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Context: Attempting to define family or to assess its strength in American society is not easy

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Context:

Attempting to define family or to assess its strength in American society is not easy. Stephanie Coontz states that “[We need to examine] the myths and half-truths that surround our understanding of American families, both past and present. [. . .] Not all myths are bad, of course. […] But myths that create unrealistic expectations about what families can or should do tend to erode solidarities and diminish confidence in the problem-solving abilities of those whose families “fall short” (p. 9). And, Brathwaite, et al, view family as a social construction and designed a study in order to try to understand “the ways in which participants discursively construct their alternative family relationships as “family” (p. 10).”

Question:

Karen V. Hansen writes, “Overall, the Crane network illustrates the centrality of kin as care providers. The Cranes demonstrate that networks centered around care for children typically involve the exchange of many things besides childcare, and involve caring for individuals of different ages, not just children.” (p. 14).

Using all three of the essays in this reading set, address the following: What is a “family” in America? As part of your answer state and explain the parts of this concept of family.

Instructions

The following are recommended:

• Use ideas and facts from the reading set while also relying upon your own logic. For example, you might agree with or disagree with an author’s logic or conclusions and give your reasoning. Or you might choose to emphasize the importance of one idea while diminishing the importance of another, with an explanation of why you are valuing the ideas in this way.
• Make connections between the readings. Although the authors’ approaches are different, you will find parallels between them. For example, you could identify points of agreement and disagreement, or you could point out that they are reaching similar conclusions by different methods or logic. 
• Define and employ key terms that seem to be central to the arguments of your sources and, therefore, to your argument as well.  Primary among these key terms is “family.” Other key terms that might help you with your argument are decline; familism; deficit comparison model; voluntary kin; social constructionism; kinscription.

 

The following are REQUIRED. Essays that don’t conform to these requirements will not be graded:

• The length of your essay must be 1,500 words or longer. This word count does NOT include the following (which are not required): title page; abstract; bibliography/references/works cited.
• Quote and/or paraphrase and work directly with material from all three essays in this reading set.
• Attribute any material that you summarize, quote, or paraphrase to its source (using the page numbers of the reading set). This page and the previous page provide examples of what proper attribution looks like. (We are using MLA style, but you may also use APA style or any other style you’re comfortable with.)
• Your own ideas and thinking are necessary and important, and you cannot pass this evaluation without them. However, you should base your essay on the information contained in this set of readings, and engage with the arguments contained in the set of readings. Do not give an account of your own life experience; do not use any outside readings (including from the internet); and do not rely on information from courses you have taken. 
• Only receive assistance with writing your paper from employees of UMass Boston—not from friends, relatives, or outside tutors. You may not use electronic writing assistants such as Google Translate or Grammarly. However, you can and should use the spelling- and grammar-checker built into your word processing program, a writer’s handbook, and a dictionary or thesaurus.
• Submit a complete portfolio before the deadline. Incomplete or late-submitted portfolios will not be graded.

Portfolios that include any paper that employs academic dishonesty or plagiarism will be treated in the manner as outlined in the Student Code of Conduct, which can be downloaded in PDF form at: https://www.umb.edu/life_on_campus/policies/community/code. The consequences of violating these policies are serious and may include suspension or expulsion.

 

 

 

University of Massachusetts at Boston

 

Colleges of Education and Human Development, Honors, Liberal Arts, Nursing and Health Sciences, Public and Community Service, Science and Mathematics, and the School for the Environment

Writing Proficiency Evaluation (WPE): Portfolio

Portfolio Reading Set: “Family” in America

Portfolios must be submitted electronically

By 11:59 PM on Monday, January 4, 2021

Submission instructions will be sent to you by email on December 23, 2020

(Please note: Because of routine system maintenance, you will not be able to submit your portfolio December 29 or December 30.  If you must submit a portfolio on one of those days, contact the writing proficiency office.)

 

Portfolio Reading Set: The Family in America

 

1. Coontz, Stephanie. Introduction. The way we never were: American families and the nostalgia trap. New York, NY : BasicBooks, c1992.
2. Braithwaite, D. O., Bach, B. W., Baxter, L. A., DiVerniero, R., Hammonds, J.R., Hosek, A. M., Willer, E. K., & Wolf, B. M. (2010). Constructing family: A typology of voluntary kin. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 27, 388-407.
3. Hansen, Karen V. Not-so-nuclear families class, gender, and networks of care. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, c2005.

Articles reprinted by permission

 

 

 

The Way We Never Were: Introduction

By Stephanie Coontz[1]

Pessimists argue that the family is collapsing; optimists counter that it is merely diversifying. Too often, both camps begin with an ahistorical, static notion of what “the” family was like before the contemporary period. Thus we have one set of bestsellers urging us to reaffirm traditional family values in an era of “family collapse” and another promising to set us free from traditional family traps if we can only turn off “old tapes” and break out of old ruts. […] I am less inclined to identify some recent qualitative change in family patterns that people should repudiate or embrace. I am not going to recite a litany of ways in which modern families have “abandoned traditional commitments,” failed their children, or “lost their moral compass.” Nor, however, will I offer soothing words about achieving “self-actualization,” making divorce a “growth experience,” or celebrating the “new family pluralism.” I hope to contribute to a more nuanced appraisal of where American families have come from and the challenges they face. […]

When schoolchildren return from vacation and are asked to list the good things and the bad things about their summer, their lists tend to be equally long. Over the year, however, if the exercise is repeated, the good list grows longer and the bad shorter until by the end of the year the children are describing not actual vacations but idealized images of Vacation.

So it is with families. The actual complexity of our history–even of our own personal experience–gets buried under the weight of an idealized image. On both a personal and a social level, when things are going well, we credit our successful adherence to the family ideal, forgetting the conflicts, ambivalences, and departures from the “norm.” When things are going poorly, we look for the “dysfunctional” elements of our family life, blaming our problems on “abnormal” experiences or innovations.

 

I hope to expose many of our “memories” of traditional family life as myths. Families have always been in flux and often in crisis; they have never lived up to nostalgic notions about “the way things used to be.” But that doesn’t mean the malaise and anxiety people feel about modern families are delusions, that everything would be fine if we would only realize that the past was not all it’s cracked up to be. Proving that there was no “golden age” of the family is in one sense a debater’s point that rightfully leaves most audiences unsatisfied. Even if things were not always right in families of the past, it seems clear that some things have newly gone wrong.

