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Running Head: JOURNAL ON FAMILY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE
Journal on Family and Social Structure
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JOURNAL ON FAMILY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE
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The idea of family social structure can be characterized as a family's subjective
comprehension of reality in light of shared convictions and encounters that decide how
individuals interact and identify with one another and the world outside the family unit. All
through my childhood my family had two identities: a public identity that was molded by
societal desires and standards, and a private identity that was administered by the special needs
and issues that plagued our family life.
From a public perspective, my family was a low-income family that consist of my Dad,
my Mom, my two younger brothers and myself. We lived in an apartment in a struggling
neighborhood that was full of extra-curricular illegal activity. Our private identity, portrayed by
dysfunctional behaviors and interactions that happened between different individuals within our
family, recounted an altogether different story. In fact, many did not know that both my parents
struggled with drug addiction and that our home consist of many conflicts that turned into
abusive encounters.
The structure of my family taking into account examples of communications, subsystems,
and boundaries is vital in comprehending the elements inside of my family origin. My Dad
worked long hours as a car lot attendant for a rental car agency, where he began selling drugs to
make ends meet from our family. My Mom was a stay at home Mom that struggled with a drug
addiction and would occasionally baby sit some neighbors kids to supplement her addiction.
Both my brothers are younger than me. One oldest younger brother was very sensitive to what
was going on in our home but kept himself busy with school activities and football. Whereas, my
youngest brother was still too young to truly understand what was going on around him but he
was and continues to be a funny kid.
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As the oldest child, I assumed the part of the gatekeeper within my family unit. My
objective as the gatekeeper was to utilize my wit and goofiness to help my family come back to a
condition of homeostasis by facilitating the relief of tension and restoring quiet and peace inside
of the family. However, over time this had become impossible and I ended up living with my
Granny.
Culture and ethnicity also played an integral role in my family identity and dynamics. My
Dad in Hawaiian, Chinese and Portuguese and my Mom is Hawaiian, Greek and Italian;
however, the Hawaiian culture was by far the culture that my parents instilled in us. My parents
or I should say my Granny emphasized trust, respect, and commitment within the family unit, but
they all also introduced American language, food, celebrations, and values including a focus on
individuality, privacy, and achievement.
In 1992, our family would forever change. My Dad left our home with no former
notification or dialog and petitioned for a divorce from my mom. His sudden and unforeseen
takeoff from our home left every relative battling with sentiments of stun, perplexity, scorn,
indignation, and uneasiness. The introductory period of the divorce procedure is distinguished as
the most unpleasant time for a family because of the adjustments in family structure as an
aftereffect of the nonattendance of a parent, and consequent weights and requests for relatives to
tackle new roles and obligations.
The stressor confronting my family was the detachment, and consequent divorce, of my
parents which left the family in a condition of trouble and fundamentally changed our family
identity, structure, dynamics, and functioning. My Dad's nonattendance brought about
noteworthy money related hardship for the family, which constrained my Mom to enter the
workforce and tackle the new and unfamiliar part of monetary supplier. The obligation and
JOURNAL ON FAMILY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE
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requests of this new role influenced my mom's capacity to keep up her parental figure part inside
of the family unit. As a result of my parents’ divorce, I turned to drugs myself to help cope with
this tragic event in my life and I ended up moving out of the house and in with friends. I was no
longer the gatekeeper of my family. My brothers had then taken on new roles and responsibilities
within the family.
Culture additionally affected my family's impression of the divorce and capacity to adapt
to the transition. The disintegration of a marriage and family is not all acknowledged inside of
the Hawaiian culture because of the solid accentuation on family association and commitment.
Truth be told, families that experience divorce are frequently disgraced and excluded by more
distant family just like the case in our family structure. My maternal grandparents communicated
hatred and dissatisfaction in my Mom's powerlessness to rescue her marriage and family, which
created more pressure inside our family.
