Making Families

Moral Tales of Parenting and Step-Parenting

Jane Ribbens McCarthy, Rosalind Edwards, Val Gillies

• Publisher: sociologypress
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134282050
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book goes to the heart of academic, political and popular debates, as well as professional concerns, about the nature of contemporary family life and parenting. Families are widely discussed in western societies as breaking down or as radically changing, with step-families in particular seen as evidence of such trends. In one of the first British in-depth sociological research studies for over two decades, this book provide evidence of parents' and step-parents' own understandings and experiences of their parenting in step-families.

It addresses questions such as: What does it mean to be a family? Do people in step-families see themselves as making a different kind of family? Is individual happiness in a couple relationship prioritised at the expense of responsibilities towards children? Can a step-parent ever be regarded as the same as a biological mother or father? What do people in step-families do to try to make step-family life work?

The book looks at how people create, understand and experience their parenting and family lives. It reveals how these understandings are rooted in a strong sense of moral responsibility, but that what such responsibility constitutes varies according to gender and social class. In particular, it draws out key theoretical implications for understanding the nature of morality, fairness and justice, and questions ideas about individualisation and the democratisation of family life.

This book will be essential reading for those concerned with the study of contemporary family lives, including sociologists, social policy analysts, family therapists, professionals and practitioners. It is also relevant to those interested in contemporary morality and everyday experiences.

Chapter 1
Constructing (step-)families: continuity or difference?

'It's a word,' Josie said to the still children. 'Family is a word. So is stepfamily. Step-family is a word in the dictionary too whether you like it or not. And it's not just a word, it's a fact and it's a fact that we all are now, whether you like that or not, either.'

(Joanna Trollope, Other People's Children, 1998: 84)

Families are widely discussed in Western societies as breaking down or as radically changing, with both policy-makers and people generally struggling to make sense of these shifts. How we chart a map of these changes, however, is highly contestable. Josie, the step-mother in Joanna TroI lope's novel quoted above, indicates one of the contours that may be drawn on these new (or maybe not so new) maps: that between 'ordinary' nuclear families and step-families.

So, is step-family a word that represents relationships and preoccupations that are inherently distinct from those of 'ordinary' family life, and that people have to deal with whether they like it or not? This book addresses these issues, beginning from the stance that looking at step-families can tell us something significant about family life and parenting generally. We regard step-families as a form of critical case study. On the one hand, they can be seen as representing the forefront of family and lifestyle change. From this point of view, their potential placement outside of the 'conventional' can reveal the typical itself through contrast, as well as providing knowledge about differences. On the other hand, diversity of family forms may not necessarily mean diversity of family lifestyles: people in step-families may be drawing on images and meanings of 'ordinary' family in how they create and understand their lives together, Either way, as Jacqueline Burgoyne (1987) observed, step-families throw light on broader assumptions and values concerning families. They highlight fundamental issues in family life and parenting that people may want to re/ create and/or dis/continue under changing circumstances, as well as those that they may feel their situation precludes.

Literature addressing step-families, however, can often focus around, or take for granted, differences from 'normal' family life, rather than exploring similarities or overlaps. In this introductory chapter we will look at how stepfamilies are constructed in various commentaries on contemporary family life, legal discourses and literature on step-families and parenting, raising key tensions around continuity and difference that run throughout this book.

Works of fiction may also treat step-families as a fundamentally different kind of environment in which to bring up children. Joanna Trollope's Other People's Children, an acclaimed novel about middle-class step-family life, paints a picture of inherent tensions and resentments. The members of the step-family at the centre of the book experience complex and tumultuous emotions as Josie and Matthew begin married life together, each with children from a previous marriage, in one household. Initially the adults involved do not want, cannot love, and cannot find a way to establish a relationship with 'other people's children'. Sometimes they are too self-absorbed in problems even to notice the suffering inflicted on their own children, who are made miserable and angry as their lives are disrupted by new schools, new homes and new parents. While Josie's ex-husband keeps his distance, Matthew's ex-wife is bitter and determined to undermine her children's relationship with their father and prevent one developing with their step-mother. Adults and children quickly reach breaking point, and step-family life becomes a fraught and bleak existence. At the height of crisis, however, people pull back from the brink. Allegiances and loyalties begin to form. Connections are being made, they are beginning to 'fit together' and find a common purpose:

'Maybe,' [Josie] said, 'we've got a sort of chance now. Maybe we could start, well, mending things after all that breaking. If - if we stopped being afraid of being a step-family, that is.' She folded her right hand over her wedding ring. 'I know I'm not your mother. I never will be. You've got a mother. But I could be your friend, I could be your supporter, your sponsor. Couldn't I? Sometimes hard things turn out better because you've had to make an effort to overcome them.' She stopped. 'Sorry,' she said. 'I don't want to lecture you.' She took her hands off the table and put them in her lap. 'I really just want to say that we may be a different kind of family, but we don't have to be worse. Do we?' (Troiiope, 1998: 277)

Trollope's story raises a number of pertinent questions. What does it mean to 'be a family'? Do people in step-families see themselves as making a different kind of family? Is individual happiness in a couple relationship prioritised at the expense of responsibilities towards children? Can a step-parent ever be regarded as the same as a biological mother or father? What do people in stepfamilies do to try to make step-family life work? It is these and similar issues that this book seeks to explore. It is concerned with how biological and stepparents themselves make sense of parenting, both within and between households, and within the wider social context. It looks at how people create, understand and experience their parenting and family lives. It reveals how these understandings are rooted in a strong moral sense of responsibility, but that what such responsibility constitutes varies according to gender and social class. In this focus, then, the book goes to the heart of academic, political and popular debates, and professional concerns, about the nature of contemporary family life and parenting.