 

Some of the most disturbing problems are those involving youth. More than 20 percent of American children live in poverty–one in eight children under age twelve actually goes hungry; almost 100,000 are homeless on any given night. America’s record in vaccinating children age two and under is worse than that of any country in the Western Hemisphere, except Bolivia and Haiti; the United States ranks twenty-first in the world in infant mortality. “We’re still number one” in homicide rates, though. Every day, 135,000 children take a gun to school; every fourteen hours, a child younger than age five is murdered; in Chicago’s inner city, 74 percent of the children have witnessed a shooting, stabbing, or robbery. Homicide has now replaced motor-vehicle accidents as the leading cause of death among children below the age of one. The violent-death rate of teenagers rose from 62.4 per 100,000 in 1984 to 69.7 in 1988, an increase of 12 percent. The teen suicide rate has quadrupled since 1950.

In a recent national poll, one in seven Americans claimed to have been sexually abused as a child, while one in six reported being physically abused. One out of every ten newborns has been exposed to some kind of illicit drug. […] Each year, there are 30,000 pregnancies among young women under the age of fifteen. U.S. children rank behind those of most of America’s industrial competitors in school achievement tests: The high school dropout rate in America is 27 percent, compared to 5 percent in Japan and 2 percent in Russia. Our murder rate is four times higher than Europe’s; our rape rate is seven times higher. However, as the U.S. Surgeon General notes, “The home is actually a more dangerous place for American women than the city streets.” Each day, four women are killed by their male partners; in 1989, more women were abused by their husbands than got married in the same period.

The precise links between these depressing figures and recent family changes are not always clear, but it is logical to posit some connection. Family life seems more fragile than ever. The rate of divorce tripled between 1960 and 1982, then leveled off at a point where 50 percent of first marriages, and 60 percent of second ones, are likely to end in divorce within forty years. Between 1960 and 1986, the proportion of teenage mothers who were unmarried rose from 15 percent to 61 percent, while the total number of children growing up with only one parent doubled, to a full quarter of all children under age eighteen. Twenty-five percent of the people polled in a recent national inquiry into American morality said that for $10 million they would abandon their entire family; a large number of people are evidently willing to do the same thing for free, judging from the astonishing statistics on how few noncustodial fathers spend time with their children after divorce.

Not all the changes affecting American families are negative, but even innovations of which most people approve create uncomfortable predicaments. Most women want to retain the gains they have made in jobs, education, and law, but working women are burdened with a second shift at home. […] Few Americans want to return to the days of segregated gender roles and legal inequality, but they are not sure how to build male-female intimacy in the midst of continuing inequities, the complicated dynamics of sexual harassment and mistrust, and the extremes of isolated self-sufficiency on the one hand and codependency[2] on the other.

Most Americans welcome the expanded tolerance for alternative family forms and reproductive arrangements, although they are perplexed by the difficult boundary disputes that accompany new family definitions. Courts have been asked to decide what happens to fertilized ova if the partners split up and to rule whether sperm donors or surrogate mothers have higher rights. It is surely wrong to consider a woman who agrees to become a surrogate mother nothing more than a “carrier” for the fetus, but isn’t the woman who made plans to receive that baby for nine months also an expectant mother? What about child-custody disputes between lesbian or gay partners? Do paternal grandparents have any right to visit their grandchildren if their daughter-in-law has custody and forbids the relationship to continue? How does a divorced woman relate to the “wife-in-law” she gains when her husband remarries, a woman who may actually take more care of her children on visitation weekends than her ex-husband does?

Contrary to the doomsday scenario, there have been undeniable gains associated with the democratization of family relations, the expansion of women’s options outside the family and men’s responsibilities within it, the erosion of ethnocentric[3] and moralistic norms about what a proper family must be and do, and the new tolerance for unconventional family relations. But these gains have been accompanied by unanticipated and difficult new inequalities. While divorce has been a vital option for many, family dissolution often impoverishes women and children and, at least in our current social context, puts some youth “at risk.” Even though many families as well as individual women benefit from women’s new work opportunities, child care by profit-making companies, state agencies, and unregulated homeworkers all have major drawbacks. There seems to be an erosion of commitment to social obligations in general, and to children in particular, within America. There are no easy answers to such problems.

But, then again, there never were. Women and children bore the brunt of poverty within “traditional” two-parent families just as surely, if less visibly, as they do in modern female-headed households: Budget studies and medical records reveal that women and children in poor families of the past were far more likely to go without needed nutrients than were male heads of families. “Poverty has always been feminized,” comments economist Claudia Goldin.

Twenty percent of American children live in poverty today: At the turn of the century the same proportion lived in orphanages, not because they actually lacked both parents, but because one or both parents simply could not afford their keep. As late as 1960, after ten years of low divorce rates, one in three children lived in poverty.

 

Modern statistics on child-support evasion are appalling, but prior to the 1920s, a divorced father did not even have a legal child-support obligation to evade. Until that time, children were considered assets of the family head, and his duty to support them ended if he was not in the home to receive the wages they could earn. As for child abuse, it has far too long and brutal a history to be blamed on recent family innovations.

While over permissiveness may create problems among some modern youth, overwork was responsible for the prevalence of delinquency and runaways in the late nineteenth century. Today’s high school dropout rates are shocking, but as late as the 1940s, less than half the youths entering high school managed to finish, a figure much smaller than todays. Violence is reaching new highs in America, but before the Civil War, New York City was already considered the most dangerous place to live in the world; the United States has had the highest homicide rates in the industrial world for almost 150 years.

Alcohol and drug abuse, similarly, were widespread well before modern rearrangements of gender roles and family life. In the 1820s, per capita consumption of alcohol was almost three times higher than it is today, and there was a major epidemic of opium and cocaine addiction in the late nineteenth century. “On a per capita basis, narcotic abuse was certainly as bad and probably worse” then as it is today (National Institute of Health). Many middle-class women were addicted to patent medicines that contained powerful drugs; pharmacists routinely dispatched young messenger boys to people’s homes with vials of morphine.