My parent's divorce was a sudden occasion that fundamentally expanded the level of
anxiety inside of my family and added to changes in family identity, structure, roles, and
connections. Cultural impacts additionally added to a negative evaluation of the circumstances.
My family's negative impression of the divorce brought about sentiments of misery and sadness
as opposed to an accentuation on critical thinking, problem-solving and growth. This negative
recognition altogether repressed our capacity to adaptively cope with the transition and related
stressors. My family was then able to rearrange structure and roles, however lacked attachment
and dependability.
JOURNAL ON FAMILY AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE
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The Way We Weren’t: The Myth and Reality of the “Traditional” Family
Stephanie Coontz
COLONIAL FAMILIES American families always have been diverse, and the male breadwinner-female
homemaker, nuclear ideal that most people associate with “the” traditional family has predominated for
only a small portion of our history. In colonial America, several types of families coexisted or competed.
Native American kinship systems subordinated the nuclear family to a much larger network of marital
alliances and kin obligations, ensuring that no single family was forced to go it alone. Wealthy settler
families from Europe, by contrast, formed independent households that pulled in labor from poorer
neighbors and relatives, building their extended family solidarities on the backs of truncated families
among indentured servants, slaves, and the poor. Even wealthy families, though, often were disrupted
by death; a majority of colonial Americans probably spent some time in a step-family. Meanwhile,
African Americans, denied the legal protection of marriage and parenthood, built extensive kinship
networks and obligations through fictive kin ties, ritual co-parenting or godparenting, adoption of
orphans, and complex naming patterns designed to preserve family links across space and time. The
dominant family values of colonial days left no room for sentimentalizing childhood. Colonial mothers,
for example, spent far less time doing child care than do modern working women, typically delegating
this task to servants or older siblings. Among white families, patriarchal authority was so absolute that
disobedience by wife or child was seen as a small form of treason, theoretically punishable by death,
and family relations were based on power, not love.
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY FAMILY With the emergence of a wage-labor system and a national market
in the first third of the nineteenth century, white middle-class families became less patriarchal and more
child-centered. The ideal of the male breadwinner and the nurturing mother now appeared. But the
emergence of domesticity for middle-class women and children depended on its absence among the
immigrant, working class, and African American women or children who worked as servants, grew the
cotton, or toiled in the textile mills to free middle-class wives from the chores that had occupied their
time previously. Even in the minority of nineteenth-century families who could afford domesticity,
though, emotional arrangements were quite different from nostalgic images of “traditional” families.
Rigid insistence on separate spheres for men and women made male-female relations extremely stilted,
so that women commonly turned to other women, not their husbands, for their most intimate relations.
The idea that all of one’s passionate feelings should go toward a member of the opposite sex was a
twentieth-century invention—closely associated with the emergence of a mass consumer society and
promulgated by the very film industry that “traditionalists” now blame for undermining such values.
EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY FAMILIES Throughout the nineteenth century, at least as much divergence
and disruption in the experience of family life existed as does today, even though divorce and unwed
motherhood were less common. Indeed, couples who marry today have a better chance of celebrating a
fortieth wedding anniversary than at any previous time in history. The life cycles of nineteenth-century
youth (in job entry, completion of schooling, age at marriage, and establishment of separate residence)
were far more diverse than they became in the early twentieth-century. At the turn of the century a
higher proportion of people remained single for their entire lives than at any period since. Not until the
1920s did a bare majority of children come to live in a male breadwinner-female homemaker family, and
even at the height of this family form in the 1950s, only 60% of American children spent their entire
childhoods in such a family. From about 1900 to the 1920s, the growth of mass production and
emergence of a public policy aimed at establishing a family wage led to new ideas about family selfsufficiency, especially in the white middle class and a privileged sector of the working class. The resulting
families lost their organic connection to intermediary units in society such as local shops, neighborhood
work cultures and churches, ethnic associations, and mutual-aid organizations. As families related more
directly to the state, the market, and the mass media, they also developed a new cult of privacy, along
with heightened expectations about the family’s role in fostering individual fulfillment. New family
values stressed the early independence of children and the romantic coupling of husband and wife,
repudiating the intense same-sex ties and mother-infant bonding of earlier years as unhealthy. From this
family we get the idea that women are sexual, that youth is attractive, and that marriage should be the
center of our emotional fulfillment. Even aside from its lack of relevance to the lives of most immigrants,
Mexican Americans, African Americans, rural families, and the urban poor, big contradictions existed
between image and reality in the middle-class family ideal of the early twentieth century. This is the
period when many Americans first accepted the idea that the family should be sacred from outside
intervention; yet the development of the private, self-sufficient family depended on state intervention
in the economy, government regulation of parent-child relations, and state-directed destruction of class
and community institutions that hindered the development of family privacy. Acceptance of a youth and
leisure culture sanctioned early marriage and raised expectations about the quality of married life, but
also introduced new tensions between the generations and new conflicts between husband and wife
over what were adequate levels of financial and emotional support. The nineteenth-century middleclass ideal of the family as a refuge from the world of work was surprisingly modest compared with
emerging twentieth-century demands that the family provide a whole alternative world of satisfaction
and intimacy to that of work and neighborhood. Where a family succeeded in doing so, people might
find pleasures in the home never before imagined. But the new ideals also increased the possibilities for
failure: America has had the highest divorce rate in the world since the turn of the century. In the 1920s,
these contradictions created a sense of foreboding about “the future of the family” that was every bit as
widespread and intense as today. Social scientists and popular commentators of the time hearkened
back to the “good old days,” bemoaning the sexual revolution, the fragility of nuclear family ties, the cult
of youthful romance, the decline of respect for grandparents, and the threat of the “New Woman.” But
such criticism was sidetracked by the stock-market crash, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the
advent of World War II. Domestic violence escalated during the Depression, while murder rates were as
high in the 1930s as in the 1980s. Divorce rates fell, but desertion increased and fertility plummeted.
The war stimulated a marriage boom, but by the late 1940s one in every three marriages was ending in
divorce.
THE 1950S FAMILY At the end of the 1940s, after the hardships of the Depression and war, many
Americans revived the nuclear family ideals that had so disturbed commentators during the 1920s. The
unprecedented postwar prosperity allowed young families to The Way We Weren’t 3 achieve consumer
satisfactions and socioeconomic mobility that would have been inconceivable in earlier days. The 1950s
family that resulted from these economic and cultural trends, however, was hardly “traditional.” Indeed
it is best seen as a historical aberration. For the first time in 100 years, divorce rates dropped, fertility
soared, the gap between men’s and women’s job and educational prospects widened (making middleclass women more dependent on marriage), and the age of marriage fell—to the point that teenage
birth rates were almost double what they are today. Admirers of these very nontraditional 1950s family
forms and values point out that household arrangements and gender roles were less diverse in the
1950s than today, and marriages more stable. But this was partly because diversity was ruthlessly
suppressed and partly because economic and political support systems for socially-sanctioned families
were far more generous than they are today. Real wages rose more in any single year of the 1950s than
they did in the entire decade of the 1980s; the average thirty-year-old man could buy a medianpriced
home on 15 to 18% of his income. The government funded public investment, home ownership, and job
