Culture Of Politics

Hochschild’s emotional perspective on institutional care is an interesting way to look at the culture of politics. How intimate, personal, and genuine is the care of daycare workers to nursing home attendants? I have been exposed to two kinds of daycares in Montreal where I have observed many differences; a government funded 7$/day daycare (I worked there for a short period) and a 35$/day private daycare founded by a parent (attended by the little boy I babysit). The government daycare was decorated with big-cartooned pictures and alphabet letters, whereas the private daycare was decorated with pictures of the children (on field trips or doing activities) and the children’s artwork and projects. How intimate and personal do/can caregivers be?

Hochschild suggests that our modern model for care requires “upgrading the status of public caregivers” (p.222) and “upgrade the value of their work” (p.222). How can this be done to get the desired results? Hochschild explains “to do this, they [daycare workers] need well-organized occupational groups to establish control over accreditation, monitor the entrances and exits of people from the field, and lobby for other measures to increase the public’s appreciation for their emotional labor” (p.223). But this depends on each person's view of the caregiver...

Family Politics and Policy

As societal norms change, institutions are required to change with it. There appears to be a disconnect between public demands and private needs, in that the institutions are not evolving with the modern times. The laws pertaining to the family are still lagging behind and exclude many of the new forms of family unions. In Culture of Politics, Hochschild describes four different models of care, and explains which one should be adopted. Although she claims that we are living in a world in which the cold modern model of care is the norm. She also talked about the gender-stalled revolution. It is based on the fact that over two decades women’s days have gone from being predominantly spent in the home to being spent mostly at work. Over the span of two decades nothing has changed in culture to make up for this difference in her day.

Skinner and Kohler’s article also point out the fact that we are lagging in regards to parental rights. The law in terms of custody over children is mostly exclusive to the biological parents. It excludes stepparents, grandparents, and same-sex parents. This is actually quite a sad fact since it is normal for these types of families to exist. I believe that we ended this semester's readings on a little bit of a sad note! The push for society to accept other forms of the family besides the nuclear family may never happen because of the restrictions of the law; we can also see that it is common to struggle to adjust to family diversification, when all semester that is what we have been talking about.

1. Do you think there are policies that can be created to help move society in the modern world? (Example: the growing acceptance and legalization of same-sex marriages)

2. What would happen if we eliminate the laws pertaining to the biological parents? Are they needed to ensure child safety?

3. Are these laws set in place in order to limit us in our family choices? What laws can be created to better suit the changing family? Will this effect our generation in how we think and perceive the family?

Family Politics and Policy

While I disagreed with some of Barbara Ehrenreich’s logic, I agree with her point that much optimism is unfruitful. As we recognize the agency we have as educated individuals, I think it is important to see what we can do with that agency; what are the most effective way to change perceptions and laws regarding the family and gender roles? Why do some quests, such as increased paternal rights and gay marriage pan out, while the American government can take away support from women on welfare who have children? The answer, I think, is public outcry and mobilization.
When studying social movements, some main questions are how to get a multitude of people vocal about an issue, and in turn what should they specifically be vocal about. As we have discussed in class, there are two main approaches: attempting to change ideologies through a legal structure, and attempting to change society through ideologies. Unfortunately, the two do not coalesce very often and we have seen, especially through the studies of emotion work, that changing laws, social structure, and even ideologies may not entirely change the way individuals and societies construct the family and gender roles.
Here is an instance where I feel that (cautious) optimism is necessary for a few reasons. As we leave university, we are entering a world where gender roles in education and the job market are changing rapidly and in ways never seen before. Years of feminist activism has changed gender roles at least at the legal level, however many prejudices seem to be ingrained. So knowing what we know, do we take a realist approach and work within the society that we have? We see this approach in legal battles for gay marriage and paternal rights; both use more conventional means of social protest and mobilization tactics, and both have made legal headway. I think we see this approach in Denmark and the Netherlands as well. As mentioned in the readings, these countries do not ask what the best way to raise a family is, but rather how we can support families. Their system promotes one of the most supportive, and gender segregated, structures. So should we be realists and work within our framework, or optimists and try to find a different approach, one to change the core of ideologies. We certainly need optimism attack this process.
What I mean to say here is not that there is one right way to go about this, or that we should be aiming for a Marxist Utopia. But rather, a recognition that the sociology of the family is integrated with so many other fields, and to change ideologies we cannot address one area. (If you haven’t noticed) I’m really interested in mobilization tactics in the “post” movements that emphasize the individual, however I think one of the strongest barriers to these social movements is our societal belief of what a social movement should be, what a law should be, and what is appropriate to promote change. But to change ideologies, I think we need to look at the definitions we hold, and parse their interactions with each other and society. Perhaps the question should not be "How might the law or expectations change to better suit the needs of family members?", but what can we do to change the idea of a law in society?


