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August 29 - December 5, 2022
it has become harder to define exactly what a family is. In this regard it is similar to some other sociological concepts such as social class and race that are difficult to define precisely but too valuable to do without.
We must place some boundaries around the concept of family, some limitations on its shape, or else it will lose its usefulness. But how do we determine what the key aspects of family life are today and how can we best specify what we mean by the term family?
More generally, it’s in society’s interest that today’s children become good citizens with traits such as obeying the law, showing concern about others, and being informed voters. It’s also in society’s interest that they be productive workers who are willing and
in society's interest to produced good, lawful children who are also productive and beneficial to the whole.
The important fact is that they are taking care of dependents and, in doing so, producing public goods. This definition would include, of course,
what and who is covered by the concept of the public family and who is not.
An appropriate definition of the private family must, therefore, encompass intimate relationships whether or not they include dependents.
page 9 or marital ties to others. The same Scarborough person said that the City of Hartford’s suit was “a threat to anyone who’s had people in their home who are not blood but who they care for and love no matter what” (Ryan, 2015). If we are to accommodate alternative families, we must expand our definition to include emotional bonds among people who are not related through blood or marriage. Let me offer, then, this definition of the private family: two or more individuals who maintain a close, emotional relationship and a commitment to each other, and who usually live in the same household
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def of "the private family"
members are uncertain about who is in or out of the family To be sure, individuals also receive emotional support and material assistance from kin with whom they are not in a close emotional relationship. The word “family” is sometimes used in the larger sense of relationships with sisters, uncles, cousins, close friends, and so forth. These broader kinship ties are still an important part of the setting in which people embed their intimate relations to spouses, partners, and children. The usual definition of “kin” is the people who are related to you by descent (through your mother’s or
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Family is a “zombie category,” wrote two social theorists (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2002), a dead body walking around that we mistakenly think is still alive.
???? Confucius rolling over rn
Some conclude that we should give up on the term “family” and use a broader, more inclusive descriptor, such as “personal community” (Pahl & Spencer, 2004, 2010). But I think that in an American context, we are not at the point where we should give up on the concept of family.
page 11 Table 1.1 Two Ways of Looking at the American Family THE PUBLIC FAMILY THE PRIVATE FAMILY
the distinctions between public v. private families.
Key Challenge Free-rider problem Boundary problem Source: The table is the author’s, but it is based on Giddens (1991, 1992), Beck & Beck-Gernsheim (1995, 2002), and Beck, Giddens, & Lash (1994). In sum, to examine the contributions of families to the public welfare is to look at relationships through the lens of the public family. To examine the family’s provisions of intimacy, love, and fulfillment is to look through the lens of the private family. Sometimes, both lenses apply to the same situation.
Women who have a first child as a teenager tend to come from families that have less education and less money, on average, than do other women. So the reason that teenage mothers attain less education may reflect their disadvantaged family backgrounds rather than having a child; in page 13 other words, they might have had less education even if they hadn’t had children as teenagers.
A random-sample survey is not an experiment because the households that are selected are not divided into a treatment group and a control group.
So although observational studies may yield a great deal of information about a small number of families, we may be unsure that we can generalize this knowledge to other similar families that weren’t in the observational study.
symbolic interaction theory a sociological theory that focuses on people’s interpretations of symbolic behavior page 18 For instance, when women and men interact with each other, they vary the way they dress, the gestures they use, and the tone of voice they employ according to whether the situation is a friendly conversation or a potentially romantic encounter. Each person in the interaction picks up on the symbols used by the other in order to understand which type of situation is being experienced.
fr tho
don’t have the mental energy to continually scrutinize the basic facts
bitch, I do
In this way, the simple gesture of holding the door becomes a symbol of the cultural differences between men and women. And done again and again on a daily basis, it reinforces gender differences.
In general, the interactionist perspective helps sensitize us to the ways in which people create shared understandings of how family members should act toward one another. These shared understandings become the bases of the social roles people play in families—spouse, parent, breadwinner, homemaker, child, and so forth.
they mean arising not from biological differences but rather from culturally accepted rules, from relationships of power and authority, and from differences in economic opportunities.
meaning of socially contructed
in fact, we may not even consider a mother who is raising children full time to be “working.” But today women also constitute most of the employees at hospitals, nursing homes, day care centers, and other settings where people are cared for. Their pay tends to be low: As we will see in Chapter 8, aides at child care centers make less, on average, than parking lot attendants.
Table 1.3 Aspects of Personal Life in the Late Modern Era
Having to make so many decisions has its good and bad points. It opens the possibility of developing a self-identity that is deeply fulfilling; and it allows people to seize the opportunities that may be before them. On the other hand, choices can bring insecurity and doubt. The risk of making the wrong ones can weigh on you, creating a burden as well as a boon.
People who choose not to rely on lifelong marriage must construe kinship differently. They must do the hard work of constructing a group of kin, a broader family, that they can rely on. These ties require continual attention to maintain. In contrast, relations of blood and first marriage are supported by strong social norms and the law.
