Plager / Family Legacy in Health Concerns Understanding Family Legacy in Family Health Concerns

Family legacy stories recover an understanding of family health that has be-come marginalized in the predominant ways that family health is studied in the family disciplines. This article describes what family legacy means for family and family member health concerns, activities, and practices in their everyday life. Six families with school-age children took part in an interpre-tive study of health practices and concerns in families. Five to six in-depth family group interviews were conducted with each family using semistruc-tured, open-ended questions. All families had meaningful family legacy sto-ries that set up health concerns and shaped health practices, activities, and habits. A paradigm case exemplifies how a family may extend, flee from, and/or reshape family-of-origin legacies in their family of progeny. Explor-ing and acknowledging family legacy recognizes a rich part of family life and can enhance the nurse’s and family’s understanding of family health and re-lated practices, activities, and habits. Telling family legacy stories recovers a way of understanding fami-lies and their health concerns and practices that has become largely marginalized. Family legacy and tradition are generally not prob-lematized in the rational and empirical science approach to study