Blog 5 – Family and Health
By: Elise Osborn
Due to ever expanding technology and information regarding health, people are beginning to live longer than ever before. As of 2023 the average life expectancy for an individual within the United States was 73 years old, which is a number that is steadily increasing after the COVID-19 pandemic which brought the life expectancy down to 71 years in 2021 (Datanni et al., 2023). But age is not the only thing that matters when concerned about health, rather your health is the backbone to having a successful, fulfilling, and enjoyable life experience. For these few reasons alone and many more, prioritizing your health and taking care of your body is one of the most important things you can do right now. It is only in the moments when you have little to no control over your body due to a disease or illness in which you realize just how much you succumb to your health despite what you may feel. Meanwhile, at times when we are at our healthiest, we ignore and become blind to the importance of our body and the ways in which we rely on it to go about our daily living and interact with the world around us. This phenomenon is known as the “silence of health”; we neglect our bodies only to finally start paying attention to them when they begin to fail us (Charon, 2006).
But we should not live in that silence, instead we should be proactive in protecting our bodies and staying healthy. To do this we must first become educated and then acquire the necessary behaviors and attitudes that will keep us on track with taking care of ourselves. One primary area of our lives in which we can trace back our current behaviors is within the family. As established in my previous blogs, according to Social Cognitive Theory, families are one of the primary areas of socialization and a place to learn norms, attitudes, beliefs, etc. Based on this assumption, the conversations that happen in the family related to health are fundamental to the development of a child’s individual health behaviors. Not only are these family interactions important for the individual, but they are essential to have within the family because health is deeply rooted in genetics. Certain illnesses, susceptibilities, predispositions, and other health issues can be passed down generationally through families. Being aware of these genetic predispositions can equip an individual to prepare themselves about what to expect concerning their own health but also what they could pass down. Discussing family health history (FHH) is a vital conversation to have for both individual and family wellbeing.
In this blog post, I will review the research concerning family health history and individual health seeking behaviors as it relates to family orientations (conversation and conformity) and tie it all together with an overarching goal that all families should achieve concerning health communication.
Family Communication about Family Health History
As stated earlier, families are a foundational part of understanding an individual’s overall health because, to some degree, health is genetic. That is why it is important to know and document your family’s health history (FHH), which includes all past and current medical information to ensure that you can live a healthy life (Rafferty et al., 2022). Generating a FHH is a daunting task because it requires transparency and disclosure of personal medical/health information that is generally considered to be private (Rafferty et al., 2022). In the healthcare field, the disclosing of a patient’s medical records without their consent violates the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Due to this already prevalent ideal that personal medical information is private, it has spread to become the dominant understanding even within families. This privacy of medical history is important, don’t get me wrong. It has helped prevent the exploitation of people and has many other great benefits. But this privacy or refusing to share important medical history that can affect other family members can become an issue and prevent the creation of an FHH which would be beneficial for everybody in a family. Therefore, families should be able to share relevant medical information and history with each other to generate an FHH.
In Family Communication Patterns Theory (FCPT), please refer to Blog #1 for a more in-depth explanation, there are two primary orientations; conversation and conformity. Families that are high in conversation are more likely to communicate frequently, which includes the likelihood that there is more self-disclosure (Watts & Hovick, 2023; Feng, 2025). Meanwhile, the conformity orientation emphasizes the unity of family and the shared understanding of various beliefs and attitudes (Watts & Hovick, 2023). In my previous blogs I’ve highly stressed the importance of a high conversation orientation in various topics, but for FHH both orientations are important to help form the attitudes, beliefs, and understandings (Feng, 2025). Families that operate in a high conversation orientation can allow for open communication about medical issues which could make the members of a family more likely to disclose their own health problems if they arise. But also, a conformity orientation can create a shared and unified belief about health disclosure and stress the importance of an FCC by making it a family activity not just individual (Watts & Hovick, 2023). But conformity should be used wisely within a family, high conformity within a family can indirectly shape coping behaviors and allow for emotional suppression since uniformity is prioritized over individuality (Price et al., 2025). So, the best course of action is to have moderate conformity and high conversation within a family concerning FHH.
Not only do having these conversations about FHH have beneficial effects on the family, but it also has individual health behavioral effects in that it encourages online health seeking behaviors (Feng, 2025). These online health seeking behaviors include becoming more aware of FHH and conducting research relating to issues detailed in an FHH. Overall, FHH encourages health-seeking from individuals to other people and themselves, which can help to bring a family closer together. To finish this blog post, I want to propose a way in which FHH can be reframed that can help strengthen the conversation but also the relationships within families.
Create the Shared Identity
To tie everything together, the best way to ensure conversations about health within the family, promote positive health-seeking behaviors, and encourage health information disclosure is through the formation of shared identity within the family around health. FHH’s can be used as a tool to help link families together; it helps to create a connection over shared health history (Feng, 2025; Watts & Hovick, 2023). By actively discussing FHH and making it a collective identity, it can help to strengthen family ties and impact how you personally may regard FHH and other health behaviors (Watts & Hovick, 2023). This can be achieved through open communication, reciprocity of experiences, and continuous advocation that FHH is a family matter and that it should be treated as such (Watts & Hovick, 2023; Rafferty et al., 2022).
Coming Up Next
In the next blog post I will review the literature regarding parent-child communication on sex-related topics.
Discussion Questions:
- Do you know your family’s health history? Share your experiences.
- Do you seek health information online to help yourself or others primarily?
- How can an FHH be a shared family identity? What are some benefits of this?
References
Charon, R. (2006). 5: The patient, the body, and the self. In Narrative medicine: Honoring the
stories of illness (pp. 85-104). Oxford University Press.
Dattani, S., Rodés-Guirao, L., Ritchie, H., Ortiz-Ospina, E., & Roser, M. (2023, November 28). Life expectancy. Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
Feng, Y. (2025). For Myself or for Others? The Influence of Family Communication Patterns on Family Health History Communication and Online Health Information Seeking. Journal of Health Communication, 30(1–3), 72–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2025.2450617
Price, C. J., Meter, D. J., & Fauth, E. B. (2025). Family Communication Patterns, Emotion Suppression, and Coping: The Role of Conformity Orientation and Its Components. Communication Studies, 1–20. https://doi-org.lib-proxy.fullerton.edu/10.1080/10510974.2025.2554088
Rafferty, K. A., Coffelt, T. A., & Miller, N. (2022). Understanding Criteria that Predict Private Health Information Disclosures between Emerging Adults & Their Parents. Western Journal of Communication, 86(1), 19–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2021.1995622
Watts, J., & Hovick, S. R. (2023). The Influence of Family Communication Patterns and Identity Frames on Perceived Collective Psychological Ownership and Intentions to Share Health Information. Health Communication, 38(6), 1246–1254. https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2021.1999573