1. Is there a way for the definition of the family to be less “exclusive” in policy? What services would need to be employed to take family law on a true case by case basis? What are the problems with this?
2. What issues around the family do you feel are powerful enough to mobilize around? Why are some addressed while others not? Do you think the most important issues are addressed through legal battles?
3. Do you find yourself to be an optimist? Realist? Pessimist? Something in between? What effect does this have on your view of the family? Do you think it changes over the life course, and why?

Family Politics and Policy

The reading for an anthropology course the other day was “The Deinstitutionalization of American Marriage.” The professor then proceeded to place “marriage” as the last topic which the class was to problematize, looking at the underlying structures which are leading to its breakdown within socially accepted norms. He called this the “denormalizaton of marriage”: changing division of labor (mentioning the “stalled revolution”), increasing childbirth out-of-wedlock and increasing rates of cohabitation. His lecture thus points to the exact topic of this week’s articles, highlighting the power of institutions to change individual perceptions on personal motivations and actions. However, as seen in the Skinner article, it is important to see the reflective action of individual’s actions on state and national policy. While Kiernan points to the fact that “marriage has had an important gate keeping function between the personal and the societal,” it is interesting to see how far marriage, and subsequently the family, has been moved from a privileged retreat away from the public eye to a point of contention loaded with governmental and community involvement (985). Issues such as ART and adoption point to the extent with social policy now overlaps with personal decisions.

Important to note, as Hochschild does, is the ways in which social policy can also work to limit couples’ ability to delineate the boundaries of their relationship. Although all the articles point to the wide variety of policies present globally, I found it interesting to note that even Hochschild sees a continuation of this cool modern approach. I would hope for a bit more optimism. Understandingly though, any change is going to have to come from multi-faceted shifts on individual, communal and national levels, as each becomes increasingly overlapped in both the public and private sphere. At the end of this anthropology class, a girl raised her hand and asked “Why are the laws of cohabitation and child-bearing out-of-wedlock so controversial?” The professor, in a slightly stunned way, answered “Well, that’s a bit of a hard question. There is the religious answer, the moral, the economic and the political answer. Actually I could teach a course on this topic alone.” I was tempted to raise my hand and give her the course code for this class.

Q1: What other factors outside the two mentioned [cohabitation and same-sex marriage] in Kiernan’s article do you see as being forces in redrawing the boundaries of marriage relationships?

Q2: An article I read for another class talked about the changing norms of families and how this may lead to changing norms for reconstituted and blended families. How do you think national policies will affect the establishment of new norms for non-traditional family types, bearing in mind ideas of exclusive status and the parental rights doctrine?

Q3: Gerson highlights that “Self-reliant women also concur that if a worthy relationship ultimately proves out of reach, remaining single need not mean rejecting motherhood or becoming socially disconnected” (744). If, hypothetically speaking, the “stalled revolution” eventually ends with a closing of the “lag time,” what do you think will happen to the value of marriage? Will it lose all value as an institution or strength in a position of prestige and exclusivity?

Family Politics and Policy

Within this week’s readings there were several issues that reminded me of my diametric perspectives on familial responsibility.  On the one hand, and similar to the cold modern approach outlined by Hochschild, I believe that females have a right to unburden themselves from their direct association as caregivers of the world.  Females, in the West, are modeled after this natural caregiver ideal, and rather than support females in these endeavors, I question whether social policies that support women in this role also limit their ability to shape themselves as anything else. 

On the other side of this debate raging in my conscious, is the reality that we, as humans, ought to care for one-another.  We ought to give care without non-gender-associated.  The fact that public society does not support private or public care is damaging to all those who were ever or will be children or elderly.  It is not that I question the importance of care work; I merely question the burden of that care being unavoidably female.  Must we support females in this work or support society in the care of its citizens?

