Aging and family: challenges from social work and family orientation

Abstract

This literary review article presents the main theoretical manifestations about the relationship between aging and family, with emphasis on life cycle as the basis of intervention under the focus of social work and family orientation. The work of Salvador Minuchin is taken as a theoretical foundation, whose structural model understands that the family is a system that constantly constructs defenses that helps the stability before the external and internal transformations. Dealing with an older adult member creates dysfunctionality that can be healed through social work and family counseling, emphasizing the definition and bestowal of roles and functions, as well as establishing clear commitments about the family's position on the elderly within a life cycle, understanding this as an opportunity and not as a family burden. Through this therapeutic exercise, a functional family structure can be achieved again, but this can only be managed from a holistic view of the family, and taking into account the reality of a modernity in crisis that individualizes rather than establish stronger bonds with those members who are being isolated by society as the case of elderly people. This essay precisely discusses the direction in which family counseling and social work should be addressed to work with the relationship of family and aging.