I am not arguing that the more things change, the more they remain the same. There have been many transformations in family life and social relations in American history, but they have been neither as linear nor as unitary as many accounts claim. Some changes have resulted in gains for one kind of family and losses for another, or gains for one family member and losses for another. Alternatively, things that seemed like gains in one context were experienced as losses in another. However, the historical record is clear on one point: Although there are many things to draw on in our past, there is no one family form that has ever protected people from poverty or social disruption, and no traditional arrangement that provides a workable model for how we might organize family relations in the modern world.

To say that no easy answers are to be found in the past is not to close off further discussion of family problems, but to open it up. To find effective answers to the dilemmas facing modern families, we must reject attempts to “recapture” family traditions that either never existed or existed in a totally different context. Only when we have a realistic idea of how families have and have not worked in the past can we make informed decisions about how to support families in the present or improve their future prospects.

[We need to examine] the myths and half-truths that surround our understanding of American families, both past and present. […] Not all myths are bad, of course. People need shared stories and rituals to bring them together and reinforce social solidarity. But myths that create unrealistic expectations about what families can or should do tend to erode solidarities and diminish confidence in the problem-solving abilities of those whose families “fall short.” Many of the myths [...] are white, middle-class myths, both because middle-class individuals are the predominant mythmakers in our society and because the media tends to project fragments of the white, middle-class experience into universal “trends” or “facts.” [...These myths distort the diverse experiences of other groups in America and [I] argue that they don’t even describe most white, middle-class families accurately.

The most common reaction to a discordance between myth and reality is guilt. Even as children, my students and colleagues tell me they felt guilty because their families did not act like those on television. Perhaps the second most common reaction is anger–a sense of betrayal or rage when you and your family cannot live as the myths suggest you should be able to do. My hope is that [...] people put some of that guilt or anger aside and develop more compassion both for those who are still trying to live up to the myths and for those who are struggling, whether more or less successfully, to adjust their family norms and behaviors to modern realities.

 

 

 

 

Constructing family: A typology of voluntary kin

By Dawn O. Braithwaite, et. al[4]

The family is the most pervasive and central of human institutions. Scholars exploring the breadth of relationships underscore the importance of family, situating it as the “focus point for nearly all relational encounters. It is, truly, a masterpiece of the human experience” (Floyd & Morman, 2006, p. xi). Media portrayals of families, as well as the scholarly literature, focus most centrally on families comprised of blood and legal kin living within the boundaries of heterosexual marriage and in relatively autonomous family households (Fingerman & Hay, 2002; Galvin, 2006; Turner & West, 2006). Families come in different forms, many outside of the bonds of heterosexual first marriage; for example, single parent families, stepfamilies, adoptive families, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered (GLBT) families, grandparents raising grandchildren, and families that are child-free by choice.

Scholars across disciplines are advancing definitions of family that recognize the existence of families outside of blood and legal kin relationships, focusing their definitions around the question of whether a social network of non-related persons functions as a family (e.g., Coontz, 1999; Galvin 2006). While the boundaries of family are often contested, we chose to situate the present study in a social constructionist[5] view of family. Galvin, Brommel, and Bylund’s (2004) definition of family is representative of a social constructionist perspective on family:

Networks of people who share their lives over long periods of time bound by marriage, blood, or commitment, legal or otherwise, who consider themselves as family and who share a significant history and anticipated futures of functioning in a family relationship. (p. 6)

This definition, representative of those who see the family as socially constructed, creates the opportunity to include non-legal kin as family (e.g. White & Klein, 2002). Whereas scholars are paying greater attention to a wider array of family forms and relationships outside of the traditional nuclear family (e.g., Ellingson & Sotirin, 2006), comparatively little attention has been directed toward those families formed outside of blood and legal kinship. Our interest in the present study centered on those persons perceived to be family, but who are not related by blood or law. In particular, the focus of our study was in understanding the ways in which participants discursively construct[6] their alternative family relationships as “family.”

Reframing fictive kin as voluntary kin

The relationships of interest in the study are most often referred to by scholars as fictive kin (e.g., Chatters, Taylor, & Jayakody, 1994; Ibsen & Klobus, 1972; Muraco, 2006), but they also are labeled as chosen kin (Johnson, 2000; Weston, 1991), self-ascribed kin (Galvin, 2006), urban tribes (Watters, 2003), friend-keepers (Gallagher & Gerstel, 1993; Leach & Braithwaite, 1996), othermothers (Collins, 2000), and ritual kin (Ebaugh & Curry, 2000).

As with other “alternative” families, fictive families are often conceptualized by scholars through what they are not; that is, they are defined by how they are different from the conventional understanding of family, focusing on what fictive family members lack. For example, Floyd and Morman (2006, p. xii) defined fictive family as “family-like relationships that are neither genetically nor legally bound.” This represents what Ganong and Coleman (1994) referred to as a deficit comparison model. This model is underscored when “alternative” family types (e.g., GLBTQ families or stepfamilies) are compared against traditional nuclear families and found wanting because of differences or lack of a common bloodline (Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991; Weston, 1991).

Whereas the term fictive kin appears most often in the literature, the term fictive is fraught with problems for us. Rather than focusing on the deficit model, we wanted to understand how persons involved in these relationships understand them. We agree with Weston (1991) who argued that the term fictive only adds to the stigmatization, suggesting that these are not “real” relationships. Based on Weston’s work, we also considered the label chosen kin; however, this term is used in the literature to describe gay and lesbian families. Although some of the relationships we were interested in undoubtedly would be GLBT families […] we wanted to broaden our lens to all non-blood and legal relationships. In addition, the term chosen positions members of these alternative families as objects of selection. In the end we opted to label these relationships as voluntary kin to talk about the breadth of family relationships represented in our study. Voluntary kin implies a mutuality of selection, rather than framing these relationships as asymmetrical structures of chooser and chosen.

Understanding voluntary kin as discourse-created families

A perspective of communication as constituting relationships (Baxter, 2004) allows us to consider the ways in which families are created via discourse. This social constructionist perspective centers the negotiation of family identity and expectations in communication (Bergen & Braithwaite, 2009; Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Galvin, 2006). However, families that depart from cultural norms are even more dependent on discourse to define themselves internally and to those outside the family (Galvin, 2006). Given that voluntary kin relationships do not have blood or legal ties, understanding these families as formed in discourse led us to adopt social constructionism as the theoretical frame for the present study. Leeds-Hurwitz (2006, p. 230) explained that the theory is predicated on the assumption that “people make sense of experience by constructing a model of the social world and how it works” and the use of talk to “make things happen.” Gergen (1985, p. 266) stressed that “social constructionist inquiry is principally concerned with explicating the process by which people come to describe, explain, or otherwise account for the world (including themselves) in which they live.” From this perspective, relationships are constituted in communication, literally talked into being (Baxter, 2004).

