Parenthood

The movie "Parenthood" is basically about a huge family who is living their daily lives with numerous parental issues. It portrays the problems that the parents incur with their children as well as how they deal with them. Based on the movie, the way a person articulates conflicts has the ability to influence the quality of interpersonal communication in a relationship.

Generally, the film reflects contextually interpersonal communication that is dyadic interaction between two people. If one of them withdraws from the other, the relationship is said to be dissolved (Adler & Rodman, 2002). Apart from that, it shows content and relational messages being communicated in different ways from one party to another.

We are going to discuss three scenes from the movie in later part. For each scene, we are going to review the styles of expressing conflicts as well as providing possible suggestions to improve communication.

The first scene is when Gary went out of the house without looking at his mother's face. He did not even answer his mother's question about what was in his bag. Other than that, he used equivocal language when he told his mother that he was going out, which was deliberately vague. This situation clearly showed that Gary was using non-assertion style of expressing conflict with his mother. He did not explain to his mother about the content of his bag and did not tell her where was he going. Moreover, he used avoidance method since he was trying to get away from his mother. This circumstance showed no self-disclosure because he did not give self-clarification to his mother about what was he going through. Additionally, his non-assertiveness may badly influence his future interaction with his mother because there was lack of direct expressions and thoughts to his mother (Kandell, n.d.).

The next scene takes place in a principal's office at Kevin's school, whereby his