- Hello, and welcome
to the next episode of HDFS 060.
In this episode, I'm going to take us
from the main body of the course,
which has been about the typical
or average or expectable family.
And as I've pointed out before,
not all families are the same.
Now that we have laid the foundation
for applying to develecology to families,
we've practiced on families that are, in fact,
pretty much the norm or the expectable
or the family that we have experienced.
But many of us have experienced families
that are not typical.
And it is an important point of the course
that develecology applies to all families
and that family scientists are necessarily engaged
with families that are not the typical or the norm.
And so I'd like to explore family diversity
in this presentation.
And I'm going to largely disappear
once I get my PowerPoint set up.
I'm going to disappear so that we can focus on the ideas,
and I will be back at some point.
Okay, so let's switch views.
Put me up here for a minute,
so you can see that I'm still here and move on.
The reality is that there are many possible families.
And as I just said, develecology applies to all of them.
The possible families include many, many varieties,
and I'm going to list, later, many of those differences
because the differences are important
as we look at families in societies and the ecosystem.
So what we know is that there are many types,
and I'm going to keep saying develecology
applies to all of them.
Cultures differ in what is valued,
what is considered normal
and what is devalued, discriminated against or forbidden.
It's not that there is one kind of acceptable family.
There are many kinds that are acceptable.
There are many kinds that are discriminated against.
And there are many differences among different macrosystems.
What is valued in a particular macrosystem
reflects what is done by the majority in that macrosystem,
those who dominated.
So it's important that we look at any particular macrosystem
in terms of what is dominant,
who is dominant and what are their values.
Potentially every person, relationship, family
or group that differs from the dominant version
faces discrimination, disfavor, criticism and obstacles
in the way of their development.
Every -ism reflects the prejudice of a dominant group
against a minority, whether it's sexism, racism,
ageism, childism.
The experiences of those who differ
from the dominant will shape their development,
their relationships, families and communities
just as the experiences of those who are the dominant
will shape their development.
But their experiences may be different.
Typical differs with the ecosystem.
What is atypical in one ecosystem may be typical in another.
These differences represent different macrosystems.
Remember, the macrosystem is the consistencies.
In this case, we're talking about consistencies
or similarities across families.
Particular differences maybe tolerated
or even celebrated in one macrosystem
and discriminated against in another.
Macrosystems also change.
A difference may become more accepted or less accepted.
Understanding the history is important.
The bottom line, and this is where I will end up,
is that whether a particular family is healthy
or good for development,
depends on the experiences its participants have
in the relations, roles, activities
and settings provided by that family
and by the ecosystem the family exists in.
A family's effect on development does not depend
on its form or the particular identities
or differences among its members.
So it's not who you are.
It's what you do.
The macrosystem's transactions with family members
may facilitate or hinder the family
in providing appropriate experiences for development.
So we have two sets of factors
that determine whether a family is good
for the people in it.
And that is one set,
the relations, roles, activities,
the settings provided by the family,
the experiences in those.
And the second is how the macrosystem
that family is in facilitates or hinders the family
in providing appropriate experiences.
So prejudice, discrimination, exclusion,
hatred are all characteristics of the macrosystem
that may interfere with the healthy development
of the people in it.
But that is the effect of the macrosystem,
not the parents or other members of the family.
All right, moving on.
Let's look at a few different types of families.
And I've pulled out of my random-access memory,
the storage unit in my central processing unit in my head,
about, I dunno, 30 different things
on which families differ.
And these are mostly things that researchers
and clinicians have thought about.
There's not much research on some of them,
but they are the reasons
that families differ from each other,
the characteristics they differ on.
And they may, in many cases, in some macrosystems,
make the family a target of prejudice or discrimination.
So let's go down through these.
Age differences between partners.
We have a set of ideas about who should be getting married,
who should be in a relationship with whom.
And when the relationship is between people
who are at different stages in the lifespan,
it may call the attention, that may call the attention,
of people who are concerned about that.
It's not that people have to be the same age,
but they should maybe, we think, be at the same stage.
So for example, a middle-aged man
should probably not be in relationships
with teenage women and vice versa.
Similarly, we think about the age and the situation
when sexual relations begin.
In some cultures, sexual relations between partners
begin very early, as soon as people enter puberty,
in others, not 'til considerably later.
The age and situation when childbearing begins.
In some cultures, if you're not pregnant very quickly
after the formation of a, or partnership for a couple,
people begin to talk about you.
