Changes in Families, Changes in Parenting

Discussion Topic

Often, when we discuss our unit on Family, I have a very difficult time getting students to understand that the way people lived one or two generations before them is just not how people live in their families today. Furthermore, the lens we have viewed families through over the last 100 years or so is VERY different from how people looked at and thought about families and their role in them before that. Today's "traditional" family is hardly traditional at all, really, if we think of tradition as going back earlier than the mid-1900s.

However, we also see some other developments. One key development is socio-economic. In the 1950s or 1960s, a typical family would have just one working parent (usually a man) who left the home to go to a workplace and earn enough money to meet that family's cost of living plus a little bit more. Today, typical families that have two parents often see both parents working, yet they do not have 200% the cost of living as their income. They still manage to just make their survival needs plus a little bit of luxury. We do not find that the second income all turns into invested wealth. Quite the contrary, and there's an irony there. Somehow, our idea of what to expect in our wages has adjusted, and while *families* may make an income that meets their needs, individuals make much less than an individual would make a few decades ago. Now consider that today, many more people do not get married right away or many people run their families as a single parent. While we have no scientific evidence that suggests there is anything negative about a single parent household, we know there are challenges where it is very hard for a single parent to both make the income for a household to survive on their own as well as tending to the other work that takes place at home (raising kids, chores, etc.)

On that note, consider that the work that gets done in the home (all of it, though let's focus a little on child raising for a minute) is work, and work we as a society want. I mean, we need new kids to grow into adults for society to survive on a macro level, but we don't pay much in exchange for fulfilling our macro needs of turning kids into functional adults. Is it us as individuals or families responsible for all of this? If society is getting our next generation as the functional and productive adults due to all the work we put into them, then is society on the hook? Read over this article on an unexpected way we arranged child care in the U.S. at one point in the past and think about how our story about "entitlements" and "government assistance" have changed today.

Link: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/11/daycare-world-war-rosie-riveter/415650/

Now also consider that we are much more worried about "problems" for ways of parenting that are often social norms in other cultures or periods in history. This isn't to say that another person's way of doing it in the past was necessarily better, but we often just assume that we can judge others based on today's standards. Today's standards might have some flaws, though, especially when our standards are so demanding, but the resources in terms of money or assistance that families or parents can get is more and more limited as we see above...

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/20/opinion/the-case-for-free-range-parenting.html

Last, but not least, in balancing cultural perceptsions and economic concerns, we have to recognize that the "nuclear family" model is simply not economically sustainable unless families fit a very particular and narrow structure. While this relates to some of the socio-economic issues we covered back in unit 7, now consider the implications for families. Consider who gets blamed for social problems (spoiler alert: it's often the poor) but who has the actual resources to make changes or fix systemic issues (spoiler alert: it's not the poor). Keeping this in mind, think about the argument made in this article.

Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/04/american-policy-fails-at-reducing-child-poverty-because-it-aims-to-fix-the-poor/

So, now the questions:

What do you think are the most important changes for us to think about in family style and structure over the past several decades? How do you think the social norms and expectations we set are reasonable or unreasonable, and how are these expectations more or less fair to people from different socio-economic class, racial group, or ethnic culture backgrounds? What changes have been positive, which ones are negative, and how do we know?

In responding to one or more of these, try to draw in some of the things we have talked about or read about over the semester, including gender, race, class stratification, culture, and especially thinking about "family" as a **socially constructed institution**. Why is it socially constructed in the ways most people think about (nuclear in sturucture and socio-economically well off, neither of which are true for many if not most families today), and how does our belief that this describes a standard family get to be that way?