marriage/family

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

Americans about my age and older all seem to have stories about how we survived our school playgrounds without today’s cushy soft surfaces, safety-oriented climbing structures, and running water.

Here is a picture of the playground at my elementary school. I myself survived a fall off one of those seesaws onto the broken-glass-strewn asphalt, with nothing but a scrape to show for it (attended to by the school secretary — there was no “school nurse” back then either).

In the safety craze in recent decades, sadly, real seesaws were one of the first things to go.

Go back another few generations, and you’ll find stories like this — about 200 children killed in the streets of New York in 1910 (from the NYT Jan. 1, 1911):

Most of those kids weren’t in cars or wagons; they were playing in the streets, doing work for their families, or just wandering around unattended — there were no public playgrounds. In contrast, in 2009 there were about 10 pedestrian or cycling children killed by vehicles in New York City. Ah, the good old days.*

Nowadays

As things have gotten safer for America’s children, of course, parents have become ever more concerned with their safety, as well as with their learning and development. Somewhere in America on a Sunday a few weeks ago, in an affluent community, a public playground was bubbling with activity. Every child seemed to be enjoying a rollicking good time on the latest safety-designed play equipment, cushioned by a luxuriously deep bed of mulch.

Also, each child seemed to be within a few feet of a parent or other adult caretaker — coaching, encouraging, spotting, supervising.

In recent years, concern about the physical fitness of children has increased, especially among poor children. Some researchers have asked whether the proximity of safe neighborhood playgrounds is one cause of the social class disparity in obesity rates. That would make sense because obesity rates are lower among children who play outdoors. But the relationship between social class and playing outdoors is not clear at all. Rich children have more access to some kinds of facilities, but poor children have more free time — and, where there is public housing, it usually includes playgrounds, like this one photographed in the 1960s:

In Annette Lareau’s analysis of family life and social class, Unequal Childhoods, children of middle class and richer parents spend more time in organized activities, and poorer kids spend more time in unstructured time (including play and TV). But as these pictures show, there’s play and there’s play. Are middle class parents hovering more than poorer parents do, and with what effect?

Consider a recent article by Myron Floyd and colleagues (covered here), which attempted to assess the level of physical activity among children in public parks by observing 2,700 children in 20 public parks in Durham, NC:

[The] presence of parental supervision was the strongest negative correlate of children’s activity… the presence of adults appears to inadvertently suppress park-based physical activity in the current study, particularly among younger children… This result should be used to encourage park designers to create play environments conducive to feelings of safety and security that would encourage rather than discourage active park use among children. For example, blending natural landscapes, manufactured play structures, and fencing in close intimate settings can be used to create comfortable environments for children and families. Such design strategies could encourage parents to allow their children to freely explore their surroundings, providing more opportunities for physical activity.

Interestingly, park in the pictured above has a fence around it so that parents can hang around at a distance with little fear for their children.

Under social pressure

In Under Pressure, one of many books bemoaning the excesses of over-parenting, Carl Honoré wrote:

Even when we poke fun at overzealous parenting… part of us wonders, What if they’re right? What if I’m letting my children down by not parenting harder? Racked by guilt and terrified of doing the wrong thing, we end up copying the alpha parent in the playground.

The point is not just that some parents have overzealous supervisory ambitions, driven by unequal investments in children and a threateningly competitive future. I think there is a supervision ratchet that feeds on the interaction between parents. In an article called “Playground Panopticism,” Holly Blackford summarized her observations:

The mothers in the ring of park benches symbolize the suggestion of surveillance, which Foucault describes as the technology of disciplinary power under liberal ideals of governance. However, the panoptic force of the mothers around the suburban playground becomes a community that gazes at the children only to ultimately gaze at one another, seeing reflected in the children the parenting abilities of one another.

This plays out in everyday interaction, whether one wants to engage it or not. If everyone else’s kid is closely supervised while yours is running around bonkers on her own, what is a parent to do? If the other parents insist that their kids not go “up the slide” and yours just scrambles past them, you feel the pressure. (You also put the other parent in the position of violating another taboo — supervising someone else’s child.) So it’s not just fear of underparenting that drives parents to hover — it’s also the cross-parent interactions. These are the moments when contagious parenting behavior spreads.

