Unlocking My Mental Wardroble: One Mind, Many Lenses

As a psychology student taking Sociology of Family and Marriage as an elective, I entered the course with the expectation of filling my empty cup of knowledge about ‘family and marriage’; should I one day become a clinical psychologist, I cannot run away from couples or family therapy. Psychology had already trained me to think through the biopsychosocial model, a framework that has followed me across almost every subject. The “bio” came from physiology and neuropsychology. The “psycho” came from abnormal, clinical, personality, developmental, and everything in between. The “social” was often viewed through the lens of social psychology, or through Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory: a model I understood in theory, respected academically, but quietly resented during exams.

Bronfenbrenner’s model always appeared deceptively simple. At first glance, it looked easy and friendly, almost like a set of circles that only required memorisation. Yet when a case study appeared in an exam, those neat circles suddenly became a jungle. I often struggled to apply the model well because I treated it as a straightforward map: identify the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, chronosystem, and move on. However, after 13 weeks, sociology taught me that perhaps the problem was not that I failed to understand Bronfenbrenner. Perhaps the problem was that I expected this social world to be straightforward.

One phrase my course instructor kept repeating throughout the semester was that family does not work in a vacuum. At first, it sounded like one of those elegant academic lines that lecturers say. However, the more I engaged with the course, the more I understood its weight. A family is never just a family floating independently in space, surviving purely on love, values, or individual choices. It exists within housing conditions, economic pressures, cultural expectations, gender norms, religious beliefs, educational opportunities, community support, state policies, and historical changes. In other words, what happens inside the family is often shaped by what happens outside it.

Through sociology, I began to see that Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model can be understood more deeply when viewed through the major sociological perspectives: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, and conflict theory, including Marxist and feminist approaches. These perspectives did not replace the ecological model for me. Instead, they gave depth to its layers. They helped me understand that the “environment” surrounding a child is not simply a background setting. It is made of institutions, meanings, inequalities, norms, expectations, and power relations.

Functionalism helped me see how the family is often understood as a social institution that performs important functions for society. Families socialise children, provide emotional support, regulate behaviour, transmit values, organise caregiving, and help maintain social stability. From this lens, the family is not merely a private emotional unit, but part of a wider social system. This gave more meaning to Bronfenbrenner’s microsystem because the family is not just “people living together.” It is a structure that teaches norms, roles, expectations, responsibilities, and ways of surviving in the world. A child does not only receive care in the family; a child learns how society works through the family.

Symbolic interactionism, on the other hand, brought the model closer to the ground. It reminded me that families are not only built through roles and structures, but also through meanings. A mother is not simply a person biologically connected to a child; “mother” is also a symbol shaped by care, sacrifice, authority, tenderness, absence, conflict, memory, and sometimes disappointment. A home is not just a physical place; it may mean safety to one child, restriction to another, and chaos to someone else. This helped me understand that when we study children and families, we cannot only ask, “Who is in the family?” We must also ask, “What does family mean to this child?”

Conflict theory then disrupted the comfort of the first two perspectives. From Marxist and feminist views, the family is not only a place of love, care, and socialisation, but also a site where power, inequality, gender roles, economic pressure, and social class may be reproduced. This perspective reminded me that not all families begin from the same starting line. A child’s development is shaped not only by parental affection, but also by housing conditions, financial stress, access to education, community resources, gender expectations, and wider social inequalities. Suddenly, Bronfenbrenner’s outer layers were no longer decorative circles. They were powerful forces pressing inward.

The Marxist perspective made me more aware of how class and economic structures shape family life. Families do not simply make choices in isolation; their choices are often limited or enabled by income, work demands, housing, educational access, and material resources. What may appear as a parenting style, family routine, or caregiving arrangement may also be a response to economic pressure. Meanwhile, the feminist perspective helped me examine how patriarchy and gendered expectations operate within family life. Questions about who cooks, who cares, who sacrifices, who makes decisions, and whose labour is taken for granted are not small domestic details. They are sociological questions.

