Childhood, Family, Alcohol

Mark Jayne, Gill Valentine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351952361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing together international research from the fields of geography, alcohol studies, sociology, psychology and childhood studies, Jayne and Valentine explore children's understandings and experiences of alcohol consumption and the role of alcohol in family life. Chapters address both extra-familial 'norms' about parenting and drinking cultures which are generated in wider society (through law/regulation, media/advertising and social networks etc.) and intra-familial 'norms', including the modelling behaviour of family members', attitudes to alcohol, drinking habits and practices, rules and guidance, and initiating children to drinking. Based on empirical research undertaken in the UK, and drawing on studies from around the world, Childhood, Family, Alcohol advances theoretical debates and offers insights relevant to policy and practice by: · adopting a cross-generational perspective on drinking cultures · exploring pre-teen children's understandings of alcohol · focusing on the significance of the spaces of everyday family life · considering adult alcohol consumption, drinking practices and drunken performativities · reflecting on social/individualized consumption, social reproduction, adult-children interaction and materialities · showing the importance of non-(and more-than) representational understanding of the complexities of childhood, family life and alcohol consumption.

Chapter 1
Introduction

In contemporary societies in the global north there is growing concern about alcohol consumption amongst young people, even in countries such as France and Italy, which have previously been assumed to have ‘sensible’ drinking cultures (Järvinen and Room 2007; Velleman 2009). Alcohol research has generated a voluminous amount of writing focused on young people in terms of a diverse range of issues with a non-exhaustive list of studies including; everyday drinking practices in households and the role of family and peer influence (Komro et al. 2007; Lowe et al. 1993; Yu 2004; Conway et al. 2003; Shucksmith et al. 1997; Marquis 2004; Bogenschneider 2004; Plant and Miller 2007; Bergh et al. 2011); teenage ‘risky’ behaviour (Newburn and Shinner 2001); gendered geographies of young people’s drinking (Forsyth and Bernard 2000; Hubbard 2005; Leyshon 2005, 2008) and the mis-use of alcohol by both young people and parents/carers (Leib et al. 2002; McKeganey et al. 2002; Ward and Snow 2010; Templeton et al. 2011). Despite this progress it is noticeable that there has been a relative lack of research that examines the transmission of drinking cultures within families across a broad diversity of social groups, including those who do ‘not necessarily consider themselves as having an alcohol problem, or to be suffering the consequences of other people’s problematic drinking’ (Holloway et al. 208: 534). Moreover, research has also failed to consider in a sustained manner children who are younger than teenagers, or indeed to address in a convincing way how space and place are key constituents in parental and children’s and young peoples’ knowledges and experiences of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness.

In this book we unpack the complex ways in which geographical imaginations contribute to the transmission of drinking cultures within families (Jayne et al. 2008a; Valentine et al. 2010a). In the UK, official figures actually show a decrease in numbers of young people drinking above Government recommended levels of consumption, with politicians, policy makers and charities warning against complacency and raising concerns about young people underreporting their alcohol consumption and highlighting the role of alcohol in violence and disorder in public space (BBC 2015; and see Jayne and Valentine 2015; Jayne et al. 2015 for a critique). Recent policy attention has, for example, been focused on the potential role of parents/carers in preventing alcohol misuse by their offspring, and in supporting the introduction of alcohol to young people.

For example, in 2009, for the first time the UK Government published Guidance on the Consumption of Alcohol by Children and Young People in order to offer young people and their parents/carers advice on how to identify and prevent problem drinking (Donaldson 2009). In this report the then Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, recommended that young people under the age of 15 should avoid alcohol completely, 15- to 17-year-olds should only consume alcohol with the guidance of a parent/carer, and certainly no more than once a week (Donaldson 2009). The former Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines followed previous policy initiatives focused on young people such as the Youth Alcohol Action Plan (2008) which emerged from the UK government’s Alcohol Harm Reduction Strategy for England (2004) and Safe, Sensible and Social (2007), which sought to address alcohol-related problems for individuals, families and communities. Indeed, the UK charity Alcohol Concern has also argued that the law concerning giving alcohol to children at home should be reviewed and called for a ban on the advertising of alcohol on television before the 9pm watershed and before non-18 films in cinemas, as well as for the National Curriculum to include increased alcohol education (Diment et al. 2007).