Family communication researchers adopting a social constructionist perspective focus on how families are formed, maintained, changed, and repaired through language use (Leeds-Hurwitz, 2006). Bourdieu (1996, p. 19) argued that we construct our sense of what is “real” through our language use. In particular, he indicated that there is nothing “natural” about “family”; rather, what counts as a “family” is a discursive construction: “But if it is accepted that the family is only a word, a mere verbal construct, one then has to analyze the representations that people form of what they refer to as the family.” Bourdieu (1996) asserted that the discursive construction of “family” is ideologically steeped in that some forms of social relations (e.g., those built on blood or law) become valorized and legitimated whereas other “alternative” forms of family bear a heavier legitimation burden and are less accepted, on their face, as “real,” “normal,” or “natural.”

In sum, whereas we know that voluntary kin are persons outside of blood and legal ties who are considered as family, we know little about how these relationships are discursively represented in native talk. Because there are no formal roles or expectations for the formation and enactment of voluntary kin relationships, they are especially discourse dependent. While there is agreement among scholars that voluntary families are potentially important for persons in these relationships, researchers have yet to study how members of voluntary families provide accounts of them to others and what different forms these families may take. As a first step in understanding the discursive constructions of voluntary kin, the following question guided our work:

What are the discursive constructions of voluntary kin relationships in the talk of members of these relationships?

Discussion

From a social constructionist perspective, “family” is discourse dependent (Galvin, 2006); in talking about “family,” we are always in the communicative business of constructing what a family means and legitimating it as a social entity. Families that somehow depart from the normative standards of what constitutes a “real” family bear a special discursive burden to present themselves as understandable and legitimate. Because voluntary kin relationships are not based on the traditional criteria of association by blood or law, members of those fictive relationships experience them as potentially problematic, requiring discursive work to render them sensical and legitimate to others.

The talk of our 110 informants legitimated four main types of voluntary kin relationships: (i) voluntary kin as substitute family, (ii) voluntary kin as supplemental family, (iii) voluntary kin as convenience family, and (iv) voluntary kin as extended family. These four types of voluntary kin were legitimated and rendered sensical[7] by discursively invoking the family of blood and law. They were discursively constructed as sensical or “real” through analogy; that is, voluntary kin members were characterized as filling family-like roles (e.g., parent, sibling) or performing family-like functions (emotional fulfillment, acceptance, a sense of common identity, temporal and spatial presence in one’s everyday life). They were legitimated in large measure because of attributed deficits in the blood or legal family: deficits of absence (physical death, geographic dispersion, or temporary nonpresence); deficits of role (a missing family role or an underperformed role); or deficits of emotion fulfillment (from felt estrangement, non-acceptance; lack of commonality). Only one type of voluntary kin relationship was legitimated affirmatively–the category of voluntary kin as extended family. This type gained its legitimacy by reframing the boundary of the traditional family of blood and law to emphasize its expansiveness and permeability. The major contribution of this study is its attention to the discursive work enacted by participants as they construct their voluntary kin as sensical and legitimate; although “fictive” by some benchmarks of “family,” they were nonetheless constructed as “real” by our participants in their talk. […]

Although our participants constructed their voluntary kin relationships as significant to their lives, the key discursive resource deployed to accomplish this task was a discourse of the traditional family. The traditional family of blood and law was the discursive prism through which our participants made sense of their voluntary kin relationships, reminding speaker and listener of the centrality of that discourse. Given that deficits in the traditional family were the basis of legitimation for most of the voluntary relationships described by our participants, it is perhaps important to note that voluntary kin were not legitimated on their own terms. That is, based on our participant talk, would people have voluntary kin relationships if their families of blood and law were fully functional and complete? Our participants opened a slight discursive door by which to answer this question in the affirmative–the voluntary kin as extended family. However, even this type gained its legitimacy only by being framed within the permeable boundary of the traditional family. Interestingly, the extended family type was presented least often by our participants.

The development of a typology[8] of voluntary kin types potentially helps researchers in understanding the different forms voluntary kin relationships take, rather than thinking about them in a unitary way. This interpretive project was not focused on an examination of differences, but certainly directions for future research include an examination of whether these types can be replicated with different populations. For example, it would be interesting to note whether this typology would emerge in native talk with populations already studied in the voluntary kin literature, including African Americans, older adults, immigrants, working-class families, and youth. Should these types emerge, their relative frequencies might vary by population group. Researchers could also productively examine possible gender differences in the prevalence of these voluntary kin types. The examination of such differences, while beyond the scope of the current project, holds value for future research.

In addition, future researchers could productively attend to various outcomes and processes associated with these voluntary kin types. It would be valuable to determine, for example, whether these types vary with respect to such indicators as relational satisfaction, commitment, and longevity. Researchers need to examine the communication processes by which various kinds of voluntary kin relationships are enacted. For example, since these relationships are, in most instances, part of a social network with the families of blood and law, researchers need to examine the ways in which individuals negotiate boundaries between one kind of family and another.

How parties negotiate information access, as well as how they distribute time and other symbolic resources, merits systematic research attention. We are currently collecting data focused on the interaction and boundary work between the voluntary and blood and legal family members.