In others, they'll talk about you
because you're pregnant early.
The spacing between children
makes for differences between family,
not just how many you have,
but how quickly you have them and how far apart they are.
And in our culture, for example,
people often talk about the ideal spacing for children.
And that ideal in our culture may be different
from the ideal in other cultures.
Ethnic and racial differences between parents
are of interest.
And I realize that ethnic is misspelled in that slide.
Just ignore that.
Ethnic and racial differences may produce biracial children.
Children who come from parents
of different ethnicities or races,
and biracial children may face discrimination
in some cultures.
They're not tolerated in others,
and their parents are roundly criticized
and discriminated against.
Religious differences between parents may be of concern.
The origins of children.
Are they the children of two biological parents?
Was a surrogate involved in producing the child?
Is the family adopting a child
from a different set of parents?
Or is this not even an adoption,
but people raising somebody else's child,
either with official sanction, as in the foster care system,
or because the parents couldn't take care of them
and another family took them in.
Racial differences between the children,
which may happen with adoptive parents,
and differences between children and their parents
may be of interest to people.
People who are raising children alone may be of concern.
A one parent family,
whether that's by happenstance,
some people have children and they just don't have partners
and don't have them.
Others do it by choice.
And those relationships may be biological.
They may be adoptive.
They may be foster.
And in some situations, in some states, for example,
in this country, people who have no partners
are not allowed to adopt.
That's been changing.
Is it a family with one non-heterosexual parent
with children?
And in some states,
and through some agencies, non-heterosexual parents
are not allowed to adopt children
or to be foster parents.
And so those are all differences among families.
Now, when we move to the next group,
it's divided only because of the size of the slide,
not because there are categories.
You can see now that we're getting up
to a pretty large number of different kinds of families.
And that's the point.
There are many, many different kinds of families.
And again, all of them can be studied using develecology.
I'm not going to go into detail on any of these
because I can't figure out which ones
would be most important to do that with.
In fact, identifying a particular kind of family
to be concerned about and need to have special research on
suggests that we're looking at a macrosystem problem,
not the families,
but the values of people who are going to study them
or identify them as needing to be of concern.
So let's keep going.
Same sex partners with children.
Again, same sex partners may have difficulty conceiving, hm.
They may be subject to regulations that say they can't adopt
or be foster parents.
That's changing.
As I said, macrosystems change.
And it's important that they do.
Non-binary partners and parents
create a different kind of family.
Trans partners and parents,
parents who changed gender,
gender fluid parents and their partners
and parents who changed genders after partnering.
Many people change after they've had children,
sometimes with the blessing of their spouses,
sometimes without.
Sometimes those changes are accepted by their children.
Sometimes they are not.
Those are macrosystem issues.
Another set of groups, types, partners with disabilities.
How do families get formed by people with disabilities?
It happens all the time.
Families who have children with disabilities.
Families with children of both types,
some with disabilities and some without.
There are families changed by the death of a parent
or by the death of a child.
Those are two different kinds.
And parents who are remarried after the death of a parent.
And those are different from parents who remarried
after divorce of the parents,
because the number of parents in the family is different,
if one has died, than it is if two have divorced.
Blended families after death or divorce of parents.
Blended means we put together two families.
And usually we refer to those who have children
from two sets of parents.
Binuclear families.
We know about the nuclear family.
That's kind of the typical one that we've talked about,
but binuclear are families that have two residences,
two households and parents in each.
Parents of a child who live in separate places
create a binuclear family.
We talked about those in the episode on divorce.
Sometimes we have recombined binuclear families
with step-siblings, half-siblings
and full siblings sometimes as well.
A recombined binuclear family is when two binuclear families
get together, are joined by one of the parents in each.
So now children may have three, or trinuclear family.
We have families sharing residences.
Two sets of parents or two parents and their children
and a single parent and their children,
they're co-resident families.
They may just be sharing a family, but they're a household.
And they have relationships with each other
that may or may not be sexual.
And their children are experiencing multiple adults
in the household and children from different parents.
We have extended families in a single residence.
So we have, some of our families
include more than two generations.
Two generations would be parents and child.
Extended family might include grandparents,
grandchildren as well.
So we have three generations.
And it might include siblings of the parents.
So you have great aunts, uncles, aunts and uncles,
and cousins, all residing in a single place.
That's a different kind of family.
Common, very common in some macrosystems,
not so much in the United States.
We have parents with multiple partners, polygamy.
So you might have one man, two or more women.
