family stress is perceived as inevitable and normal or even desirable since people and, therefore, families, must develop, mature, and change over time. With change comes disturbance in the family system and pressure, what is termed stress (Boss, 2002; Boss, Bryant, & Mancini, 2017; Lavee, 2013). Changes affecting families also occur externally (e.g., unemployment, natural disasters, war, acts of terrorism), and these also create stress in family systems. This instability becomes problematic only when the degree of stress in a family system reaches a level at which family members becomes dissatisfied or show symptoms of decreased functioning (i.e., ability to carry out regular routines and interactions that maintain stability).
The Study of Family Stress and Change
Compared to the long history of research on stress and coping, theoretical and clinical interest in family-related stress is a rather recent phenomenon. Research on family stress and coping gradually evolved from various disciplines that have examined stress and coping from primarily an individualistic perspective.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term stress can be traced back to the early 14th century when stress had several distinct meanings, including hardship, adversity, and affliction (Rutter, 1983). Even among stress researchers today, stress is variably defined as a stimulus, an inferred inner state, and an observable response to a stimulus or situation (e.g., Oken, Chamine, & Wakeland, 2015). There is also an ongoing debate concerning the extent to which stress is chemical, environmental, or psychological in nature (Folkman, 2013; Lazarus, 2006; Sarafino, 2006).
In the late 17th century, Hooke used stress in the context of physical science, although the usage was not made systematic until the early 19th century. Stress and strain were first conceived as a basis of ill health in the 19th century (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). In the 20th century, Cannon (l932) laid the foundation for systematic research on the effects of stress in observations of bodily changes. He showed that stimuli associated with emotional arousal (e.g., pain, hunger, cold) caused changes in basic physiological functioning (Dohrenwend & Dohrenwend, 1974). Selye (l978) was the first researcher to define and measure stress adaptations in the human body. He defined stress as an orchestrated set of bodily defenses against any form of noxious stimuli and identified the term General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) to describe the body’s short- and long-term reaction to stress. In the l950s, social scientists became interested in his conceptualization of stress, and Selye’s work has remained influential in the stress and coping literature (e.g., Hatfield & Polomano, 2012; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).
Meyer, in the l930s, taught that life events may be an important component in the etiology of a disorder and the most normal and necessary life events may be potential contributors to pathology (Dohrenwend & Dohrenwend, 1974). In the 1960s, Holmes and Rahe (l967) investigated life events and their connection to the onset and progression of illness. Through their Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRSS), which includes many family-related events, Holmes and Rahe associated the accumulation of life changes and those of greater magnitude to a higher chance of illness, disease, or death.
In the social sciences, both sociology and psychology have long histories of study related to stress and coping. Sociologists Marx, Weber, and Durkheim wrote extensively about “alienation.” Alienation was conceptualized as synonymous with powerlessness, meaninglessness, and self-estrangement, clearly under the general rubric of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). In psychology, stress was implicit as an organizing framework for thinking about psychopathology, especially in the theorizing of Freud and later psychologically oriented writers. Freudian psychology highlighted the process of coping and established the basis for a developmental approach that considered the effect of life events on later development and the gradual acquisition of resources over the life cycle. Early psychologists used anxiety to denote stress, and it was seen as a central component in psychopathology through the l950s. The reinforcement-learning theorists (e.g., Spence, 1956) viewed anxiety as a classically conditioned response that led to pathological habits of anxiety reduction. Existentialists (e.g., May, 1950) also focused on anxiety as a major barrier to self-actualization (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Developmentalists (e.g., Erickson, 1963) proposed various stage models that demand a particular crisis be negotiated before an individual can cope with subsequent developmental stages. Personal coping resources accrued during the adolescent–young adult years are thought to be integrated into the self-concept and shape the process of coping throughout adulthood (Moos, 1986). Crisis theorists (e.g., Caplan, 1964) conceptualized these life changes as crises, with the assumption that disequilibrium may provide stress in the short run but can promote the development of new skills in the long run.
The study of family stress began at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago during the l930s and the upheavals of the Depression (Boss, 2002). Reuben Hill, often referred to as the father of family stress research (Boss, 2006), was the first scholar to conceptualize family stress theory (Hill, 1949, 1958, l971), when he developed the ABC-X model of family stress and his model of family crisis (Boss, 1988, 2002, 2006; Lavee, 2013). Subsequent generations of family stress researchers have made major contributions to this basic model (e.g., Boss, 1988, 2002, 2013; McCubbin, 1979; McCubbin & McCubbin, 1988; McCubbin & McCubbin, 2013). Developments in family stress theory include emphases on (a) family strengths or resilience (Walsh, 2006; Henry, Morris, & Harrist, 2015); (b) culture, race or