Children and Families in the Social Environment

Modern Applications of Social Work

James Garbarino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351528962
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The first edition of this volume successfully applied Bronfenbrenner's "micro-systems" taxonomy to childrearing and family life. Emphasizing how forces in the environment influence children's behavior, Garbarino has staked out an intermediate position between the psychoanalytic and the systems approach to human development. Taking cognizance of new research and of changes in American society, Garbarino has once again carefully analyzed the importance of children's social relationships. For this wholly revised second edition, he has incorporated a greater emphasis on ethnic, cultural, and racial issues.

1
An Introduction

James Garbarino and T. Gaboury Mario

Beginning at the End, or Ending at the Beginning?

Where does one start in seeking an understanding of children and families in the social environment? With the processes of development that characterize the individual child as a biological organism? With the family as a social entity? With the environment as a network of social institutions and events? Where is the beginning of this chain of relationships that binds together child, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends, neighbors, communities, and professional helpers? And where is the end? It would be easy to cast aside the many interconnections and pretend that there is just the developing child, or just the family as a social unit, or just the community power structure, or just the professional delivering human services. It would be easy, but we believe it would not be enough. Rather, we seek to capture the whole tangled mass of relationships connecting child, family, and social environment.

Much of what makes us human beings is bound up in the social dimensions that shape and are shaped by our biology. As human beings we are social creatures: we need society and society needs each of us to function. The ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle put it this way:

He who is unable to live in society or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

(Politics)

We are all neither beasts nor gods. Therefore, we must understand ourselves in a social context, in a society where we must sink or swim. In this book we consider how we swim, and why we sometimes sink.

An Overview of Themes

The focus of this book is the development of competence—defined as the ability to succeed in life’s major challenges. What are these challenges? Although different cultures have different emphases and themes, there are some common elements. Among these are the ability to master the roles of worker, citizen, lover, and parent.

Competence is thus more than a generalized abstract quality. It is defined and measured in terms of specific situations or contexts. Intelligence—broadly defined—is certainly important. We use “intelligence” here in the sense developed by Robert Sternberg (1985). In his book Beyond IQ Sternberg refers to three kinds of intelligence. The first consists of the ability to process information quickly and accurately—”componential” intelligence. This is the kind of intelligence measured by most IQ tests. A person needs at least an average amount of this form of intelligence to succeed in most situations (only a few specialized settings require high levels of this sort of intelligence).

Beyond componential intelligence is creative intelligence—the ability to recombine elements in new ways to solve novel problems, to see new patterns in experience and data. Suppose you were given a stopwatch and told to figure out the height of a building? How many different strategies could you come up with? This would be one measure of creative intelligence.

A third kind of intelligence is social. How effective are you at reading people and influencing their behavior? Just as componential intelligence tends to involve analyzing and manipulating symbols (e.g., solve for X where 2X + 42 = 16X — 23), social intelligence tends to involve analyzing and manipulating people and social situations (e.g., how can you persuade the manager of a building to show you the building’s blueprints so that you can discover its height?).

Of course, intelligence, or general “adaptivity” as psychologists often call it, plays a large part in determining whether or not one will handle situations competently. But there is more (McClelland, 1973). Communication skills are vitally important. One must be able to communicate accurately in word, look, or gesture. One must send and receive messages accurately. Patience is also important. Delaying one’s response to a stimulus as long as it takes to respond effectively is a skill relevant to success in many situations. Likewise, it helps to have a reservoir of self-esteem and self-confidence to go along with social and intellectual abilities. We can call this generally positive orientation toward oneself and toward one’s ability to master the world—”ego development.”

Where does competence come from? How do people get it? By and large, they develop it in childhood, and their families and communities play a large role in the process. Furthermore, within some general guidelines that we will consider as we go along, many different strategies and tactics lead to developing competence. Many alternate social arrangements are developmentally sound; they are different but genuinely equal. Therefore, we are led to a commitment to pluralism, to letting families and communities utilize and pursue their different strategies and tactics for producing competent children within some common agreement on basic principles such as the need for love, affection, and acceptance. We respect diversity, but want to search for ways to ensure that where there really are general standards, all families and communities can and do meet those standards. Pluralism implies diversity within fundamental consensus or agreement on basic principles. Throughout this book we seek pluralist models of human development as a guide for professional helpers. As our society becomes more ethnically and racially diverse, this becomes ever more important.

To do justice to our central themes—the development of competence and pluralism—we need to find some way to pull apart and then reassemble the complex interconnections among child, family, and social environment. We have found an intellectual tool for accomplishing this ambitious task. It is an ecological model of human development elaborated by human developmentalist Urie Bronfenbrenner. Bronfenbrenner’s approach suits us well because:

1. It focuses on the developing child in the real world.
2. It pays a lot of attention to the social environment in its many diverse forms.
3. It recognizes the essentially active role of the individual—shaping as well as being shaped by social contexts.
4. It sees the social environment as a grand human experiment, and thus invites our efforts to improve it, to make it better.

