Nurses need to recognize family strengths and capitalize on them when planning care. Family strengths are factors that help a family function best as a unit of solidarity. A focus on family strengths involves helping families recognize and develop their own potential. This approach is preferable to a problem-oriented focus, which sometimes causes health care professionals to neglect strengths. By assessing a family’s strengths and pointing them out, nurses can enhance coping skills and self-esteem, thus assisting a family to move toward accomplishing its own functions and development tasks. Helping families recognize and use family strengths is vitally important when planning nursing implementation. Family theory literature concurs on the following five characteristics of healthy families

•           Mutual respect and support. Mutual respect and support is the basis for healthy family processes. Each of the other characteristics of healthy families depends on mutual respect. Respect implies valuing other family members for who they are and recognizing each one’s unique importance to the family’s integrity as a whole. It implies an atmosphere of acceptance, not a controlling environment. When there is respect, support flows naturally. To families that respect each other, relying on one another for assistance or encouragement does not imply weakness, but rather recognition of a healthy mutual dependency

•           Open communication. Open communication in a family is the ability and willingness to honestly discuss all issues of concern to the family. Open communication can involve routine family decisions or matters of greater significance, for example, a child talking about school problems, a teenager sharing thoughts about experimenting with drugs, or a couple speaking with one another about sexual concerns. Open communication involves self-disclosure and sharing aspects of self that are personal or private. This kind of openness involves risk of rejection or punishment. Therefore, it requires self-confidence and trust in other family members. Not all families that function well operate under conditions of complete openness, but it is generally agreed that the fewer the areas of closed communication, the healthier the family.

•           Shared problem solving. Shared problem solving implies that family decisions are made with input from all family members. Mutual trust and open communication make shared problem solving more effective. Families need to address day-to-day problems, such as allocation of responsibility for household chores, and more serious problems that threaten family structure or functioning, such as serious illness of a family member.

•           Flexibility. Flexibility implies willingness among family members to adjust family process or roles to accommodate changes in individual member’s needs. For example, children may agree to switch household chores with each other so one of them can attend team practices that conflict with chores.

•           Support for personal growth. A healthy family recognizes individual member’s needs to experience growth toward their full potential. This may require temporary or long-term adjustments in family process to accommodate the needs of a particular member. For example, the husband /father may desire a career change that requires returning to school, which in turn may create a financial burden that necessitates family lifestyle changes such as omitting a family vacation or limiting the number of family outings. Or one parent may take on an extra part-time job to help with a child’s college expenses. Enhancing individual family member’s personal growth also incorporates maintaining a balance between shared activities and separate activities. Each member is recognized as an individual, as well as a family member.

Other theorists have identified additional traits that characterize healthy families, including sensitivity to family members’ physical, emotional, and spiritual needs; child rearing practices that encourage talents and foster creativity; growing through and with children; family unity, loyalty, and mutual commitment; and responsible community relations.

Families may exhibit each of these traits to a greater or lesser degree and still fall within the definition of a healthy family. The extent to which day-to-day family processes are healthy predicts the amount of disruption that family stressors or family crises are likely to cause. Often, nurses encounter a family when one family member is ill. Nurses can help families to recognize their family strengths to cope with a family member’s health problem. The same approach is effective when collaborating with families facing maturational stressors, such as dealing with a teenager learning to balance freedom and responsibility with the family automobile.

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