The government’s published alcohol strategies have also been complemented by a national television advertising campaign entitled Why Let Drink Decide? where teenage actors describe their future ‘risky and harmful’ decision-making dominated by alcohol. As well as offering links to the advertisements, the campaign website provided advice about how to ‘be in control’, to ‘think before you drink’, to ‘drink less’, as well as guidance on ‘looking after a drunken friend’ and ‘having fun without alcohol’ (Why Let Drink Decide? 2010). These policy initiatives have helped ensure that the role of adults and families in transmitting values and practices relating to alcohol consumption to children has become a central feature of political and popular debate. Indeed, academics have long argued that ‘the family is the primary context for the socialisation of drinking behaviour in young people’ (Foxcroft and Lowe 1997: 227) and consequently a major influence on the development of the drinking careers of young people in relation to both drinking habits and attitudes to drinking (e.g. Raskin White et al. 1991).

Theorizing Childhood, Families, Alcohol

Despite there being a backdrop of academic debate, political and popular concern and policy focus the role of alcohol within the family has nonetheless been under theorised. For example, research has been dominated by quantitative analysis of the links between family structure and risk (e.g socioeconomic factors, parental alcohol problems etc.), with only a handful of studies addressing parents’/carers’ communication and supervisory strategies (all with teenagers) (e.g van der Vorst et al. 2005). As such, the overwhelming focus of research on family life can more accurately be understood as studies of social reproduction, comprising mainly research on child-care, and the organisation of domestic labour (e.g. Cox and Narula 2003; Dyck 1996; Holloway 1998, 1999). As such, they have been quite instrumental, focusing on parenting decisions rather than the banal everyday experiences of living in families (with children’s experiences of family life located within distinct sub-fields, such as children’s geographies, psychology, consumer culture and some ‘alcohol studies’ – which will be discussed throughout this section). There is therefore a lack of theoretical and empirical research focused on families across a broad diversity of social groups with children younger than teenagers, and therefore relatively little is known about whether parents/carers actively teach pre-teen children to drink within a family setting. As such, a recent review observed the need for more studies of parents’/carers’ attitudes and practices in relation to children’s alcohol consumption (Smith and Foxcroft 2009).

For example, it is through shared everyday practices and interactions that family relations and individuals’ identities, attitudes and values are forged (Morgan 1996). As such, theorists and researchers need to pay more attention to what it means to live in families, how family connections are constituted and lived between people, to the unpredictable flow of daily events and inconsistencies of family behaviour, and to the relationships between the family in the present and the pasts/futures of its members. By foregrounding everyday life, and the negotiation of shared attitudes and practices in families (in relation to material objects, emotions, time etc.) rather than focusing on individuals within families or aggregate patterns in family behaviour, in this book we centralize the dynamic of family life with reference to social and cultural theory.

Gillis (1996) argues that everyone lives in two families – the one thy live by (i.e. our idealized vision of family life which we aspire to) which serves as a moral anchor for the way we believe family life ought to be lived, and the one they live with (i.e. the families we share our everyday realities with) with all their contradictions, messiness and disorder. However, such understandings of ‘family’ tend to get lost in definitions used by policy-makers to describe households in which children live and Gillies (2009) argues that the State has been adopting an increasingly interventionist approach towards families as the mundane practices of everyday family life (e.g eating) have been systematically linked with the health and well-being outcomes not only of ‘the child’ but also of society as a whole (obesity etc.). Whereas the nineteenth century was marked by the introduction of compulsory schooling in western societies to compensate for the perceived domestic deficiencies of ‘working class’ families, contemporary parents/carers are increasingly charged with responsibilities to maximize their child’s start in life by providing the ‘right’ support at home as part of processes of individualization (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1995; Gagen 2000). Most notably, the contemporary family is perceived to be the site where our personhood is cultivated and the lens through which pasts, presents and futures are often interpreted, acted upon and imagined (Gilles 2009). Growing anxiety about children’s well-being has therefore meant that many aspects of family life have become subject to government legislation, policies, and ‘advice’ (Plummer 2003).