An Overview of Topics

With all this in mind, our book begins with a discussion of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 we expand upon the model to analyze the issue of social risk and opportunity for children. Chapter 4 looks at the family as the primary environment for children. In Chapters 5 and 6 we examine two fundamental topics: the child as a biological organism, and childbearing and child rearing. Chapter 7 explores the fundamental issues of identity and ethnicity. Chapter 8 addresses the child’s community and neighborhood. In Chapters 9 and 10 we outline how human services and social policy work with regard to children. Chapter 11 concludes the book by setting the issues of children, family, and social environment in the broader perspective of our society’s history and future. Having reached the end, let’s begin again with a more detailed introduction to these chapters and then proceed to greater depth.

The Ecology of Human Development

Chapter 2 discusses several factors that influence developing individuals. Each of these can be tied to one or more situations or “contexts” within which people develop. Contexts of development are those regularly occurring environmental settings that can affect development by presenting risks or opportunities. Some of the relevant developmental contexts are family, friendship groups, neighborhoods, schools, communities, states, and nations. We can arrange them on a scale from smallest (microsystems) to largest (macrosystems). Events that take place at each of these contextual levels have effects on children and their families.

Subsequent chapters concentrate on the various contexts more specifically. These more detailed analyses, however, should not detract from our explicit premise that the subsystems of the overall ecological system are inextricably interrelated, one with the other. We hope to demonstrate throughout this text the interconnectedness of the various actors and activities in the human ecology of the child. The degree of cooperation among these interconnected systems is a vital issue for those concerned with the quality or “habitability” of the social environment.

Contexts can be positive or negative influences on development—or both at one time or another. Depending on the balance of the multiple factors (ranging from individual biological endowments to environmental forces), individuals or families are exposed to many types of developmental risk and opportunity. We introduce this notion of sociocultural riskand opportunity in Chapter 2. Later in Chapter 3, we elaborate on it in greater detail.

Sociocultural Risk and Opportunity

Chapter 3 lays out more specifically the theme of sociocultural risk and opportunity. Disruption of the sociocultural systems that surround individual development results in the disruption of people’s lives. This relationship is a basic equation in human development. Chapter 3 concentrates on relating the aspects of risk and opportunity to the social dimensions of the ecological system—from micro- to macro. For example, it considers the impact of smaller households in the United States, styles of raising children, emotional climates in the family, density of communities, local employment levels, conditions in the work place, national economic and political attitudes, and war, all as important contributors to or detractors from child and family development.

We undertake a discussion of pluralism in Chapter 3. Considered as a macrosystem issue, pluralism leads us to recognize that our culture is comprised of a diversity of traditions, each with its own strengths and weaknesses relative to any particular environmental condition. Our approach recognizes and respects the diversity of Americans. Pluralism stresses the importance of fostering the strengths in a people’s special heritage. A pluralistic perspective helps us avoid imposing one cultural view upon another. It promotes tolerance and enhances the creative approaches available to human services workers and researchers. However, pluralism has its own set of challenges. Most important is gaining respect for diversity culture-wide, and divesting dominant groups of some decision-making power. Many of us tend to view “different,” as meaning “less good,” with the underlying danger that dominant beliefs, habits, and attitudes can be foisted unjustifiably on those with fewer numbers and less political clout. A concern for “empowerment” at all levels flows naturally from our ecological perspective.

The Family as a Social System

The discussion of both risk and opportunity on the one hand and pluralism on the other leads us to the family. In Chapter 4 we move from bigger levels of analysis (cultures and societies) to inquire into a smaller level, the family—its various types and functions within our social system. Utilizing sociohistorical, cross-cultural, and family systems perspectives to understand the variety of views regarding families, we review some interesting patterns: First, we draw a distinction between the abstract notion of “family” (what families should be based on dominant views) versus the particular types of families that exist (the different ways families actually are). Crucial to an understanding of pluralism and environmental influences is appreciation of the conflicts that often result from the imposition of the abstract “ideal” family on specific “real” families.

Are families important? The simple fact that humans have created family units in various forms throughout history and across cultures suggests the answer to this question. Chapter 4 makes the case that families are the mediators between individuals and their society. The various forms families take are related to their adaptiveness to contextual constraints. As well, many changes in the sociocultural environment are responses to the collective force of families. Interplay between social systems is the key here.

We explore family systems in detail in this chapter, emphasizing models that consider relationships between families and their settings in terms of stages of family development. Families change both in size and structure. Therefore, it is inappropriate to view them as static entities. How do families work? This becomes a central question in light of the almost overwhelming and complicated array of pressures involved. Forces within families (e.g., family goals, drives, and structure), and forces outside families (e.g., links to society, community/neighborhood make-up) are topics that we must consider.

The Developing Child

In Chapter 5 we descend our analytical ladder still further to consider the developing organism—the child. Children have been viewed quite differently throughout history. Differing perceptions of children’s abilities and developmental agendas have resulted in wholly different descriptions of and proscriptions for proper and healthy growth. Is the child basically innocent and to be taught, or inherently wicked and to be punished? Many questions like these pervade the history of childhood and contemporary issues such as child abuse.

At the individual level of analysis, the biological or physiological aspects of development assume a prominent position. The focus here is on the intricate interrelationship between individual make-up and environ-mental forces. Chapter 5 broadly reviews the stages of development from conception through prenatal-perinatal development, early, middle, and late childhood. At each level, we discuss developmental landmarks (e.g., key changes and infant reactiveness, early language development, gender identity, as well as thinking ability and adolescent maturation). We introduce questions about the relative contribution of heredity and ...