Searching for the functional family

I wrote a research paper for my women's studies class on the topic of nuclear families. I'll present the paper in class thursday. I wrote it the morning that it was due, so I didn't feel that I did a very good job of it, but in reading over it again in preparation for presenting, it seems okay to me. So here it is:

In this paper, I will describe and contrast the different ways in which to assemble a family, commenting on their relative evolutionary stability, in broad terms, and on their practical, day-to-day costs and benefits to individuals living in these various situations, in narrower terms. The familial situations I intend to examine and compare are the various forms of the present day nuclear family and the alternative, and original basic unit of social and cultural organization as provided to us by anthropologists, the tribe of both present (if scarce) and “prehistoric” times.

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First, a definition is in order as to what exactly I am referring to by the phrase, “nuclear family.” I am using Meredith F. Small’s definition, from her book, Kids: How Biology and Culture shape the way we raise our children, “governed by an adult [or two adults] and not a household compound with extended kin networks.”[1]The definition of this modern invention reflects the corresponding alternative, the tribe, in which a family is, in fact, governed by a “household compound with extended kin networks.” The problems inherent in the nuclear family paradigm are those of overexertion on the part of the parents and the correlating underparenting, if I may coin a term to describe the deficit of care that children need but normally do not receive to the full extent required for healthy socialization. The overexertion of the parent(s) is present in any of the possible modern combinations of family members (mom and dad, single mom, single dad, with child(ren). It is simply a matter of the ratio of adults to children necessary, which Small suggests is three to one.[2] Most acutely, the problems of overexertion play out in our society in the form of the double burden on the mother, having to perform a perpetual balancing act between her family and her job/career, trying to provide both emotional/social support and financial support for her child(ren), especially in the case of the single mother. The issue is complicated further when one considers not only the financial motivations for mothers working but also the personal desires of mothers for achievement in the workplace because, here, we are dealing with what makes the mother happy and gives her psychological stability, something that is just as important for the mother as for the child(ren).[3]

The economy has evolved such that more and more people are now working nonstandard shifts, and to some, this appears to be beneficial because it allows for, theoretically, the kind of balancing act in which a parent is with the child(ren) at all times while the other is at work, or in the case of a single parent, that they are at least home during the evening when their children are home and awake. While this setup may allow such a balancing act to even be possible, it does result in much stress for the parent(s), either by the consequential separation of husband and wife in the case of a couple or by the general sleep deprivation that prevails in the case of all parties involved.[4] Incidentally, single mothers end up building up and utilizing such kinship networks that used to be commonplace in the helping of taking care of the child(ren), just so they can survive. While this is the most extreme case of parental overexertion, any form of the modern nuclear family has heavy stresses on it. While in some cases it works out that a parent or parents can rely on other family members, like grandparents or aunts and uncles, to provide the necessary childcare while the parent(s) work, such a setup is often not possible in our society because the pressures on the family have become so high that more often than not, extended family members are no longer a part of everyday life, but rather, relationships are strained and grown children are isolated from their parents or siblings for the majority of the time, excluding such extra-nuclear family as a possibility.[5]

The high pressure on families today lead parents to depend on maladaptive parenting techniques involving coercion and negative discipline that end up doing much harm psychologically to the child(ren), which also points to an explanation as to why the world is in such a mess today. It all starts at home. These parenting strategies basically involve either withholding love and affection from a child or flooding a child with too much affection and praise in order to produce the desired behavioral result in the child, regardless of how the child actually feels about the situation.[6]

Parents resort to these techniques because they are not considering what the child actually needs but only what the parent wants in terms of how the child should behave. Children who are controlled in this way end up tying their own self-worth to the approval of others, eventually internalizing the demands parents originally put on their children so that they must strive to be something that they are not in order to seek some sort of happiness or fulfillment – a fulfillment completely dependent on receiving the requisite approval from any authority figures, rendering the child dependent, self-deprecating, and neurotic.[7] Not coincidentally, in my opinion, these kind of children grow up to become very effective cogs in the capitalist system because they lack the creativity to imagine a way of life different from the one forced upon them, and they still crave and are completely dependent upon the approval of authority figures (such as their bosses) in determining their own self-worth. The nuclear family is promoted as the ideal in this country, and has been since after World War II.[8] This is because it is a very effective unit of organization in maximizing profits and production in the economy, ignoring the adverse effects the nuclear family inherently has of being overworked, stressed, and on the verge of despair – the natural byproducts of such isolation from an extended community of support.

In tribal societies, there is a group of adults, often spanning generations and including either a line of brothers or sisters, and older children that all share the burden of caring for the very dependent young of our species. This developed evolutionarily, first, to allow humans to reproduce more frequently than other species of primates, giving them a superior adaptive edge. But this system of care for children also served as a prolonged time of learning the culture of the family tribe.[9] This is the kind of familial relations that we as humans are adapted to. It is the unit of social organization that evolved with us over millions of years. There is much wisdom to be found in learning about what we, as humans are naturally adapted to. Ten thousand years is not enough time for us to adapt via evolution to the monumental changes to how our society is organized – the switch from being hunting and gathering nomads to sedentary agriculturalists. And fifty years is most certainly not enough time to adapt to the extremely organized, regimented, and isolated unit of familial organization – from the tribe (or extended kin group) to the nuclear family. It is essential for the health of humanity, in my opinion, to somehow regain its connection to live in the way it is adapted to live.

Today, there are attempts being made among civilized nuclear families to adopt more tribal ways of parenting children – attachment parenting, voluntary weaning/tandem breastfeeding, elimination communication (a.k.a. natural infant hygiene), co-sleeping. Of course, these are all valiant efforts but are all severely limited in applicability if not attempted in the context of a wider supportive network than the normal nuclear family, in which such intensive parenting practices were originally possible, leading to the same (or more) overexertion of the parent(s) but perhaps psychologically healthier children. The maladaptive parenting techniques commonly in use now are in use simply because parents have to be more concerned with other things than their child(ren)’s welfare, such as work, chores, and hobbies, not leaving enough time or energy for the kind of parenting that children actually need. Children need parents to be responsive to their needs all the time.[10] This need developed under conditions where it could be met – in a tribe in which extended kin also participate in responding to the needs of all of the children.[11] Without this extended supportive network, taking such an intensive and active role in the care of your child(ren) would simply be beyond one’s capability in terms of time and energy as a parent, and that is even considering the case of stay at home mothers. It seems to me that attempting to parent in this way will only cause more strain on an isolated parent, but it is certainly courageous of them to try. Such parents are certainly on the right track; we need to move back towards actually caring for our children instead of controlling them with either discipline or praise, and the only way that this could possibly be truly effective is to also move towards our original societal structure of tribes as well, giving parents, especially mothers, the much needed support in giving their children what they desperately need – love.

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[1] Meredith F. Small, How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Raise Our Kids (New York: Doubleday), 213.

[2] Small, 217

[3] Michele Kremen Bolton, The Third Shift (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass), 288.

[4] Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne L. Kalleberg, Fighting for Time: Shifting Boundaries of Work and Social Life (New York: Russell Sage Foundation), 58.

[5] Stanly I. Greenspan, The Four Thirds Solution (Perseus Publishing), 206.

[6] Alfie Kohn, Unconditional Parenting (New York: Atria), 5.

[7] Kohn, 23.

[8] Andrew Cherlin, “Changing Family and Household: Contemporary Lessons from Historical Research” Annual Review, 51.

[9] Small, 52.

[10] Attachment Parenting International, http://www.attachmentparenting.org/info.shtml.

[11] Small, 215.

Tags:

• parenting
• civilization
• community
• primitivism
• work