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?
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