Social Institutions Families

Institutions are...

A set of statuses, roles, groups, behaviors, and organizations that provide a foundation for addressing fundamental societal needs

How is the "family" a social institution?

Family is...

How do you define family?

Turns out, it's sorta hard to do

Family can be based on kinship, on emotional connections, and on choice (marriage, adoption, friends etc.)

A household is an economic and residential unit

Households in the US have undergone some pretty big transformations

Have families gone through them too?

Social Institutions

The Nuclear Family

Like all social institutions and structures, the family is built on an ideology and not on an inevitable or natural or true configuration of people

Our normative ideology is called "the nuclear family"

What is the nuclear family?

Heteronormativity

The nuclear family as the ideal and normal family heavily relies on heteronormativity

Why does the ideology of the "typical" American family ideal and the roles and behaviors embedded within family as an institution require:

1. straightness

...and...

2. gender roles rooted in the masculine/feminine binary

Good Families, Bad Families

Families

The myth of the "good" nuclear family is a gendered, raced, classed, and heteronormative ideology

When you think of what a "good mom" is and a "good dad" in our cultural imagination, you can quickly see how these ideologies stem from the values and resources of hegemonic or dominant groups who become the "best" families

Families as Cultural Battlegrounds

"Bad families" are thus set apart by their dysfunction--they are to blame for their own misfortunes

The need for better "family values" is the difference between failure and success in America

"Family values" in the U.S. typically has followed 2 trajectories--the idea that the government should "get out" of family life (except in the case of reproductive rights) and that LGBTQ persons and issues revolving around sexuality threaten "family values"

The institution of the family takes on an excess of significance in our cultural imagination: moms (and dads) "fail" their children, not the government, not religious institutions, not schools, and not economics

For Instance...

In liberal America we have a tidy little way of communicating our biases and, ultimately, our foundational "family values"

It typically looks like this: "I think it's wrong to have children that you cannot provide for"

Seems like common sense reason, but let's dig deeper

How is this REALLY about "bad families" getting what they deserve?

How does this REALLY let other institutions (and all of us) off the hook?

And do we REALLY want to live in a society where only rich people can have children?

Because, when you get down to it, MORE AND MORE people cannot "afford" children:

Dodson & Luttrell

LGBTQ Families

Temporary Aid to Needy Families, TANF (under the Personal Work Opportunity and Responsibility Act, PWORA): 60 mo (5yrs) of income subsidies over your lifetime

REQUIRES work (getting an education DOES NOT QUALIFY AS WORK) with no childcare

Women work low-wage dead end jobs and forfeit care of their children

Laws in the US are shaped and informed by the mythical heteronormative nuclear family even as there are a broad array of family forms in the US, MOST of which do not mirror the myth

LGBTQ families face stigmas that have been repeatedly debunked including:

1. heterosexual parents increase childhood well-being

2. LGBTQ parents will sexually abuse their children

3. LGBTQ parents will make their children LGBTQ

Discrimination against LGBTQ families is prevalent across the US

A Double Bind

Poor women cannot be good and worthy citizens and good and worthy mothers

Why do they "fail" as workers?

Why do they "fail" as mothers?

How do we scrub our collective conscious clean of these systematic forms of inequality?