When families do exist in this Western world, certain expectations outside of individual responsibility also exist.  Marriage, birth, death, divorce, dissolution, aging, and many other qualities impact and alter these responsibilities.  There seems to be two mutually influencing types of care highlighted in these articles: care as emotion and care as economic.  The responsibility of economic care is regulated, but it appears to be regulated without regard for the importance of emotional care.  The reality is that families need both to subsist, and even to thrive.  It would seem that when flexible gender roles allow females to pursue activities that promote independence and self-reliance (based on the mothers in Gerson’s article), they become better care-givers.  However, the inverse is also true: that independence and self-reliance in males may create a situation in which economic responsibilities become the basis of family ties.

       1.  To what degree is the responsibility of care synonymous with economic responsibility?  Is it possible to replace emotional care with economic care?

       2.  In the Gerson article, adult children viewed their mothers as having ‘financial stability and personal self-confidence’ due to the jobs that also created ‘long working hours, blocked opportunities, and family-unfriendly workplaces’ which ‘made their mothers feel overburdened and time-stressed’.  To what extent is the reality of having a working mother skewed by the framing of working women as independent, confident, and admirable?  To what extent is this acceptance also a coping mechanism, much like Hochschild’s negotiation of the benefits and costs associated with her stay-at-home mother?

       3.  Must divorce be harmful?  Various articles have suggested otherwise.  Most recently, Skinner suggests that divorced parents can work together to establish positive relationships with children, Kiernan investigates the social influence over public policy regarding recognition of cohabiting couples, and Gerson highlights the normalization of divorce as an acceptable, and even positive solution to marital strain.  Given this, is it possible to create public policies that promote emotional support following divorce?  What of the warm model of care in this effort?

Politics, Public Policy and the Future

Throughout the course of the semester, I have learned more about families past and present than I ever thought existed. From eavesdropping children, to the rise in cohabitation, to men mothering, the topics reached were both broad and fascinating. When looking toward the future of the family, I find it difficult to be as pessimistic to say that the trends we have seen, such as the increase of divorce, children out of wedlock, the rise of cohabiting, will continue to rise attributing to the decline of the family. Call me a romantic (and I know there are studies about children of divorce having an unrealistic view of marriage) but I see marriage as an institution that is not going anywhere. Although I understand people’s reasons and wants for cohabiting, in an ideal world I see myself using it as a form of trial marriage.

Kiernan suggests a reason for the rise in cohabitation: “the growth in cohabitation and the mergence of same-sex marriage have contributed to the deinstitutionalization of marriage… the result of longer term cultural and material trends.” (Kiernan 982). Don’t get me wrong, I understand that same-sex marriage hasn’t until recently been legal, so couldn’t this perhaps increase marriage? Couldn’t this change of policy shift rates of marriage in the future?

I think parental rights is an extremely difficult topic to broach, and fully understand, especially in modern times. Not only are there parents, step-parents, adoptive parents and biological parents, but there are surrogate mothers, and sperm donors and egg donors, and sometimes mistakes happen with reproductive technology wherein some people give birth using other peoples eggs and sperm by accident. From here, who has the right to parent? I find it difficult for legislation to bear meaning and cast down what they believe to be family. As well, I see huge problems within using precedence in court cases, because I see each family as an individual and unique case. An example of a mix-up is found here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36878268/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/

Luckily, it was solved and the result was mutually satisfying for both parties. From this example, it becomes clear that the some legislation, such as the exclusivity doctrine, is not applicable to all contemporary families.

As this is my last blog, I wanted to say how much I enjoyed taking this course! It was my first seminar course, and I looked forward to come to class and hear everyone’s (although very different) opinions on the family. Thanks everyone for everything and happy holidays!

1. How do you see marriage in the future? Do you think the increasing legalization of same-sex marriage will increase marital rates and decrease cohabitation?

2. Is it within government interest to create policy that promotes and encourages families? How would they go about doing this?

3. How do you see our generation and their families? What trends from the course do you see continuing, or what new trends may occur? Do you agree with Hoschild’s cold modern world?

Politics, Public Policy and the Future

The readings of this week provide us with a good conclusion to the course material since they are concerned to what is next and how to deal with family changes. They deal with issues we had discussed before implicitly: the role of policy in a topic where the public is intertwined with the private, politics and law.

