Toward Communicative Resilience: An Integrative Framework for Understanding Family Political Polarization

Political polarization increasingly disrupts family communication, reshaping relationships and intergenerational socialization. This essay synthesizes recent scholarship on political difference in families and integrates three frameworks - Family Systems Theory, Family Communication Patterns Theory, and Relational Dialectics Theory - to explain how polarization reverberates through families at systemic, structural, and discursive levels. The resulting model advances propositions linking political difference to alliance shifts, patterns of talk and silence, and competing meanings of loyalty and belonging. The framework positions family communication as central to understanding - and mitigating - the relational consequences of polarization through communicative resilience.