Family relationships: A long-lasting source of well-being

This article examines the link between family relationships and well-being, focusing on relationship quality, as well as on the positive and negative constructs used to describe it. Fincham and Beach (2010) developed a perspective aimed not only at reaching a balance between the negative and the positive aspects of relationships, but also at understanding a relationship ‘in itself’, where ‘relationship flourishing’ represents the core construct. The relational-symbolic model (Scabini e Cigoli, 2000) has provided new insights into the concept of ‘relationship flourishing’. According to this model, generative well-being can be considered as a specific form of well-being produced by flourishing family relationships. Generative well-being occurs when family generativity and social generativity are connected to each other. Research findings highlighting the two-fold role of family and social generativity are reported in the final part of the contribution.