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Sat, 31 May 2008 07:09:57 +0100

Dilemmas Created by Modernization

Filed under: Family Changes, Modern Family
The anxieties about the family that began in the 1820s were in response to the changed circumstances brought about by modernization, a shorthand way of referring to the massive growth of industrial capitalism that occurred in the nineteenth century.
 
Modernization created dilemmas for family life which have not been resolved to this day. Although some changes and dilemmas exist to some extent in all urbanized, advanced technological societies (i.e, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe as well as the United States), they may be found in their purest and most acute form under advanced capitalism, particularly in America.
 
Modernization implies not merely economic or technological change but also profound social and psychological change. It affects all aspects of life: the physical environment, the types of communities people live in, the way they view the world, the way they organize their daily lives, the meaning of work, the emotional quality of family relationships, plus the most private aspects of individual experience.
 
It is, of course, a great oversimplification to talk about the effects of modernization on what is known as the family. Living in an industrial economy has had a different impact on people in different social classes and ethnic groups. Poor and working-class families were and still are confronted with survival issues: the need for steady incomes, decent housing, and health care, the tensions that result from not being sure basic needs will be met.
 
In order to ensure survival and because their values tend to be familistic rather than individualistic, working-class, immigrant, and poor families have usually depended on strong networks of kin and kinlike friendships. Middle-class, affluent families, freed from worries about basic subsistence, confront in more acute ways the social and psychological dilemmas brought on by modernization. They more often fit the model of the inwardly turned, emotionally intense, relatively isolated nuclear family.

Mon, 26 May 2008 01:38:26 +0100

A Heritage of Family Crisis

Filed under: Family Changes
Our ancestors not only experienced family instability, they worried about the shakiness of the family as an institution. The idea that the family is falling apart is not really new. In fact, if we use a deep enough historical perspective, we see that the postwar era with its optimistic view of family life was the exception rather than the rule in American life.
 
It was part of what one historian calls “the long amnesia” : the decades between the 1920s and the 1960s during which concerns were muted about family crises, women’s roles, child rearing, and declining morals which had so agitated earlier generations.
 
Anxiety about the family is an American tradition. Some historians trace it to the 1820s and the beginnings of industrialism. Others would date the sense of crisis even earlier, from the time the first settlers set foot on American soil. Immigration, the frontier, geographic and social mobility – the basic ingredients of the American experience – were all disruptive of parental authority and familial bonds.
 
Although concern about the family may have begun earlier, anxiety increased during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and discussions took on an entirely new tone. There began to be a widespread sense of alarm about the decline of the family and of parental authority.
 
A new-self-consciousness about family life emerged; writings about the family dealt anxiously with the proper methods of child rearing and with women’s special roles. In contrast to earlier periods, people began to experience a split between public and private life: the world outside the home to be seen as cold, ugly, and threatening, while the home became a cozy retreat.
 
The home was idealized as a place of perfect love and harmony, while at the same time it was blamed as the cause of juvenile delinquency, crime, and mental illness. These conflicting themes have a decidedly contemporary ring.

Sat, 24 May 2008 01:36:33 +0100

Infanticide in European History

Filed under: Family Changes
The most shocking finding of the historical studies is the prevalence of infanticide throughout European history. Infanticide has long been attributed to primitive peoples or assumed to be the desperate act of an unwed mother.
 
It now appears that infanticide provided a major means of population control in all societies lacking reliable contraception, Europe included, and that it was practiced by families on legitimate children.
 
A study of child-rearing practices in early modern France found what would be considered by today’s standards widespread mistreatment of children or a breakdown in parental care, although this study was limited to upper-class families.
 
Rather than being an instinctive trait, having tender feelings towards infants – the sense that a baby is a precious individual – seems to emerge only when infants have a decent chance of surviving and adults experience enough security to avoid feeling that children are competing with them in a struggle for survival.
 
Throughout many centuries of European history, both of those conditions were lacking. In the allocation of scarce resources, European society preferred adults to children.

