Boundary Dissolution

Western psychology has been criticized for treating psychological constructs derived from the standards of industrialized, European societies as normative (Anderson 1999). A number of critics have argued that Western psychology promotes a highly individualistic, autonomous self as the ideal, whereas other societies value a more communal and interdependent sense of self (Markus and Kitayama 1991; Sampson 1993). Therefore, Western psychologists might perceive pathological boundary dissolution among family members who are reflecting their own culture's healthy norms of communality.

For example, Nancy Boyd-Franklin (1989) argues that African-American families developed flexible roles in order to respond to the challenges of poverty and racism. Extended kinships involve many different, sometimes biologically unrelated, adults in the rearing of children, so that there is role diffusion in parenting. Additionally, the common necessity for both parents to work outside the home has meant that "Black women have sometimes had to act as the 'father' and Black men as the 'mother' . . . while children are often required to assume 'parental child' roles necessary for family survival" (p. 64). Boyd-Franklin identifies the "parental child" as a common experience in the African-American family, where working single mothers often assign the task of caring for younger children to the oldest child, placing that child in a parental role. As long as the responsibilities assigned to the eldest are clear and well-defined, with the parent remaining "in charge" and parenting functions "delegated and not abdicated," the parental child family structure may be adaptive. However, a mother who is so overburdened that she begins to rely on her eldest child as her "right-hand man" places unreasonable responsibilities on the child, interfering with the child's social and emotional development. In addition, high rates of teenage pregnancy require many older women to take on the burden of caring not only for their children but for the children of their children. With the blurring of family roles in the three-generational family, "the mother of the female adolescent with a baby never fully becomes a grandmother while her daughter is never allowed to fully function as a mother to her own child" (p. 74). Therefore, although flexible boundaries can be a source of strength, they also can leave families vulnerable to role confusion and boundary dissolution.

Louis Anderson (1999) also acknowledges the negative implications of a reversal of roles in the African-American family, such as when the child is forced to "parent the parent." However, in the context of African-American culture, flexible family roles and interdependence are the norm, and children are socialized to advance quickly through development in order to become contributors to the family's welfare. Anderson argues that, before taking on responsibilities such as the care of younger siblings, African-American children go through an extended apprenticeship and are provided with supervision and instruction so that they are developmentally prepared for the tasks they are to assume. What most clearly differentiates pathological parentification from healthy socialization is that, although children are given responsibilities in the normative African-American family, they are still allowed to be children and "are not elevated to the executive structure of the household" (p. 164).

The concept of boundary dissolution also has been found to be relevant in family research outside the United States. For example, Kenji Kameguchi and Stephen Murphy-Shigetmatsu (2001) use the concept of boundary dissolution to understand the pervasive problem of Japanese children refusing to go to school. Following Minuchin (1974), they argue that a strong membrane around the parental subsystem is essential to the healthy organization of the family. However, among Japanese families of school-refusing children, Kameguchi and his colleagues observe a common pattern of boundary dissolution characterized by an undifferentiated mother-child relationship. The membrane separating the mother and child is diffuse, whereas the mother-father and father-child relationships are disengaged and easily disrupted. "Weakness in a parental membrane leads to vague generational boundaries between a parental dyad and a child [and] interferes with the developmental tasks of adolescen[ce]. . . . The child is thus deprived of experiences that accelerate his or her psychological separation from the parents and that also assist the parents in separating from the adolescent" (Kameguchi and Murphy-Shigetmatsu 2001, p. 68). Ultimately, both parents and child collude in behaviors that interfere with individuation, such as the child's staying home from school.