creation at a rate more than triple that of the past two decades, while 40% of young men were eligible
for veteran’s benefits. Forming and maintaining families was far easier than it is today. Yet the stability
of these 1950s families did not guarantee good outcomes for their members. Even though most births
occurred within wedlock, almost a third of American children lived in poverty during the 1950s, a higher
figure than today. More than 50% of black married-couple families were poor. Women were often
refused the right to serve on juries, sign contracts, take out credit cards in their own names, or establish
legal residence. Wife-battering rates were low, but that was because wifebeating was seldom counted
as a crime. Most victims of incest, such as Miss America of 1958, kept the secret of their fathers’ abuse
until the 1970s or 1980s, when the women’s movement became powerful enough to offer them the
support denied them in the 1950s. THE POST-1950S FAMILY In the 1960s, the civil rights, antiwar, and
women’s liberation movements exposed the racial, economic, and sexual injustices that had been
papered over by the Ozzie and Harriet images on television. Their activism made older kinds of public
and private oppression unacceptable and helped create the incomplete, flawed, but much-needed
reforms of the Great Society. Contrary to the big lie of the past decade that such programs caused our
current family dilemmas, those antipoverty and social justice reforms helped overcome many of the
family problems that prevailed in the 1950s. In 1964, after 14 years of unrivaled family stability and
economic prosperity, the poverty rate was still 19%; in 1969, after five years of civil rights activism, the
rebirth of feminism, and the institution of nontraditional if relatively modest government welfare
programs, it was down to 12%, a low that has not been seen again since the social welfare cutbacks
began in the late 1970s. In 1965, 20% of American children still lived in poverty; within five years, that
had fallen to 15%. Infant mortality was cut in half between 1965 and 1980. The gap in nutrition between
low-income Americans and other Americans narrowed significantly, as a direct result of food stamp and
school lunch programs. In 1963, 20% of Americans living below the poverty line had never been
examined by a physician; by 1970 this was true of only 8% of the poor. Since 1973, however, real wages
have been falling for most Americans. Attempts to counter this through tax revolts and spending freezes
have led to drastic cutbacks in government investment programs. Corporations also spend far less on
research and job creation than they did in the 1950s and 1960s, though the average compensation to
executives has soared. The gap between rich and poor, according to the April 17, 1995, New York Times,
is higher in the United States than in any other industrial nation.
FAMILY STRESS These inequities are not driven by changes in family forms, contrary to ideologues who
persist in confusing correlations with causes; but they certainly exacerbate such changes, and they tend
to bring out the worst in all families. The result has been an accumulation of stresses on families,
alongside some important expansions of personal options. Working couples with children try to balance
three full-time jobs, as employers and schools cling to 4 The Way We Weren’t policies that assume every
employee has a “wife” at home to take care of family matters. Divorce and remarriage have allowed
many adults and children to escape from toxic family environments, yet our lack of social support
networks and failure to forge new values for sustaining intergenerational obligations have let many
children fall through the cracks in the process. Meanwhile, young people find it harder and harder to
form or sustain families. According to an Associated Press report of April 25, 1995, the median income of
men aged 25 to 34 fell by 26% between 1972 and 1994, while the proportion of such men with earnings
below the poverty level for a family of four more than doubled to 32%. The figures are even worse for
African American and Latino men. Poor individuals are twice as likely to divorce as more affluent ones,
three to four times less likely to marry in the first place, and five to seven times more likely to have a
child out of wedlock. As conservatives insist, there is a moral crisis as well as an economic one in modern
America: a pervasive sense of social alienation, new levels of violence, and a decreasing willingness to
make sacrifices for others. But romanticizing “traditional” families and gender roles will not produce the
changes in job structures, work policies, child care, medical practice, educational preparation, political
discourse, and gender inequities that would permit families to develop moral and ethical systems
relevant to 1990s realities. America needs more than a revival of the narrow family obligations of the
1950s, whose (greatly exaggerated) protection for white, middle-class children was achieved only at
tremendous cost to the women in those families and to all those who could not or would not aspire to
the Ozzie and Harriet ideal. We need a concern for children that goes beyond the question of whether a
mother is waiting with cookies when her kids come home from school. We need a moral language that
allows us to address something besides people’s sexual habits. We need to build values and social
institutions that can reconcile people’s needs for independence with their equally important rights to
dependence, and surely we must reject older solutions that involved balancing these needs on the backs
of women. We will not find our answers in nostalgia for a mythical “traditional family.”