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*I started looking at this after reading about it in Viviana Zelizer’s Pricing the Priceless Child, in which she writes, “The case of children’s accidental death provides empirical evidence of the new meanings of child life in twentieth-century America.”

Reminder: This blog post does not constitute research, but rather commentary, observation and recommendations for reading and discussion. The description of my childhood playground, and of one recent afternoon at one park, are anecdotes, something that stimulates reflection on wider issues, not empirical evidence or data.

A group of conservative research institutes led by W. Bradford Wilcox’s National Marriage Project, with support from the Bradley Foundation, have produced a website called The Sustainable Demographic Dividend. They argue:

…the long-term fortunes of the modern economy rise and fall with the family. The report focuses on the key roles marriage and fertility play in sustaining long-term economic growth, the viability of the welfare state, the size and quality of the workforce, and the profitability of large sectors of the modern economy.

The analysis is not important, mostly focusing on promoting religion and marriage (I wrote more about one of the articles here). But they do make a unique appeal to corporate America:

Companies whose fortunes are linked to the health of the family, such as Procter & Gamble, spend billions of dollars each year on advertising. … Executives with oversight across brands should ask themselves a simple question: Do the messages used in our advertising make family life look attractive? Or do they exalt single living? Obviously, it’s in their long-term interest to do more of the former.

And they offer as a positive example this video from Proctor & Gamble, celebrating the company’s 75th anniversary in the Philippines.

One of the essays in the report says,

A turning point has occurred in the life of the human race. The sustainability of humankind’s oldest institution, the family—the fount of fertility, nurturance, and human capital—is now an open question.

Would more of this kind of advertising help to bring back the traditional family?

Eve P. and Will LeS. suggested that we write about the window decals that have popped up on the back windows of cars in the last couple years.  The decals supposedly list the members of the car owner’s immediate family, sometimes including pets.  They also, though, tend to reproduce some interesting ideas about families.  Here’s what Eve had to say:

• The figures are almost always placed on the left side of the car, so that the figures (usually placed from tallest to shortest) strongly give the impression of a visual hierarchy or ranking.
• A “dad” figure is first in line, before a “mom” figure, and the adult figures come before the child figures (boy children before girl children, unless the boy is younger child), and the child figures come before any animal figures…
• This ranking seems to suggest that men take precedence over women, adults take precedence over children, and all humans take precedence over animals.
• I don’t think I’ve ever seen a two woman or two man setup (or any other set of adults besides one man and one woman)…
• The “dad” figure is taller than the “mom” figure…

So the stickers tend to reproduce the normalness of (1) being paired up with (2) someone of the other sex, (3) having children, (4) a gender hierarchy, and (5) the imperative that men be taller than women.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The chart below summarizes the position on 12 rights for gay, lesbian, and bisexual Americans held by Barack Obama and 12 candidates for the Republican Presidential Election:

Data collected by Ned Flaherty for Marriage Equality USA.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Family Inequality.

The grandparent spike spikes on.

Last fall I learned that the number of children who live with at least one grandparent had spiked upward over the last half decade or so. The one-year update of that trend was dramatic enough to justify a yikes-edition update.

Again, the non-poor and near-poor lead the upward trend, while the highest rates are among near-poor. Although there were upward movements in the years before 2008, for the present I think we should file this under recession studies.

(For more on grandparents providing care for children, see this Pew report from last fall.)

The start of the Fall semester has inspired me to re-post this fascinating phenomenon we covered last year.

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Rigby B. sent a link to the Just4Camp website to show us how care package products were gendered for “only” girls and boys. And, indeed, they were (screen shots below). But what is even more fascinating to me about this is the commodification of care.

The term “commodification” refers to the process by which something done for free becomes something done for money. Ever since the institutionalization of the wage, more and more things have become commodified. One particularly interesting category is care or what sociologists like to call “care work.”

Care work includes all of those tasks that involve nurturing and maintaining others: nursing, parenting, teaching, tending a home, etc. At one time in history, none of these things were paid jobs, but we have increasingly commodified them so that now paid nurses staff hospitals, home care workers take care of ailing elders, children spend the day in day care, professional teachers educate them, and housecleaners and gardeners can be paid to tend our homes and yards.