We note that while the voluntary kin are clearly important to our participants, most of these relationships are in addition to, rather than in replacement of, blood and legal families. We were somewhat surprised that we did not find more estranged families in our data. Perhaps persons with estranged families did not volunteer to come and talk about their experiences, or perhaps most people retain at least some contact with their blood and legal kin, even in situations where blood and legal families are not close. Certainly this raises an empirical question that researchers should continue to examine. […]

 

 

The Cranes, An Absorbent Safety Net

By Karen V. Hansen[9]

Family dominates the milieu in which the Cranes’ lives unfold, providing a major point of reference and inspiration. Six-year-old Robbie Crane has an angelic face, with huge eyes and long, thick eyelashes. To his single mother, Patricia Crane, his biological father, Robert Holcomb Sr., and his maternal grandmother, Fran Crane, Robbie seems a gift from God. “There’s a purpose for him being here,” Fran told me with conviction. “I have no idea what it is. I felt that from the minute he was born.” On biological grounds alone, Robbie’s existence is surprising. Before she became pregnant with her son, Patricia had been told that she was no longer capable of having children. Moreover, Robbie is his father’s only biological child, even though, according to Fran, Robert’s sexual practices over the years might well have resulted in children. It is more than the mystery of Robbie’s conception that make this child seem unusual to his family, though. As an example of Robbie’s unique qualities, Fran and Robert independently recounted the same story. Fran described the evening that Patricia’s best friend’s mother died: “Robbie was there at her house when she passed away. And he was outside in the backyard, and he came in and told them that an angel came and got–he called her Grandma–that an angel came and got Grandma. And they went and checked and she was dead.”

Raising Robbie–keeping him safe and cared for–is a responsibility shared across a network of adults, most, but not all, of whom are members of his extended family. Robbie’s parents each take a deep interest in their son and are friendly with one another, but they are not married and they do not live together. Robert’s home is located about a two-hour drive south in the town where both he and Patricia grew up. Despite this physical distance, Robert is an active participant in Robbie’s life, an important parenting partner to Patricia, and a significant member of the Crane network of care. The rest of the network Patricia relies on to help her raise her son consists of her mother, Fran, her younger brother, Ben Crane, and her next-door neighbor, Tracy Johnson. [...] When Patricia is working, Ben picks up Robbie from the school bus stop and takes him across town to where his great-grandmother Louise lives. There, Fran looks after him until Patricia is off work and simultaneously keeps an eye on her mother, Louise, who is nearly ninety and increasingly debilitated by Alzheimer’s disease. Several times a week, Ben steps in while Patricia works the 2:00 to 8:00 P.M. shift. Tracy watches Robbie one morning per week and occasionally during the afternoon. For her part, Patricia provides Fran with food and shelter, Ben with emotional support and meals, and Tracy with time off from her responsibilities as a working single mother with four children.

 

This network of interdependence struggles with the limitations of its financial resources and its vulnerability to health crises. Although Patricia is employed (she works two jobs–as a member of a sanitary maintenance crew at a truck stop and as a driver at a car auction), she sometimes needs to suspend paid employment in order to provide care for others in her network. During those periods, government support systems (such as Social Security and disability insurance), however inadequate, function as a safety net. Similarly, on the few occasions when none of the regular members of the Crane network is available to watch Robbie, Patricia turns to a human safety net of friends and neighbors. The resident manager at her apartment complex, for example, is a willing backup caregiver.

Overall, the Crane network illustrates the centrality of kin as care providers. The Cranes demonstrate that networks centered around care for children typically involve the exchange of many things besides child care, and involve caring for individuals of different ages, not just children. Patricia’s friendship with and reliance on her neighbor Tracy, moreover, highlights how nonfamily members recruited to fill gaps left by inadequate or absent kin may come to be embraced as part of the network. Finally, the Cranes’ responses to open-ended interview questions point to the importance of shared values and broad agreement among network members about how to care for children. For the people in this network, family comes first, sometimes as a resource to tap for support, sometimes as a site of multiple needs that members take turns to meet, and sometimes as both. Network members acknowledge specific obligations and responsibilities toward one another, and all share the expectation that the assistance they give will be repaid in some way, at some future time. [T]his reciprocity, however uneven it may be in the short term, helps the individual members in the longer term, as they go about trying to meet the challenges of their daily lives.

Second Chances on the South Side

When I interviewed Patricia Crane for the first time, we sat in the living room of her one-bedroom apartment at the Hacienda Apartments, a complex that sits along a wide, intermittently busy boulevard in the city of Oakfield, California.’ The street is dotted with fast-food joints, empty lots, and gas stations. The area does not look terribly run down, but neither does it feel like a neighborhood. The Hacienda Apartments consist of several single-level buildings–about fifty units in all–arranged in a horseshoe pattern. The complex was built in the 1920s to provide housing for the area’s many agricultural workers; it offers one-room studios, a few kitchenettes (studios with refrigerators and stoves), and some one-bedroom units. Lee Ramsey, the apartment manager, dismisses the apartments’ graceful white arches and red-riled roofs, saying that its Mission adobe-style exterior is more appropriate for a town in the California foothills than for Oakfield, which is located in the state’s heavily agricultural Central Valley.

A few large valley-oak trees shade the complex’s internal yard, along with numerous eucalyptus and several walnut trees. Bright yellow flowers planted at the trees’ base add a welcome splash of color. On hot days, tenants sit out in front of their apartments, casually observing the activities in the buildings’ common space. Lee tries to place families with children in units near the green patch of lawn in one corner of the interior horseshoe, so the children will have someplace to play. The patch is inviting, shaded by a commanding walnut tree, but it is no more than a twenty-by-twenty-foot square. A white picket border, about eighteen inches high, marks the area off from the driveway. The manager’s unit stands in the soft center of the horseshoe. Its fenced yard (easily three times as big as the play area for the children) is home to two dogs and a cat. Outside the perimeter of the apartment complex, but symbolically in its center, facing the street, is a liquor store.

