Part 2: http://tinyurl.com/pxxoejvPart 3: http://tinyurl.com/o7od67w Part 4: http://tinyurl.com/poaa345
As well, scroll below this entry to read the first of two segments on Putnam's "Families" chapter. I see Our Kids as central to understanding contemporary exigencies regarding education policy and essential to building and actualizing an egalitarian social justice agenda. I see and hope to reveal connections to education and schooling, education reform, and my own experiences.
Part 5; Chapter Two: “The American Dream: Myths and
Realities” – Families (2 of 2)
As if aware of possible imbroglio regarding traditionalist
and sexist undercurrents in the first two-thirds of the “Families” chapter of Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis,
author Robert Putnam offers an admission of the perplexing connections among
poverty and women’s health issues. “Whatever the reasons,” he says as if doing so
might offer a tabula rasa, “children of less-educated parents are increasingly entering
the world as an unplanned surprise…while children of more educated parents are
increasingly entering the world as a long-planned objective” (65). This
difference, Putnam feels, affects the resources a parent or parents have to
raise those kids.
Regarding non-marital births, Putnam informs that numbers
remain low for college-educated women and that “the racial gap within classes
has narrowed, while the gap within races has widened,” echoing overall trends
in American economic mobility. Putnam also explicates issues of cohabitation,
divorce, and multi-partner fertility, which is a term to describe “blended
families” (68).
Apparently, less-educated families are more likely to have
elements of the “impermanent structure” of multi-partner fertility. My own
childhood can act as an example of what this means. From the time I was nine
until I was nineteen, I saw my mother marry twice after divorcing my
birth-father. I saw my father marry three more times. Along the way, I picked
up and kept two half-brothers and a step-sister on my mother’s side. I caught
and released, so to speak, three step-brothers from one step-mother and have
retained two step-sisters and a step-brother from my dad’s current marriage. I “lost”
a step-dad and two-step mothers along the way, though I hardly regard them as
losses.
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| Buy this representation of impermanence here: http://boutique.tibetart.fr/Impermanence/en |
Among siblings with the same mother, I count a set of twin boys with
whom I share a father, one half-brother half my age whose dad was my second
step-father, and a half-brother whose dad is my current step-father and who is
two decades my junior. Our family rule is to count half-brothers as brothers,
but given we were close to grown when the latest “steps” entered our parents’
lives, we tend to see them and their children as relatives but not necessarily
brothers and sisters. In between the courtships that lead to marriages were
itinerant partners, flings, cohabitators, false starts and mistakes. As the
oldest child, I am witness to them all and often had to intervene in some way
for some manner (I know that’s vague, but even I deserve my secrets). One can
imagine the uncertainty and instability surrounding my our childhoods. Male figures in particular,
given our mother had custody of us, were ephemeral presences and not always
good role models.
In this regard, I lived like many kids, “especially from
less affluent, less educated backgrounds” in that my father
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| Family matters when it comes to upward mobility. |
wasn’t always
around (69). He was somewhere, though, and often telephoned if he was not
nearby. Putnam informs that many men who have children with whom they do not
live have “no contact with their children” (69).
All the changes to the family structure have resulted in a “class-biased
decline in the number of children raised in two-parent families” (69). Notice
within this quotation Putnam does not define “two-parent” to signify
heteronormativity, per se. However, he later states that “College educated moms
are also more likely to have a male breadwinner in the household” (71), even if
they work too, and this results in “a substantial class disparity in the
financial resource available for childrearing” (71). Readers will have to draw
their own conclusions about whether Putnam’s research and explanations skew
toward a prickly conservativism, but he admits to a messiness considering
family factors’ impact on poverty and mobility:
[C]ause and effect are entangled here: poverty produces family instability, and family instability in turn produces poverty. A similar kind of mutual reinforcement occurs between affluence and stability (75).
Moving from cultural shifts as explicatives for “family
breakdown” to policy shifts, Putnam says three “probably” contributed (76): The
War on Drugs, 3-strike legal proceedings, and increased incarceration. Having
just heard Bernie Sanders reveal *his plan* for racial justice and equity, I can’t
help thinking about these three factors and how they have affected the lives of
people of color and poor Americans of every color.
The “two-tiered family pattern” (77; also see my previous blog post on "Families") has consequences for
children. Affluent kids tend to live in two-parent homes and have access to the
resources two incomes affords. In the lowest third of poor American families,
most kids live with only one parent or in the “kaleidoscopic” realities I
mentioned in part 1 of this chapter’s reflection and in this installment’s
paragraphs detailing my own upbringing. Even within the kaleidoscopic mode, the
dominant theme is that only one person has an income (76-78).
Divorce and absent birth-fathers take their tolls on
children. Regardless of race,
Children who grow up without their biological fathers perform worse on standardized test, earn lower grades, and stay in school for fewer years....They are more likely to demonstrate behavioral problems such as shyness, aggression, and psychological problems such as increased anxiety and depression (78).
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| So does stability. |
Again, problematics are apparent. Many education experts
know better than to rely on standardized test scores as meaningful metrics of
anything more than poverty and/or parents’ income or educational background.
Standardized test scores may reveal more about zip codes, given increased
segregation among class lines, than they do about intelligence or ability.
Further, neither a proclivity toward shyness nor an assertive nature need
labeling as problematic except in extreme examples.
Of all the body chapters in Our Kids, “Families” reads as
the one with the writerly voice most different from the others. Putnam reveals
his book is influenced and informed by a team of researchers. While the book
lists him as the single author, I hear someone else’s imprint in this chapter’s
tone and penchant for entering a quagmire while trying to top-toe in and out of
damning quicksand. To be sure, liberal, vociferous social justice warriors may
struggle to remain objective in reviewing this chapter’s timbre. Throughout, though,
the veteran scholar’s voice remerges to soften claims with qualifiers, as in
this summary from the penultimate paragraph:
Since family fragmentation is, as we have seen, powerfully fostered by economic hardship, in one important sense family structure can be seen as merely an intervening variable between poverty in one generation and poverty in the next. Nevertheless, it is a prominent part of the picture (79).
While definitions of family evolve and the importance of a “birth-mother-and-birth-father-centric”/neo-traditional
model of the two-parent home faces multiple critiques and interpretations, one
thing is clear: When it comes to poverty, affluence, and economic mobility,
family matters. When family is defined with
stability, it encompasses better affordances for children than when it is not.
Regardless of whether or not Putnam and/or other speakers in this chapter are justified
targets for critique for cis-centric, heteronormative, traditionalist
definitions of family and marriage/healthy pairings, smart readers can, at
least, agree on that.
Next: “Parenting”
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