Family, development and social change

Nowadays it seems urgent for Family Studies to go beyond fragmentation, the oblivion of history and poverty of sensitivity towards social change in order to meet under the aegis of solid developmental science, at the crossroads of interdisciplinary thought and the universality of hermeneutics —axes of the reconstruction, robust knowledge, growing rigor, and an orderly fertility. In the face of this complex scenario, this article develops only four quite modest objectives as an integrating proposal and programatic vision. Firstly, it poses a theoretical–methodological–research model as a starting point for the study of the family in a more integrated manner. Secondly, it analyzes how development takes place in the family and how social change happens. It presents economic adversity as a concrete example. Thirdly, it clarifies, from a pedagogic stance, some substantial tasks of the family. Lastly, it tries to rescue from the twilight the social, moral and educational importance of emotions in order to drink with them from the springs of a symbolic–analogic hermeneutics.

family, development, social change, context, process, boundary, robust knowledge, life–course model, economic hardship, emotional memory, moral imagination, affection, interdisciplinary approach, symbolic–analogic hermeneutics