Lee Ramsey has been managing the Hacienda Apartments for the past three years. As a result of her hard work, the drug and prostitution traffic for which the complex had been notorious is gone. She explains that the Hacienda Apartments now function as a small community, safer for the elderly, families with children, anyone whose life situation might make them vulnerable: “Yeah, we keep an eye out, because we go to food banks, and every now and then you get a good supply of rice and beans and noodles. And it’s like, okay–who just moved in with nothing? And you help out when you can. When you have an extra piece of furniture–we can furnish a place in a matter of days You do what you can.” Noting with pride that those who move into the building now are a

“better” group of people, Lee says, “I look at this as a place [for people] to stop and regroup for a second chance.” Patricia Crane, her mother, Fran, and her thirty-two-year-old brother, Ben, are just such people. Patricia and Robbie relocated to Oakfield two years earlier, from a town in the coastal county of Santa Cruz. Ben moved about the same time, following his sister’s lead. Patricia wanted to be near Fran, who had recently moved and whose health was beginning to fail; Oakfield’s much lower rents were also a draw. On the other hand, the city’s heavily agricultural economy does not support wage rates as high as those Patricia and Ben had earned in the Santa Cruz area, where both worked in an electronics factory. Patricia, Robbie, Fran, and Ben moved to the Hacienda Apartments five months ago. The mix of units there fits the Crane family’s needs. Patricia has a one-bedroom apartment, but the bedroom is for Fran. Patricia sleeps on the couch in the living room, with Robbie on the floor beside her. Until recently, Tracy, the only nonfamily member of the Crane network, and her children lived in the apartment right next door. Ben rents a studio a few doors away, explaining that he does not need “a kitchen in my place, because we have a kitchen over here. So it’s cheaper. It’s cheaper that way, you know. I just give [Patricia] the grocery money every now and then.” With the kitchen in her unit serving as everyone’s home base, Patricia’s role as network anchor has a physical as well as psychological reality.

Patricia Crane, Anchor

I can hear the sound of the television as Patricia opens the door to usher me into her apartment for our first interview session. She is an extremely thin woman in her early forties. She stands about five feet, five inches tall, with shoulder-length brown hair, dark eyes, and a sallow skin tone that hints of ill health. Although she has quit smoking, the apartment still smells faintly of stale cigarette smoke. The living room is small, about ten feet by ten feet. A large brown-and-beige plaid couch dominates the left side of the room, the television and a set of bookshelves are straight ahead, and an overstuffed chair is squeezed into an alcove on the right. Just beyond the couch is a door that leads into the bathroom. The kitchen is visible through a doorway to the right of the television. There is a window over the kitchen sink that provides a view of the street. The bedroom, tucked off the kitchen, cannot be seen from the living room.

We sit down and I explain the study and the informed-consent procedures. After signing the forms, Patricia turns the television to mute, much to my relief. I have been silently wondering how well my rape recorder could capture her voice if competing with the TV. In response to my open-ended questions, Patricia tells me about herself and about the complex caretaking system she relies on to keep Robbie safe while she is at work.

The only girl in a family of five children, Patricia grew up in the San Joaquin Valley and lived there most of her life. She describes her stepfather as “pretty stern” and says that her brothers were “raised by the belt.” She, however, was never beaten. She has happy memories of summers spent in the mountains with her grandparents. She would bunk together with her siblings and her cousins in a cabin. The children would hunt for frogs and lizards to give their grandfather, who would then make “lizard stew,” the Crane family equivalent of stone soup. Her family belonged to the Salvation Army church, which she still attends. When I ask if she identifies with any particular ethnic group, Patricia says “white.” Later, she mentions that her biological father was part Choctaw Indian, although how much a part she does not know.

She joined the Job Corps before she finished high school, acquiring job training and, later, her general equivalency diploma (GED). Patricia has held many kinds of low-wage positions, including waitress, warehouse worker, cleaning person, and electronics assembly-line worker. Like her mother and her grandmother, she also has been an agricultural laborer in the lettuce-packing sheds near her hometown. Patricia has never done clerical work. She explains that it does not suit her; she does not like sitting behind a desk. She tells me without hesitation that the job she liked best was her position in an electronics factory in the Santa Cruz area: it required that she use her brain as well as her body, and it paid “good money.” One start-up company she worked for conducted a lot of experiments; Patricia discovered that she enjoyed the experience of helping to shape a product. That kind of job does not exist in Oakfield, however, so she cannot earn the same level of wages or gain a similar degree of job satisfaction.

When she was twenty-two, Patricia became a mother. Just after she gave birth to her first son, Brendan, she took guardianship of Ben, her youngest brother: “I had Ben since he’s been eleven years old. I had custody of him, because he got too much for Mom to handle. You know, he was getting in too much trouble. So I went to court [at her mother’s request] and I got custody of him. So I had Ben and my oldest son at the same time I had to, or else he was going to CYA [California Youth Authority]. It was either he goes, or comes with me. So I said, ‘Come with me, and we’ll work it out.’ And we did.” In conjunction with the court and her mother, Patricia rook responsibility for Ben as he struggled to find his way. This established a life-long pattern of closeness between the siblings in the context of their extended family.

Ben was occasionally responsible for his sister’s baby son while she was at work. He developed a strong brotherly relationship with Brendan over the years, and a still stronger mother-son kind of relationship with Patricia. Sometimes this arrangement succeeded, other times not. Eventually, Ben was taken out of Patricia’s care. He dropped out of high school, spent time in juvenile detention, and drifted.

Brendan, now nineteen, was also a challenge. Patricia had help from her mother in rearing Brendan, but still found him difficult to manage. His father, largely absent from Brendan’s life, was formerly in the bail-bond business. Currently, he is in prison, serving time for stabbing a neighbor. As a teenager, Brendan went to live with his father. This change in his home life seemed to do him no good. His troubles worsened; he was arrested for burglary and then sent to an honor camp. He ran away from the camp, got caught, and was slammed into jail.

Although there are times when Patricia does not hear from Brendan and does not know where he is, she tries to help her son when she can. Not long ago, learning he was in serious trouble with the law, she took immediate action on his behalf:

And they was goanna Three Strike him. But I, I–me and his lawyer–went to the Three Strike board, and he only got seven and a half years instead of twenty-five years to life.  So they three striked him and was gonna send him to prison for life. Yeah, I didn’t even know about that until my aunt had read in the [newspaper] an article about Brendan. About my son! And she called me, and I says, “What’s he doing in jail?” I don’t know nothing about this! And she goes, “Yes, he’s in jail.” And so I got a hold of him out there, and that’s when I got this lawyer and we started fighting for him.

The state prison where Brendan is serving his term is several hours’ drive from Oakfield. Patricia is worried about her son; she has not yet been officially approved for a visit. Just this morning, though, she had received a phone call from Brendan. “He sounds fine,” she tells me, adding, “as okay as he can be in there.”