Postmodern theory is consistent with a view of families as diverse, changing, and developing in unpredictable directions. It can help us make sense of family life at a time when individuals must continually make choices in uncertain circumstances, for which there are no clear rules.
The basis of postmodern theory
Consistent with the postmodernists’ assertion that people construct their self-identities and may choose to change the way they are living their lives, queer theorists argue that individuals may choose to change their sexual identities
Table 1.4 Theoretical Perspectives on the Family
differences between the perspectives
According to the conventional definition, such as the one that the Bureau of the Census uses, a family consists of two or more people who are related by birth, marriage, or legal adoption and who reside together. Queer theorists argue that we should be willing to include family ties among people who establish close bonds but are not related by any of the Census rules and who don’t necessarily live together
heteronormativity, the idea that heterosexual relationships are the only normal and natural relationships, and that, by contrast, intimate relationships outside of the conventional heterosexual model are abnormal.
In this way, queer theory has some similarities with the symbolic interactionist approach that views people as continually creating and sustaining meanings
Both contest the notion that people have stable, “natural” identities that exist separately from the social world they live in. But there is a difference (Green, 2007): Symbolic interactionists try to explain how we construct gender and sexual identities that seem durable and lasting to us and to those around us. But queer theorists tend to argue against the whole idea of durable gender and sexual identities; rather, they see fixed identities as deeply problematic. Queer theory, then, is deconstructive; it attempts to take apart the idea of a stable self-identity.
similarities and differences between the two perspectives.
The very term same-sex assumes that there are fixed gender categories and that we can easily tell whether the partners are the same
Five widely used theoretical perspectives are exchange, symbolic interaction, feminist, postmodern, and queer. Table 1.4 summarizes the main theme of each perspective and its application to studying families. INTERSECTIONALITY One further theoretical point: After a look at the history of the family in Chapter 2, I will present four chapters on major sources of identity and inequality as they relate to families: Chapter 3 on gender, Chapter 4 on social class, Chapter 5 on race and ethnicity, and Chapter 6 on sexuality. Although these chapters will be separate, the topics overlap.
summary of the next few chapters to come
intersectionality the principle that inequalities related to one social identity often overlap with inequalities in other identities
The idea of intersectionality arose in the 1980s and 1990s, when scholars who studied minority groups criticized feminist theorists for not linking gender with race (and its close cousin ethnicity) and class
That is to say, when individuals experience inequality, they tend to experience it in multiple ways at once.
globalization,
It is affecting family life in nearly every region of the world, although its effects differ from region to region (Trask, 2010). In developing countries, the new factories have created millions of low-wage jobs that have drawn mothers into the paid work force. As in the United States, the employment of mothers with young children can create child care problems, which are often worsened by the lack of any government child care assistance
The effects of globalization on family life can also be seen in the Western nations, the countries of Western Europe and the non-European, English-speaking countries of the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Western Nations
In this way, globalization is creating a gap between the family lives of the college graduates and those with less education.
Whereas in the past most people who migrated from their home country to another country were men, today almost half of all international migrants are women (United Nations, 2017). Many of them are mothers who leave their children at home.
In this way, the immigrant nannies create transnational families in which mothers and children can be thousands of miles apart and yet keep in touch through phone calls, text messages, and Skype sessions.
The world is too interconnected to consider what is happening to families in the United States without also considering what is happening elsewhere.
Moreover, the movement of married women into the paid workforce—a major trend of the past half-century—has lessened women’s economic dependence on men. Even though women’s wages remain, on average, lower than men’s, it is less difficult now for a woman to support herself and her children.
By individualism, I mean a style of life in which individuals pursue their own interests and place great importance on developing a personally rewarding life.
utilitarian individualism: a style of life that emphasizes self-reliance and personal achievement, especially in one’s work life.
expressive individualism: a style of life that emphasizes developing one’s feelings and emotional satisfaction.
Individual autonomy: Kennedy implies that autonomy is a basic right under the constitution. Personal choice: autonomous individuals must be able to choose whether or not to marry, regardless of sexual orientation.
Today, most Americans still want to marry, but they have less of a need to do so than in the past. Marriage must compete with alternatives
New feelings on marriage
Individuals used to get married prior to living together, having children, and establishing careers. Today, before marrying you may live with your future spouse or with someone else, you may spend several years establishing yourself in the labor market, and you may even have children. It is not a status to enter into lightly; rather, you wait until you’re sure it’s going to work. Marriage is a status you work toward, a personal achievement, a mark of distinction. In some ways, then, marriage’s symbolic value has increased even as its practical significance has decreased
As the postmodernists argue, a key way in which family and personal life differ today from the way they were in the past is that you not only can make choices, but also you must make choices. You have to choose whether to live with someone, whether and when to have children, whether to marry, and sometimes whether to end a marriage. You must make these decisions yourself because your options are less constrained by parents and social norms.