The concept that I liked the most from these readings was that of families as pathways exposed by Kathleen Gerson (2009) and I wish we had read this before in order to include this dynamic perspective to our previous discussions. The notion of the dynamic processes that constitute family paths contrasts with the static view of family structure and this is interesting because it complements the rich perspective of the life course events within the family with the broader context. For Gerson “[B]ulky categories as traditional, dual-earner, and single parent mask more complex and subtle variations within family types. […] Family life is a film, not a snapshot” (2009, p. 739). In this sense, more than family form, the focus is on the social contexts for children.

If we use the framework proposed by Gerson of family paths to analyze the ideals of care (traditional, postmodern, cold modern and warm modern) that Hochschild (2003) defines, one could argue that this ideals of care are dynamic as well. I wonder how we could conceive the nature of care as pathways. I guess that Gerson would argue that within a same family, it may transit from one ideal of care to the other resulting in different contexts of support. Something somehow present in all readings, but explicitly dealt in Gerson’s paper is the issue that since there are differences between the ideal worker paradigm and intensive parenting, although men and women ideally want equality, there is conflict because each has different incompatible fall-back strategies. In this way, we could think that going from one ideal of care to another is hard due to this conflict. One of the issues I would have liked to see discussed more explicitly in the work by Gerson (2009), Kiernan (2004) and in this specific chapter of Hochschild (2003) is where does paid domestic work and childcare fit exactly within family pathways, the boundaries of marriage and ideals of care.

Finally, since it is one of the topics I work on, I found interesting how the readings may relate to family and migration. First, I wonder how we can incorporate into the family paths that Gerson talks about, the relationship between career and migration. For example, it would be an interesting empirical question to study how internal mobility affects women (which is already studied in terms of women’s income since they sacrifice because husband gets a better job) in terms of social context in the family, not only economically. Also, Skinner and Kohler (2002) talk about what happens when one or both parents are absent in terms of the law. But I wonder how family law deals with absent parents after migration and what happens legally when children are left behind. In this sense, what role can family law have on immigration policy (to bring children with workers and to allow family reunification) as well as how can migrant sending countries assure rights for children left behind?

Q1. Skinner and Kohler (2002) write that it is the “right of parents to direct the care, control and upbringing of their children. […] Parents have the legitimate authority to make various decisions regarding their child’s welfare, including such concerns as residence, what school to attend, religious participation, and medical treatment decisions” (p. 297). Do you agree that parents should decide about children’s religion? What happens in parents with mixed religious backgrounds? Should law establish that it is not parent’s right but that each one can choose their religion later in life (e.g. during adolescence or after being 18)?

Q2. How do you think that the literature on family and family change has dealt with issues coming from globalization? Think for example on managing parents with two careers in a globalized world or the effect of diffusion of ideas via the media or how the internet has changed the use of free time and how children and adults play.

Q3. Gerson (2009, p. 750) writes: “the direction of social change thus depends on whether the structures of work and caretaking can change to support the revolutionary and irreversible shifts in individual aspirations and family needs”. Barabara Ehrenreich’s video ends with the phrase “we have collective power and we could use it to end a great deal of unnecessary suffering in the world”. All this implies changes in law and policy. Do you agree? How can this collective power really challenge interest groups and politics? How do we deal with gatekeepers?

Week 10: Family Politics and Policy

In today’s world, even though the structure of the family have become even more diverse, the laws pertaining to the family is still lagging behind and exclude many of the new forms of family unions. Skinner and Kohler’s article on the parental rights that are based on the “exclusivity” basis clearly depicts the exclusion of stepparents, grandparents, and same-sex parents with regards to the custody over children. The solution, that Skinner and Kohler mentioned, may possibly be basing the custody on the best interests of the child—not by biological parental rights.

In contrast, through Kiernan’s article, we are able to see that in European countries, the policy and political discussion are more about issues concerning how best to support families, particularly in their endeavors to raise children regardless of the marital status of their parents (Kiernan, 980). In Europe, policy makers (on family matters) de-emphasized the “exclusivity” laws within the family. How is it possible for the European countries move on to embrace the different forms of families and concentrate on supporting the diverse individuals that make up the family while in the United States, the politics and policies of the family still concern themselves solely on the “traditional values”?