When Patricia turns to the topic of her child-care arrangements, I learn that her elaborate system of care is in jeopardy. Her mother, Fran, is in the hospital, battling lung cancer. A fatigue born of worry shows on Patricia’s face. Leaning forward from the couch, taut with determination, she describes the shifting circumstances brought on by her mother’s health crisis:

Now it’s gonna be put on me to take care of my mom. So I’m gonna have to work that out with my work schedule................... The social worker up there at the hospital was talking to me about just not going back to work right now, and Social Security will pay me, I guess. They’ll pay me to stay here and take care of Mom. So yeah, that’s what we’re looking into now       I’ve gotta have oxygen here and all kinds of other things for her, so it’s gonna be a pretty major turnaround for me. I’m used to being out working, and I’ve gotta stay home now. It’s gonna drive me nuts. [Laughs.]

One month later, I return to interview Patricia a second time. In the interim, Fran has come home from the hospital, weak and on oxygen. She is temporarily living with Sherry, her half-sister, in the same house with their mother, Louise. Because Sherry’s house is on the other side of town from the Hacienda Apartments, Patricia’s day has an entirely different shape. Now, she drops Robbie off at the school bus stop in the morning and then drives thirty minutes across town to her Aunt Sherry’s house. She makes sure that both her mother and her granny get their medications and meals. Then, she drives back to her side of town to pick up Robbie in the afternoon.  This routine has required that Patricia quit her jobs at the truck stop and at the car auction.

I am puzzled that Patricia does not include Aunt Sherry in her network. Patricia’s explanation is that she relies on Sherry for advice about education and learning, but not hands-on care, although she does help on occasion. For instance, Sherry has a computer in her home and has purchased several programs appropriate to kindergarteners and first-graders, specifically for Robbie to use. I comment about the difficulties imposed by job constraints, since I know Aunt Sherry to be employed full time. When I interview Fran Crane she explains further. Sherry, her half-sister, simply cannot take on care responsibilities like those involved in caring for their mother, because, never having had to take responsibility as a child, she does not know how. As the youngest in the family, Sherry was always “spoiled,” according to Fran.

At the close of the interview, when I ask if there is anything else I should know about her system of care, the response Patricia offers is distressing, though predictable in a country where poor people are not guaranteed adequate health care. She talks about health insurance and her lack of it. Without insurance, every doctor’s appointment or medical procedure becomes an out-of-pocket expense for her. When Robbie gets sick, Patricia is forced to weigh her son’s health against her limited financial resources. It is an impossibly painful calculation. “Especially when he gets hurt. I’m sitting here–should I take him to the doctor’s or shouldn’t I? You know? All the time, I take him to the doctor’s anyway. That’s the only thing that I think is unfair.” The lack of affordable health care also takes its toll on Patricia’s own health. She simply forgoes medical attention she cannot afford. To add insult to injury, the State of California holds her responsible for paying a two-thousand-dollar medical bill that resulted from care given to Brendan at the honor camp, after he had been beaten by other boys there.

Family First and a Helping Ethic

For the Cranes, family obligations come first but operate in a culture of helping others. The “family-first” perspective is articulated and regularly tested among the Crane network members. When I asked Patricia Crane if there was any circumstance in which her brother would not help her, she replied, “No. No. Because his family comes first; that’s what he says. He’s told his boss, ‘Anytime I get a phone call, my family comes first.’” Patricia talks about her own employment when her son once got sick:

Well, I’ve always tried being in the labor force. But when he was in the hospital for five days, I just took off. I says, “My boy comes first” . . . It’s no problem, because I tell them right up front, you know, you know, when they hire me. You know, “My son comes first.” You know, like, this incident with my mom, you know? I let my employer know, “I’ve gotta go to the doctor’s. I’m going to the doctor’s with my mom all the time. You know, I might be late.” And they says, “No problem.” You know? And then, when she ended up in the hospital, I called them and they didn’t answer. Well, I called them back the next day and they answered. And I told them what had happened, you know? And they says, “No problem. You take off this time, and you come back whenever your mom’s better.” I’ve been lucky.

Her friend Tracy Johnson tells about a similar commitment to her family. In fact, she had a disagreement with Patricia about her sense of obligation to her own mother. Even though Tracy was perfectly clear about not wanting her drug-addicted mother around her children, at one point her mother ran out of food and Tracy could not turn her away. Tracy said, “Patricia was like, ‘Can’t you just tell her no?’ And I was like, ‘Patricia, no. That’s my mom.’ It’s so hard.” For Tracy’s inability to turn her mother away, Patricia got angry with her, although she probably would have done the same thing had she been in Tracy’s position. Tracy held tight to her sense of responsibility for her mother, even when it conflicted with her obligation to protect her children and her commitment to her friend.

Like many others in the working class, members of the Crane network prefer child-care providers who are related to them. Fran has helped Patricia rear both her children, and the two women are helping Ben with his son. Patricia and Tracy are each other’s exception to this child-rearing preference. Reliance on someone outside the family has earned Tracy, especially sharp criticism. Her grandmother, for one, does not mince words:

She tells me I’m no type of mother to leave my kids. And I do rake them sometimes to my best friend, [Jessica]. And I trust her with my life. Because when I moved in around the corner from my dad, what happened? My dad was keeping them [My grandmother and father) both got sick at the same time, and they couldn’t keep my kids. So I needed a babysitter, and I wouldn’t go to work. I stayed off work for about a week, and [Jessica] said, “Tracy, I noticed you weren’t going to work.” And I was like, “Yeah, I know.” And she goes, “I know you don’t like leaving your kids with anyone, but I watch kids all the time and I will watch your kids for you.” And I paid her thirty dollars a week to watch my twins, plus I bought groceries and stuff. And that’s the only person I will trust my kids with, outside of family, other than Patricia because I consider her part of my family.

Privileging family does not necessitate excluding friends who have passed the litmus test of trust. [............................................................................................................... ] Such inclusions can require one to explain one’s behavior, however.

At a more general level, an ethic of helping informs the lives of the Crane network members, extending beyond the confines of their immediate families and beyond child care. Patricia’s kitchen, for example, serves as a resource for those who earn her trust or who do not take advantage–in short, anyone she wants to help. In return, others bring groceries, contribute small sums of money, and care for her son, her convalescing mother, or her.