Thu, 22 May 2008 01:33:28 +0100

Grandparents: A twentieth Century Phenomenon

Filed under: Family Changes
Even during more recent and prosperous historical times, the nostalgic image of a more stable and placid family turns out to be a myth. Death and birth, essentially uncontrollable and unpredictable, hovered constantly over every household, only about seventy years ago. It is hard to comprehend how profoundly family life has been affected by the reduction in mortality and spread of contraception during the past six or seven decades.
 
Although infant and child mortality rates had begun to decline a century earlier, the average family could not assume it would see all its infants survive to middle or old age. Death struck most often at children. But adults with an average life expectancy of about fifty years would often die in the prime of their productive years.
 
The widow and widower with young children were more familiar figures on the social landscape than the divorced person is today. It has been only during the twentieth century that a majority of people could expect to live out a normal family cycle: leaving home, marrying, having children, and surviving to age fifty with one’s spouse still alive.
 
Before 1900, only forty percent of the female population experienced this life cycle. The majority either died before they got married, never married, died before childbirth, or were widowed while their children were still young.
 
Contrary to the myth of three generation family in past time, grandparents are also a twentieth century phenomenon. In the past, when people lived shorter lives, they married later. The lives of parents and children thus had fewer years in which to overlap. As a result of these trends, there is for the first time in history a significant number of families with four generations alive at the same time.

Wed, 21 May 2008 01:28:21 +0100

Family Decline

Filed under: Family Changes
Laments about the current decay of the family imply some earlier era when the family was more stable and harmonious than it is now. But unless we can agree what earlier time should be chosen as a baseline and what characteristics of the family should be selected for, it makes little sense to speak of family decline.
 
Historians have not, un fact, located a golden age of the family gleaming at us from the depths of history. Historical studies of family life also cast doubt on the reality of family tranquility. Historians have found that premarital sexuality, illegitimacy, generational conflict, and even infanticide can best studied as a part of family life itself rather than as separate categories of deviation.
 
The division of family into a normal type and a pathological type is simply not borne out by historical evidence. Perhaps the most persistent single note in the history of the child is the reluctance of mothers to suckle their babies.
 
The running war between the mother, who does not want to nurse, and the philosopher-psychologists, who insist she must, stretches over two thousand years.

Mon, 19 May 2008 04:33:29 +0100

The influence of Environment on Child Rearing

Filed under: Family Changes
The assumption of parental determinism is also not well founded. Paretns are not simply independent agents who train children free of outside influence. An employed parent may behave quite differently than an unemployed one. Parents indirectly communicate to their children what to worry about – job loss, prejudice, and discrimination.
 
The stresses or supports parents find in the neighborhood, the the workplace, the economy, the political climate all influence child rearing. Children also learn from the world around them. The parental determinism model has encouraged the peculiar belief that children know nothing about the world except what parents teach.
 
Poor black children therefore are said to do badly in school because their parents fail to use the right techniques. It is easier to blame the parents than to change the neighborhood, school, or the economy or to assume that ghetto children’s correct perception of their life chances has something to do with school performance.
 
Other kinds of research show that early experience is not the all-powerful, irreversible kind of influence it has been thought to be. An unfortunate childhood does not necessarily lead to a despairing adulthood. Nor does a happy childhood guarantee a similarly sunny adulthood.

Sun, 18 May 2008 04:31:46 +0100

Children Shape Parents, Parents Shape Children

Filed under: Family Changes
Although the belief that early family experience is the most powerful influence in a child’s life is widely shared by social scientists and the public, it is not well supported by evidence and theory. There are serious flaws in two of its underlying assumptions: the assumption of the passive child and the assumption that parents independently exert influence in a virtual vacuum.
 
The model of the passive child is n longer tenable. Recent empirical work in human development shows that children come into the world with unique temperamental and other characteristics, and children shape parents as much as parents shape children.
 
Further, we know that the child’s mind is not an empty vessel or a blank state to be filled by parental instruction. Children are active agents in the construction of knowledge about the world.
 
Even behavioristic – stimulus-response – psychologists recognize the importance of cognitive factors and the child’s own activity in the learning process.





















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