After reading Hochschild’s article, I felt depressed. She claims that today, with the regards to care, we are living the cold modern model of care. She assumes that women are the sole capable being to provide care to their children, which further frustrates matters. In addition, she emphasizes the relation between money and fathers with respect to the issue of care. If she is correct in providing this relationship, there is a commodifying of care (as we have mentioned in class numerous times) and that men show their “care” through the amount of the money they provide for their children.

Q1] Would eliminating the exclusivity clause as a basis for parent-child relationships work? What potential problems could arise from this elimination?

Q2]Are biological ties more important when it comes to parental rights and the custody of children? Why do you think that governments and policy makers emphasize these biological ties, even when it may not necessarily for the best interest of the children?

Q3]In present times, in your opinion, is there this sense of the de-romanticization of childhood happening with regards to care?

On Politics, Policy and Sociology in the Family

It is an unwritten rule in sociology courses on issues such as the family (or perhaps any specialization within the discipline, for that matter) to end the semester with readings and discussion of politics and public policy.  Tacitly, by doing this, we suggest that sociological knowledge ought to lead to social change—“philosophers,” as Marx dismissively declared, “have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it” (Theses on Feuerbach, thesis 11); we suggest, as well, that you are, in fact, free to define who you want to be and how you want to live your life, regardless of all of those messy social forces that seem to define everyone else.  The direct admission of this might go something like:  “I know that it seems as though everything we have covered over the course of this semester either explicitly or implicitly communicates how much our lives are conditioned by social forces and determined by institutions outside of our control, but, in reality, you can change things.  You can have agency.  Oh, and what of those really depressing statistics on your chances of success in relationships, including marriage, divorce, etc.?  Nah, they don’t apply to you now, because you have knowledge.  So cheer up, be empowered, you can do it!”  In this, we are perhaps practicing the “power” (i.e. delusion) of positive thinking which Barbara Ehrenreich finds so frustrating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

In fact, following Ehrenreich, it is perhaps our stubborn blindness to the real risks of intimacy and family life in the name of optimism (read: romance, love, etc.) which leaves us powerless to address change.  

In this week’s readings, therefore, I embraced the caution of realism.  These readings focus on the pressures of navigating messy institutions and policies that do not easily translate into the manifold dialects of our intimate relationships.  Comparative lessons from Europe and the United States demonstrate differences in social patterns even as they suggest that the state’s struggle to adjust to family diversification is common.  Interestingly, a few pages ripped from the headlines are most apt in drawing distinctions and sparking discussion.  First, from the society pages:  “Eric” and “Lola”, who after a 10-year relationship, three kids, and lots of drama, called it quits in Quebec in 2001.  As “de-facto” partners, however, Quebec policy stipulates that Eric has a financial responsibility to his kids after the separation but not to their mother.  If they had been married, it would have been a different story.  While the case seems headed to the Supreme Court, it highlights the significance of contracts and the legal (unromantic) issues of family support that so few expect to encounter:

http://www.montrealgazette.com/business/Ruling+will+impact+common+couples/3781254/story.html

In another case, Alberta just passed legislation to render parenting relationships to children born with assistance from reproductive technologies more easily recognizable to existing law and thus assure child support responsibilities:

http://www.canadaviews.ca/2010/11/26/albertas-family-law-statutes-amended-to-promote-well-being-of-children/

In both of these circumstances, the cool modern approach points us in the direction of caution, even as most of us so carelessly cast it aside in the name of romance or love.  In facing intransigent or uncertain institutions with a clear head, however, it seems we can develop strategies for resilience that improve our chances for success.  Think gender flexibility = agency, I suppose.  Thus, as we end the semester on the heels of cautious optimism, let’s think clearly about the risks and rewards of family life in all its messy incarnations.  What questions should we ask?  Here are two suggestions to start:

1.        What rights and responsibilities do intimate partners have to one another?  What rights and responsibilities do they have to one another if they have children?  How should these change (if at all) in the aftermath of a break-up?  Most importantly, what role does the state have in assuring that these rights and responsibilities are respected?

2.       What explains the persistent gap between peoples’ expectations and experiences of family life?  How might the law or expectations change to better suit the needs of family members?

Please label your post "Family Politics and Policy"

Thank you!