Family bonding | Dippedinform

Conversations for Change: Elevating bonding between elderly parents and their adult children

A reflective take on the inquiry “How might we elevate mutual bonding between parents and their adult kids; to improve their interaction, understanding and wellbeing”

Family bonding top

Social Impact | Generation Gap | Family Bonding | Communication Strategy

BACKGROUND

As families are becoming nuclear and surrounded by concrete jungle, there is little left for people to engage with. As kids grow up and go away for job or studies, there is sudden gap in the lives of parents that cause unanticipated impact on their emotional wellbeing. While there is lot of conversation about mental and emotional wellbeing among youth, there is less awareness about family wellbeing. While generation gap is often called out as problem, its deep dive inquiry is still unexplored in indians spac

MY ROLE: Design research, Ideation, Communication design, Illustration (Individual Project)

4 weeks | Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology

DESIGN CHALLENGE

Topics like family bonding, generation gap are complex problems that vary a lot depending on the positionality of parents, their children, their story as family and also many other social, cultural, emotional factors that was difficult to tackle in the given time. While the intent to take up this project emerged from my personal experience and based on interactions with a few friends, I wanted to better understand the scenario and map out the interconnected factors that lead to this; and ideate possible outcomes to intervene.
Additionally, the project was done during the pandemic, which posed challenges in itself since I was not able to interact with elderly parents in person to get deeper insights into their stories.

SOLUTION

A campaign to create awareness about healthy family well-being by the medium of self-reflection and conversations.

PROCESS

MAPPING INITIAL QUESTIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS

Noting down assumptions and open questions based on personal experiences, preliminary conversations helped me to start with secondary research. I read several research papers, online articles that talked about generation gaps, designing for wellbeing, interpersonal relationships, communication and other related and relevant topics. Based on the insights, I developed semi-structured conversation questionnaires.

BRAINSTORMING ON THE KEY INQUIRY TERMS

SYSTEM MAPPING

STAKEHOLDER MAPPING AND CLASSIFICATION

PRIMARY CONVERSATION DESIGN

The aim of the conversation was to understand the quality of relationships that adult kids share with their families, one’s personal life story and experiences, motivations and pain-points in terms of family relationships. This helped me ideate intuitive, impactful solutions.

I laid out certain guidelines for designing the questionnaire

The intent of the questionnaire is to begin and direct the conversation to extract answers from domains like family values, personal wellbeing, motivations, cultural/social/political motivation
Since the goal is to scale of adult kid and parents bonding, there is a separate qualitative questionnaire for them. Although some questions are overlapping to measure similarities & differences in their opinions, some questions are unique to each group
The question set is broadly divided into 5 categories: Personal, Digital understanding and wellbeing, Relationship with kids, General attitude, Social.
- Personal: To understand one’s state of mind, basic bio, day in life, hobbies & interest along with follow up topics they want to share
- Digital understanding & wellbeing: To understand parents opinion about impact of digital age on families, its pros-cons according to them, their dependence on technology, gadgets etc
- Relationship analysis: To understand their views about their kids, how open they are, their opinions on bonding, upbringing, difference & similarities of mutual expectations
- General Attitude: To understand their views and attitude towards politics, stigmatised/ taboo topics, ability to learn and unlearn
- Social: To understand what they think of people, how society might be affecting their family relations, the state of social relationship etc.

CONVERSATION INSIGHTS

Communication gap

In terms of family, generation gap is nothing but lack of enough communication that leads to lack of understanding and clash in values

Lifelong practise of reflection for healthy family practices

Life experiences shape a lot of how families evolve. Healthy families are ready to evolve and accept if both the society and they themselves allow the unlearning.

Imbalanced priorities between family and career

Most Indian parents are too obsessed with their kids education and career for all the good reasons, but unintended bad family outcome.

Lack of parenting learnings

In India, new parents aren't really taught how to grow their kids. First child is experiment, then they learn from it and apply better ways on second child.

Gender relation to the problem

In majority of Indian families, it’s a homemaker mom, and it’s usually her who gets more affected once kids are gone. Her primarily purpose was to take care of families and kids, and once they go, there is huge void that she doesn't know to understand it.

aha moments!

During the interview itself, some participants were thinking and reflecting. Some participant also wanted me to take interview of somebody they know to initiate the reflection for them.
• While interview, some questions really made people think about their actions. It even took some parents time to think about few questions.
Maybe to begin with, I don't need to make a tangible solution for people to interact virtually. Because unless they are really interested they wont use it. My solution would be like any other clock, time management tools, etc.

ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS

Importance of self reflection

It is important for parents to reflect and realise how their actions impact upbringing of their kids.

Learning and adopting healthy family practices

Life experiences shape a lot of how families evolve. Healthy families are ready to evolve and accept if both the society and they themselves allow the unlearning.

Prioratising family

Parents should worry less about what society thinks so that they can cater to their kids as well as family happiness more

Non-judgment and safe sapce

Both parents and kids need to stop judging each other, their opinion, knowledge and skills. They should listen to each other and be open to new thoughts. After-all, they’re the family.

Conversation for change

Generation gap can reduce with conversations because mutual sharing of thoughts, ideas through healthy open discussion can help bring the thought process on similar level.

SOLUTION

Self Reflection is important to learn from the past, learn from mistakes and improve. But when it comes to families, it is very uncommon that parents/kids pay attention to how their habits could impact the family wellbeing in long run. Also, the attitude of children as they grow up is often defined by the family setting and culture. Thus, it becomes important to highlight the importance of healthy family culture.

Keeping this as the guiding principle, the campaign aims to educate parents and their teen kids about the issue and impact of communication and self-reflection. This idea is to have short poster articles in print or digital media, along with a few activities to calculate the ‘family bond’ level. This could be accompanied by a QR code where parents can input those data values to find ways to improve their habits.