This became especially meaningful during our community work with children at PPR Sungai Bonus. Our theme, “Our Families, Our Stories,” required us to engage with children not as case studies, but as storytellers of their own family worlds. We created a toolkit inspired by sandtray work and a Sylvanian dollhouse-style setup, allowing children to represent their family structures, home environments, relationships, roles, routines, and emotional meanings through miniature objects and symbolic play. As a psychology student, I immediately recognised the value of this approach in helping children express experiences that may be difficult to verbalise directly. Play becomes language. Placement becomes meaning. Distance between figures may suggest closeness or tension. A missing figure may say something without the child needing to say it aloud.

However, sociology helped me see beyond individual expression. The dollhouse was not only a psychological tool, but a sociological window. When a child arranged family members, assigned roles, described routines, or told stories about who worked, who cared, who was absent, or who made decisions, they were not only revealing personal experiences. They were also reflecting social patterns. Functionalism allowed me to observe how children understood roles and responsibilities within their families. Symbolic interactionism helped me pay attention to the meanings they attached to each figure, object, and space. Conflict theory encouraged me to notice how social class, housing, gender, and inequality may shape what children perceive as “normal” family life.

For example, if a child describes a cramped home where siblings share spaces and parents are often away for work, a purely psychological lens may focus on attachment, emotional security, coping, or emotional regulation. These are important and should not be dismissed. However, sociology asks additional questions: What economic conditions require the parents to work long hours? How does class affect privacy, discipline, caregiving, and educational support? If a girl places herself near the kitchen while male figures are placed near the living room or outside the house, psychology may explore identity and self-concept, while feminist theory may ask how gendered expectations are already being learned and reproduced. If a child describes an absent father or a grandmother as the main caregiver, symbolic interactionism reminds us that “family” is not always the idealised nuclear form, but a lived and negotiated reality.

This was one of the most important insights I gained from the course: there is no “one size fits all” when studying families. Psychology already taught me that human beings are complex, but sociology expanded the frame. It reminded me that families cannot be fully understood by looking only at individual behaviour, emotions, or development. At the same time, sociology should not cancel psychology. Rather, both fields sharpen each other. Psychology helps us understand the inner world of the person; sociology helps us understand the world that helped shape that inner world.

One piece of advice from my course instructor stayed with me deeply. She told me that she does not believe knowledge from one field should cancel knowledge from another, nor should we fragment ourselves intellectually: here I use psychology, there I use sociology, and elsewhere I lock the other parts of my brain in a cupboard. Instead, she encouraged me to adjust my lens wisely without fragmenting my mind. That advice felt especially meaningful because it corrected the way I sometimes approached disciplines as separate territories with guarded borders. In reality, knowledge should complement, converse, and integrate.

As a psychology student, this helped me appreciate sociology not as a competing discipline, but as a necessary companion. Psychology may help me understand why a child feels anxious, withdrawn, expressive, attached, avoidant, resilient, or distressed. Sociology helps me ask what kind of family structure, social expectation, economic condition, gender role, community environment, or institutional system may have contributed to that experience. In the context of PPR Sungai Bonus, this integration became very real. The children’s stories were never only about individual personalities. Their stories were also about space, family roles, caregiving patterns, community life, and social realities. The child and the family could not be separated from the wider world around them.

By the end of the course, I realised that my struggle with Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model was not simply a weakness in applying theory. It was also a sign that the “social” part of the biopsychosocial model is much richer than I initially understood. The social world is not merely background context. It is made of institutions, meanings, inequalities, histories, expectations, and power relations. Sociology gave the bird’s-eye view of what psychology sometimes overlooks when it scrutinises the individual too closely.

This realisation also helped me appreciate my course instructor’s repeated reminder that family does not work in a vacuum, is not merely as a sociological slogan, but as the heart of the course. Families are intimate, but they are not isolated. Sociology did not teach me to abandon psychology; it taught me to widen the frame. It reminded me that to understand a child, I must understand the family; to understand the family, I must understand the society around it; and to understand society, I must be humble enough to admit that no single theory, discipline, or lens can explain everything alone.

In the end, Sociology of Family and Marriage did not replace my psychological training. It deepened it. It taught me to look at a child in a family and see more than attachment styles, developmental stages, or coping mechanisms. It taught me to see stories, structures, symbols, roles, inequalities, and possibilities. Most importantly, it reminded me that families are never just private units. They are personal, social, cultural, economic, political, and emotional all at once,  which is probably why they are so difficult to study, so easy to oversimplify, and so endlessly fascinating. Thank you for 14 weeks. Yours no longer fragmented, Rasyidah.