The care package is an example of care work.  I still remember getting care packages in college with my favorite home made cookies and other things my parents thought I would like or needed.  They take a lot of effort: thoughtfulness, shopping, baking, packaging, and mailing.  And, here, we have an example of the commodification of that effort.  The “care” in “care package” has been, well, outsourced.

Gendered care package ingredients:

For more on commodification, peruse our tag by that name.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Sangyoub Park let us know that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has released the results of the 2010 American Time Use Survey, a study that looks at what we do with our time. They haven’t released any charts of the 2010 data yet, but the Wall Street Journal posted an article with an image that summarizes the changes since 2007, before the recession began. Not surprisingly, on average Americans are spending less time working and more time sleeping and watching TV, among other activities:

Keep in mind those numbers are daily averages that even out activity that is often not evenly distributed in real life (such as work, where weekly hours worked are averaged across all 7 days).

These changes seem insignificant when you look at them; so what if Americans are, on average, sleeping 5 extra minutes a day, or spending 2 minutes less buying things? But when aggregated across the entire U.S. population aged 15 years or older, these add up to major shifts in family and work life as well as economic activity.

There’s a video to accompany the story:

Finally, they have an interactive website where you can enter your own time use in major categories (to the best you can estimate it) and see how you compare to national averages.

We’ll follow up with more detailed posts once the BLS starts posting relevant charts.

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog.

Peter Berger* takes issue with the phrase “on the wrong side of history.”  Mostly, he takes issue with those who use that phrase. Specifically, he refers to proponents of gay marriage who claim that the Defense of Marriage Act is “on the wrong side of history” (or in Berger’s acronym, OTWSOH) The trouble with this statement, Berger says, is that “we cannot know who or what is on the right side.”

Berger is correct (though he doesn’t offer much explanation) because the history that people are referring to hasn’t happened yet. The history of OTWSOH is the future, and we can’t know the future.  However — and here’s where Berger is wrong — we can make a pretty good guess about some things that will happen, at least in the short-run future. We can look at the trend — Americans becoming more accepting of gay marriage — and predict that the trend will continue, especially when we see that the young are more accepting than the old.

But beyond the short-run, who knows? It’s possible that the values, ideas, and even facts that are right today will, decades or centuries from now, be wrong.  So it may turn out that at some time in the future, people will think that gay marriage is a plague on civilization, that human slavery is a pretty good idea, that Shakespeare was a hack, and that Kevin Federline was a great musician.

The trouble with asking history, “Which side are you on?” is that history doesn’t end. It’s like the possibly true story of Henry Kissinger asking Chou En Lai about the implications of the French Revolution. Said the Chinese premier, “It’s too early to tell.”

At what point can we say, “This is it. Now we know which side history is on”?  We can’t, because when we wake up tomorrow, history will still be rolling on. Duncan Watts, in Everything Is Obvious… Once You Know the Answer, makes a similar point using the historical film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” The two robbers flee the US and go to Bolivia. Good idea? Since we know how the movie ends — that sepia freeze frame — we can safely say, “No, bad idea.”

But if we had stopped the movie twenty minutes earlier, it would have seemed like a good idea. The vindictive lawman and his posse were about to find and kill them. A few minutes later in the film, Bolivia seemed again like a bad idea – it was a miserable place. Then, when their robberies in Bolivia were easy and lucrative, it seemed again like a good idea. And then, they got killed. Butch was 42, Sundance 31.

But history is not a movie. It doesn’t end. So at least for the long run, the OTWSOH argument claims certainty  about what is at best speculation. It says, “We know what will happen, and we know that we are on the right side of history, and those who are not with us are on the wrong side of history.” Some religious folks make similar claims not about history but about God.  “We are on God’s side,” they say, “and those who disagree with us are against God.”  They tend to populate the political right.  The OTWSOH argument, Berger says, “comes more naturally to those on the left,” mostly because that is the side that is pushing for historical change.  The two sides are indulging in a similar fallacy — knowing the unknowable — a fallacy which, to those who don’t share their views, makes them appear similarly arrogant.

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* Yes, this is the same Peter Berger whose Social Construction of Reality (co-written with Thomas Luckman), published forty-five years ago, has an important place in sociology’s relatively short history.

HT: Gabriel Rossman