Intersecting Family Identity

Thirdly, revisioning family ties to communities and contexts acknowledges the experiences of coloured children as unique because they are situated in multiple contexts growing up. That is, Uttel (2009) asserts that the community within which a child is situated also has a major impact on their development “because of the specific environmental demands to which children of colour are exposed. [They] move between different cultural communities that hold different expectations of their behavior.” As stated above, conflicting expectations from two extremely different contexts has caused me to wrestle with myself everyday as how I should act to appease to both contexts and my position in these two settings. Therefore, my identity struggle is in

Finding middle ground between the two was not easy, and finding myself in the midst of these intersecting identities was an even more difficult task. As Tsai (2012) mentions, “adolescents felt less close to both their mothers and fathers, identified less with their family, and felt a weaker sense of family obligation during adolescence...but family identity actually reversed direction and strengthened during young adulthood.” This comes to show that although self identification could be weak during my teenage years because of my identity struggle, it would eventually show a better turn as I age and learn to accommodate to these differences. Therefore, revisioning family ties to communities and contexts is a crucial step towards understanding the experiences of 21st century families because it realize that children of colour needs to negotiate their identity everyday as they transition from one community to the

All three of these approaches are similar in that each and every one of them recognize that the family doesn’t operate as a private sphere on its own, independent of external influence and context. Rather, these three theoretical approach suggest that family could only be explained if the privileges and inequality of different classes are understood through deconstructing the hegemonic discourse and structure. Through the deconstruction of the status quo and what we have long deemed as normal, we are then better equipped with the ability to see that where we are situated, where we come from, and our interconnection with other bodies in our society comes to shape our everyday lived experiences, that is, our reality. Therefore, being situated in multiple identities, I find these three theoretical approaches to be best at explaining my circumstances and struggles. In addition, their inclusive, racially situated and contextual based theories has allowed me to place myself within my everyday lived experiences, draw on from my reality to explain how identity struggle is experienced through my very own personal narrative. In addition, experts have claimed that toxic stress in early childhood is detrimental to the childhood’s lifelong development. Since