It is within this broader context that a burgeoning body of literature by social and cultural theorists and more specifically writing focused on consumer culture has sought to highlight the complexities and contradictions of ‘childhood’ and ‘family’ life and to respond to the challenge that ‘relatively little is known about how children engage in practices of consumption or the significance of this to their everyday lives and broader issues of social organisation’ (Martens et al. 2004: 42). Recent writing for example has considered discursive constructions of children’s consumption of nature/culture through children’s oral, textural and visual representations of ‘the city’ and observation of children’s urban spatial practices (Wells 2002). The role of homemade food in family identity has also been considered through practices that mark intergenerational caregiving, altruism and love as model ‘characteristics’ (Evans et al. 2011). Tyler (2009) discusses sales-service environments and encounters between sales staff and children; and Peterson (2010) focuses on children’s purchasing and playing of computer games and collecting of objects as an everyday social performance. This research identifies important signifiers of how parents, carers and other adults ‘grapple with transmitting domestic cultural values, enacting roles and responsibilities of parental generations towards their other family members, and defending the domestic unit against the fissiparous pull of competing moral discourses’ (Mosio et al. 2004: 379–38).

Underpinning this work is also a desire to uncover ‘theoretical and empirical insights into the lived experience of young people as they mediate the shifting milieus of their social lives’ (Martens et al. 2004: 42). Indeed, Ruckenstein (2010: 401) suggests that children, childhood and families are becoming increasingly important in rethinking and revising notions of consumer culture by adopting ‘a child centred perspective on consumption [which] supports the study of temporal dimensions of consumption by emphasizing how consumer culture reproduces and transforms itself through the lifecycle and over generations’. This approach develops understanding of childhood and family as key to social formation of global consumers, and children as a major target market for global capital, acknowledging childhood ‘enchantment’ around consumption but avoiding developmentalist and sacralised theorization (Langer 2004). For example, Cook (2003: 150) argues that ‘emergent from the interplay between adult and child is the iterative production of social space. [and that] Children, of course, do not passively accept impositions … [highlighting that] within childhood there exists a dynamic series of oppositional stances defining children of different age-genders in relation to each other’. Valentine’s (1999: 21) contention nonetheless that it is adult power which defines ‘what is right and wrong (safe and unsafe)’ has led to theoretical and empirical reflection on the ways in which while ‘the individual might be the bearer of anxiety … it must ultimately be the collective social valuing and discursive formation of ‘competent parenting that underlie any anxieties about parenting’ (Martens et al. 2004: 168).

In reviewing these debates, Cook (2008: 233) argues that critique from studies of children’s consumption highlights that (and we would suggest the majority of researchers focused on childhood, family and alcohol replicate is) a ‘socialization perspective, is at base, teleological in its epistemology in the sense that it posits children as incomplete, less-than-knowledgeable persons whose movement is towards an assumed or desired state of being and knowing’. Moreover, Cook (2008: 222) goes on to suggest it is important that children are considered as important actors in order ‘to disrupt individualistic assumption about economic action by bringing women, mothers and caregivers into the picture … [so that the] relational and co-productive nature of acquiring, having and displaying things becomes necessary, evident and unavoidable’. This highlights the need to understand unequal power relations between different social groups, as well as interrogating processes and practices of learning and associated lifestyle and identity formation.

More specifically, Martens et al. (2004) point to the significant mileage in understanding children’s engagement with material culture and parent-child relationship via networks of adults who play a role in children’s lives. Such comments notwithstanding, Martens et al. (2004: 175) suggest it is important that research agendas acknowledge children’s consumption is intimately connected to parents’/carers’ consumption (particularly as parents/carers often consume on behalf of their children) and as such there is a need to understand ‘how children ‘learn’ to consume, the lifestyles of their parents/ carers, the ways that their parent/carer reflexively engage with memories of their own childhood (or biography) and parental readings of material culture all lie at the heart of what can be understood as children’s consumption’. Writing on consumer culture, childhood, and families has thus begun to productively engage with theories ‘about the individuality of desire, identity and lifestyle … [as being discursively and differentially constructed through] relationships, obligations and reciprocity’ (Cook 2004: 237).

Social reproduction, adult-children interaction, materialities and intergenerational transmission of consumption cultures are thus central to theoretical understanding of childhood, families and alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. Indeed, while being a relatively small body of writing within the voluminous ‘alcohol studies’ literature, for almost 40 years a handful of progressive theorists across the ...