You might have one woman, two or more men,
and children from different parents, different combinations.
The divorce counselors that I know
are dealing more and more with situations of polygamy
that occur after a divorce,
when one of the parents with children will move in
with a couple, perhaps with children,
creating a threeple, three people,
all of whom have relationships with each other
and children, perhaps from both combinations.
In some cases, we have fourples,
people, two couples, who have joined together,
or in some cases, a couple and two other adults
from other families.
So we have three original families,
which now have members in the same household with children.
And then we have an old form, fictive kin families.
These are families that include people
who are not related biologically or by marriage
but who operate as members of the family
and are considered members of the family.
They may be people who have been family friends for years,
who now reside with the family.
They may be people who have an important role
with one or more of the people in the family.
Fictive means they're fictional,
their kinship is fictional.
I prefer to call them families with affiliated members,
family of affiliation.
I don't think they're fictional, but they're not biological.
They're not legal relationships, but their affiliations.
And those people may be very important
to the individuals in the family and to the families.
And it's functioning as a whole.
Now those were the 30 or so that I pulled out of my hat
in the space of half an hour.
You can probably come up with more.
The point will be still the same, that they are families.
They are in charge of the development of the people in them.
And they have a role
in human development and in the community.
Now within those types, there is more diversity.
Each family type is a somewhat different system.
That's our point.
They will be different.
But each type will include families
whose systems operate differently,
even though their origin and their structure
are of the same type.
So even two families, blended families,
both resulting from divorce,
parents from each family getting together
with their children,
repartnering, creating a household with people
who were formally married to somebody else,
those blended families are not all the same.
They will differ.
Their systems will operate differently,
even though they're the same type.
And that introduces a very important point,
that families have a form.
They have a structure,
and I've listed these dozens of them.
But the form is not what's important.
The form is how they're structured.
And that brings us to a very important point.
The form is not what is important.
It is how the family operates
that determines how people develop in it.
For many, many centuries,
I don't know how long, we have referred, in our macrosystem,
to broken families,
families where people have divorced.
In my view, broken means a family doesn't work.
It doesn't refer to whether or not
the parents are married or not.
It doesn't refer to whether they live together or not.
A family is broken if it doesn't serve the purposes
of developing and protecting the people who are in it.
And that depends, not on the form
or the history of the family,
it depends on the system of relationships
and activities, the microsystem, that the family puts up.
So I'm gonna keep harping on that point.
It's not the form.
It's the function.
Each family type will be affected
by differences in socioeconomic status.
Poor families are different from affluent families,
even if they have the same structure.
Families will be affected by their extended families.
It depends on who you're related to
and how they interact with you,
and their system will reflect the understanding
and expectations they have developed,
during their development, in their families of origin.
So we're putting together different families
into perhaps two different families
that have very similar form, but operate quite differently,
because the affect is different.
The level of reciprocity is different.
The way they use power is different.
The experiences they provide for children,
those are different.
So even the same type of families
will show a great deal of diversity.
And each family within a type
will be affected by their macrosystem,
by how many families like them, they interact with,
and by the degree to which they're valued or not
by their community.
So three or four families may be of the same type,
but their macrosystem and their ecosystems
and their value in that ecosystem
will help them to be different.
So I hope it's not seeming too much
like studying family sciences is impossible,
because we can study the systems.
We can study the effect on development,
regardless of the forms.
And it's important to look at the forms
because there are some similar difficulties
that they may face in a particular macrosystem.
And every family exists in a context.
And those contexts, as I've tried to lay out,
may be very different.
Every family, no matter its type
or its ecosystem can be studied using develecology.
Every person in every family will be adapting
to the experiences had in that family
and will be shaped by those experiences.
Ultimately, the development of each person will reflect
how the relations, the roles and activities,
the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem
and macrosystem experienced by the person
supports the person's development.
So ecology is a fundamental part of development,
and we have to look at the ecosystem.
And back to the bottom line.
Whether a particular family is healthy
or good for development
depends on the experiences its participants have
in the relations, roles, activities
and settings provided by that family
and by the ecosystem the family exists in.
A family's effect on development
does not depend on its form or the particular identities
or differences among its members.
The macrosystem's transactions with family members
may facilitate or hinder the family
in providing appropriate experiences for development.
Those who value human development value families.
Those who value families
work to make their macrosystems value families.
Thank you.
And I'll be happy to entertain questions.
Email me, ask in discussion group this week.
Stay healthy.