October Sky: The Hickam Family

1. The Hickam family can be described through several different concepts based on the family systems approach. The first is through boundaries. Boundaries are defined as open or closed a system is (lecture). These boundaries in the system can be within the family itself or can occur between various systems as well (textbook). Boundaries are unhealthy when the boundary is extremely closed or extremely open (lecture). Boundaries seen in the movie October Sky were the Hickam family as a family system, but within the family, boundaries were between the parents and the kids, Homer and his father and Homer’s mom with Homer’s dad. The Hickam family also had boundaries with Miss Riley, the coal mine, Coalwood, college, and rocket science.
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John struggled with the whole idea of rocketry. Because it was such a foreign science at the time, John could not see how it could take Homer out of Coalwood. Elsie accepted Homer’s passion and drive to learn rocketry and this put a strain on Elsie and John’s relationship. This is seen at the end of the movie when Elsie threatened to leave John and the Hickam family system if John did not help Homer build a new rocket. It appears throughout the movie that John had the most power, or the ability of an individual family member to influence others, in the family, but Elsie showed a tremendous amount of power when she gave John the ultimatum (lecture). In this instance, Elsie aligned or created a subsystem with Homer to gain power, in order to influence John (lecture). When Homer decided to get involved in rocketry, he disrupted the equilibrium in the Hickam family system because he tried to change the goals or feedback of the Hickam family (lecture). Homer received negative feedback from his father when he tried to change because the change was denied and John tried to get Homer to forget rocketry and work in the coal mine

Miss Riley showed positive feedback and encouraged Homer to pursue his dreams of rocketry. She defended him to the end, especially against the principal, Mr. Turner. Mr. Turner helped keep equilibrium in the Hickam family because he was convinced that Homer’s rocket had started a forest fire. His discouragement and animosity showed negative feedback and pushed Homer back into his role in the Hickam family. John Hickam also showed negative feedback through the community when Homer attempted to change the equilibrium by saying that Homer could not play with his rockets on Coalwood property which meant that Homer had to walk a considerable distance to set off his rockets. The community encouraged Homer to change the equilibrium when Leon Bolden and the Russian man helped Homer build his rockets. Because so many people were giving Homer positive feedback, this led Homer to keep on pursuing change which led to morphogenesis, or family rules/ goals changing, in the Hickam family (lecture). Morphogenesis usually comes in the form of a crisis which was witnessed when Homer’s rocket was stolen and Homer needed his father’s help to rebuild the rocket for the science fair and Elsie gave John an ultimatum