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.
To

describe how open or closed the system is the four levels of cohesion will be used. The four levels of cohesion are enmeshed which is all about the system and unbalanced, cohesive which is about the system and the individual but puts the system before individual needs and is balanced, connected which puts the individual before the system and is balanced, and lastly, disengaged which is all about the individual and is unbalanced (lecture). The Hickam family as a whole is a cohesive system because the individual has his or her own desires, but puts the family first when needed as evidenced by Homer when he went to work in the coal mine when his dad was injured. The boundary between the parents and the kids can be seen as cohesive as well because of this fact. The boundary between Elsie and John can be seen as cohesive too because Elsie backed up John’s decisions, but only until a certain extent and then she decided to take action in her individual ideas as seen at the end of the film when she told John she would leave him if he did not help Homer. Homer and his father had a cohesive boundary because Homer wanted to do rocketry but always ended up listening to his father as shown through Homer working in the coal mine.
John Hickam had a very closed or disengaged boundary with Miss Riley because she encouraged Homer’s passion for rocketry whereas Homer had a more open boundary with Miss Riley. John had a very open system with the coal mine because it was his life and his passion whereas Homer did everything he could to avoid working in the coal mine. The Hickam family had an open boundary with the idea of college because Jim worked hard to get a football scholarship so he could leave Coalwood. John had an open boundary with football as a means of escape but had a very tightly closed boundary with rocket science because he did not understand this new science. Homer had an open boundary with rocket science and college because he used rocketry to leave Coalwood.
Homer’s activities with rocketry had significant impacts on his family.

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

(lecture).
The school system both helped and hindered Homer in his attempt to change the equilibrium in his family system.

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

(lecture).
Two centrifugal interactions in the movie, or events that push families apart and therefore increase separateness rather than connectedness, is when John threw away all of Homer’s rocket-building equipment and when Elsie gave John the ultimatum (textbook). Two centripetal interactions, or events that connected family members, is when Homer decided to drop out of school to start working in the coal mine and when John came to Homer’s rocket launching (textbook).
At the beginning of the movie, I would plot the Hickam family at rigidly cohesive because the family always came before the individual, although the individual could still do his or her own thing, and rigid because John Hickam had rules and those rules were (lecture). At the end of the movie, I would put the Hickam family at structurally cohesive because John finally came to accept Homer’s rocketry and made an exception to the family goals or rules (lecture).