 

Some associations start via happenstance and evolve when one person decides to act unilaterally to extend assistance. Thus, when Fran befriended a woman she met at a Salvation Army bingo game and discovered that her new friend’s mother was struggling to care for herself, she drew the mother (dubbed “Grandma”) into the safety net of the Cranes. She explains her action this way: “She’s just a friend. But if I had somebody out there .. .you know, that needed a friend, I’d hope that somebody would be a friend to ‘em and watch out–she don’t know nobody, you know? She don’t have nobody. And there’s those dopey kids. And they’re not doing her no good. So somebody needs to watch out for her.” Patricia describes Grandma as a bit “nutty,’’ and Fran cheerfully admits that her friend’s mother is “a mess”: “I don’t know how many husbands she’s had, but I know she had several of them. And maybe they worked in the fields and stuff, picking fruit and stuff, . . . is what I’m thinking. But that little old lady–she goes out and holds a sign.I drove her over to the Bay Area. You might have seen her over there, because she goes to all those towns over there. And holds a sign up. And now that woman made two or three hundred dollars every day. Every day! People give her money there.” I ask if the sign says “Help me” or something like that. “’Need help.’ And she’s got a little old grandson down there in prison. Every bit of that money goes to him.’’ When Fran went into the hospital, she turned responsibility for Grandma over to Patricia: “I said, ‘You watch out for Grandma,’ because I think Grandma got out of the hospital maybe the day I went in, because she had [a] gallbladder operation. And the little old lady almost died. And she’s eighty-six years old. And I told Patricia to watch out for her and not let the grandkids and kids take advantage of her, you know! Make sure she gets to her doctor’s appointments, because they’re all dopeheads I made her–I said, ‘You promise me you’ll watch out for her.’

Patricia discovered that all of Grandma’s adult children (except the daughter who played bingo with Fran) were drug abusers who visited their mother periodically to steal a few hundred dollars from her if they could.  Patricia’s reaction to this abuse was, with Lee Ramsey’s help, to move Grandma into a studio apartment at the Hacienda complex. Since Grandma’s unit has no kitchen, she eats at Patricia’s apartment. This Patricia dismisses as inconsequential–Grandma doesn’t eat much, mainly eggs and bread–and besides, she has promised her mother she will look after Grandma. In answer to my question of whether Grandma contributes to the groceries, Patricia says, “Oh, she’ll give me five dollars occasionally, or something like that.” Grandma also spends a great deal of time just sitting in Patricia’s living room because, as Patricia explains, “she’s not used to living by herself.”

Like a sponge gathering moisture into its porous membranes, the Crane network absorbs those around them who need help. The kind of charitable caretaking behavior it exercises is not characteristic of all working-class people. But that such generous behavior does occur in a society bent by individualism, an ideology of independence, and racial and economic stratification is significant. Taking care of Grandma can be trying. “She’ll drive you crazy” sometimes, Fran admits. For instance, the woman’s obsession with her imprisoned grandson’s well-being threatens to push Patricia beyond the limits of her patience one afternoon while I am visiting.

Given Patricia’s generosity of time and resources, I ask whether, in return, she ever calls on Grandma for help with Robbie. Her answer is immediate and emphatic: “No!” With children who range from drug addicts to a daughter who is nice but afflicted with a multiple personality disorder, Grandma has proven herself incompetent at rearing children. Patricia is adamant that Grandma have no involvement with her son. She looks after Grandma, helps her, and feeds her out of a sense of obligation to her own mother, and because, like Fran, Patricia recognizes that someday she herself might need similar assistance.

Uneven Resources and Itinerant Labor Power

Constellations of resources shape all networks of care. While the constellations include a range of assets and deficits, in this analysis, time, money, and people surface as the most significant resources. The constellation of resources for the Cranes is unevenly endowed, abundant in some areas and meager in others, taxing their child-rearing efforts. Members of the network face intermittent unemployment, poverty, and ill health in their caretaking labor force. While the lack of financial resources translates into unsafe neighborhoods and inadequate schooling, their forceful construction of networks of interdependence helps cushion them from some of the harshness of economic insecurity. The Crane network acts as a true safety net for its members and for those it encounters and absorbs. The Cranes have realized economies of scale by living near one another, sharing, and sticking together to fashion a safe and loving environment for the children. Patricia Crane recognizes the interdependent relationships in her network and does not begrudge them. While she is more likely than Robert Holcomb, the father of her child, to acknowledge, unsolicited, the centrality of the safety net, they are equally likely to grant credit and gratitude to those on whom they rely. They have inherited a legacy of family resourcefulness and resiliency, which has stood them well in their resolute capacity to survive personal tragedy and economic downturns.

While they might be short on money, the Cranes have great wealth in people. Although the number of people may be smaller than in other networks, the members who participate exhibit unadulterated, full-bodied commitment. Patricia Crane has assembled a network full of people that can care for Robbie and that care about him. The network has a great capacity to provide hands-on assistance. Labor power is one of the main resources Crane network members supply each other. At a moment’s notice, Patricia can “kinscript” someone from her network. Carol Stack and Linda Burton define kinscription as the “rounding up, summoning, or recruiting individuals for kin-work.” Consequently, the Crane network is especially vulnerable to attacks on the health of its members. All lack access to adequate health care and no one is financially secure enough to meet the expense of a problem that cannot be alleviated by over-the-counter medicine. Each member seems profoundly aware that her or his relative good fortune in health, housing, and employment could disappear without warning. Homelessness, joblessness, or drug addiction could be but a short step away. Believing that Providence has played a role in their fate for generations, the Cranes gear their behavior to the greater good of all and bless what luck comes their way.

And interestingly, while mutual aid centrally structures the give-and-take dynamic within the network, money exchanges hands on a regular basis. In a cash-poor environment, those few dollars from Grandma can help Patricia buy groceries. And the money Patricia occasionally pays Tracy helps her to meet her bills. The money is exchanged under a basic equality of condition. Whether or not the “commodification” of some of these exchanges alters them in a significant way is a question that remains unanswered. Participation in the paid labor force for the Crane network members, male and female, is contingent.

 

While they work in jobs no sociologist would label “family friendly”–with low wages and no benefits–the Cranes take the flexibility they need. If a job is too restrictive or clashes with their family needs, they quit, banking on the fact that they can find another, similar job with relative ease. In this sense, they are itinerant workers, committed to labor-market participation, but not to a particular job. They move a great deal; they change jobs several times a year. Despite their need for income, employment does not possess them psychologically in the way it does for middle-class people in the study.