Making families: forms, norms and guidelines

Somewhat surprisingly, given the concerns we discuss below regarding children involved in family breakdown and re-partnering, this book is one of the first British in-depth sociological research studies that focuses on parents' and stepparents' own understandings and experiences of their parenting in step-families since Jacqueline Burgoyne and David Clark's (1984) classic study.¹ Conducting their fieldwork in the late 1970s, Burgoyne and Clark found that most of their interviewees drew on and were committed to nuclear family norms. Some thought of themselves as just an 'ordinary' family, especially where they and the children in the step-family were young and/or they had been together for some time. Others consciously attempted to create an 'ordinary' family life for children, by adopting as fully as possible a 'normal' mother or father 'role', and with step-fathers partly or wholly transferring their allegiances from any nonresident biological children. Some of their interviewees' attempts to create an 'ordinary' family life were undermined and the autonomy of their family routines disrupted, especially by continuing contact and conflict with the non-resident parent. In other cases, when children were nearly adult and parents themselves were older, the parent and step-parent focused on their couple relationship, because they saw attempting to create an 'ordinary' family as problematic.

According to this aspect of Burgoyne and Clark's findings, it would seem that a generation or so ago parents and step-parents largely did not see themselves as attempting to create a different kind of family, but just family. Indeed, a self-help book for step-parents published around the same time (Atkinson, 1986) advises that joining a family unit is like a skin graft that has to 'take', eventually becoming indistinguishable from a 'normal' family. There is little indication in Burgoyne and Clark's discussion that parents or step-parents could not or did not regard step-mothers or step-fathers as acting or feeling the same as a biological mother or father. Indeed, the step-parent was often regarded as providing children with the 'second' parent that they needed in their day-today life within the step-family household. Whether or not they had the ability to do so, most of their interviewees felt that the best thing to do was to 'reconstitute' (to use Burgoyne and Clark's term) an 'ordinary' family life, because this was regarded as a 'good, natural and wholesome' environment in which to bring up children. For some, this was also driven by a concern for the respectability, reputation and good-standing of their (step-)family, a view particularly held by working-class interviewees.

There was another, minority, group of Burgoyne and Clark's interviewees, however: the 'progressive' step-families as they term them. Here, parent and step-parent did not articulate images of conventional family in their accounts. Rather, the image they drew on was one of diversity of patterns in family and domestic life, with people concerned with 'personal growth', depicting themselves as making choices and asserting a positive value to their difference from 'ordinary' families. Such parents sometimes posed having a new, joint, child within their family as important because they saw blood ties as significant. Burgoyne and Clark argued that it was couples who were assured in their social position and material circumstances who could afford to ignore pervasive public moralities stressing the normality and desirability of conventional family, and indicated that most of the couples drawing on 'progressive' step-family images were middle class.

Burgoyne and Clark (1984: 204) seem to point towards the 'progressive' version of step-family life as the way forward, when they conclude overall that:

'Making a go of it' involves recognising the 'historical changes' and, on occasion, challenging the institutional contradictions which bear most heavily upon remarried parents and their children.

Indeed, there are arguments that the 'progressive' acknowledgement of diversity in family forms and lifestyles has itself become the contemporary norm (e.g. Boh, 1.989), as reflected in statistical trends.²

Diversity or continuity?

The statistical presentation of trends in family forms and household types can be emphasised in different ways to construct particular arguments about the state of contemporary family life (for reviews and analyses of some of the evidence see Fox Harding, 1996; Robertson Elliot, 1996; McRae, 1999). Administrative boundaries are drawn around, and definitions constructed for, categories of family and household. These categories are regarded as socially significant, and understood as 'different' from, and contrasted with, each other. Such constructions then have important consequences for how we perceive the state of family life in contemporary society, and for the social policies that are developed in order to deal with this administratively defined situation.

Between the early 1970s and the late 1990s, the number of first marriages in the UK fell by two-fifths, while remarriages accounted for over one third of all marriages. During the same period the number of divorces more than doubled, lone motherhood almost doubled and births outside marriage trebled. Cohabitation has become a routine mode of partnership for many, and of parenting, but cohabiting parents are twice as likely to separate than married parents (Office of National Statistics, 1998; Haskey, 1999; Ermisch and Francesconi, 2000). There has also been a significant increase in step-families, although definitional problems around whether the statistical framework should be 'household-' or 'family-' based mean that data on this is not comprehensive (for example, a child might be defined as living in a lone-mother household, but still have experience of involvement in a step-family through the non-resident father's re-partnering). Nevertheless it has been estimated that around one in eight children live in a household with a step-parent for at least some period of time (Haskey, 1994). While there are no figures for non-heterosexual partnerships, some of which will involve children living in gay or lesbian stepfamilies, awareness of and openness about their existence increased during this period (Weeks et al., 2001). Further complicating matters is the fact that some of these trends in the diversity of family forms and structures are more evident in some ethnic groups than in others (Heath and Dale, 1994).

Yet the other side of the coin of these figures about trends towards discontinuity in family forms is that there is also considerable continuity. In the late 1990s, just under three-quarters of households were still composed of a heterosexual couple. Forty per cent of people lived in a family comprising a couple with dependent children, with two-thirds of these couples being married (Office of National Statistics, 1998). Over three-quarters of dependent children in their mid-teens were living together with their biological parents (Haskey, 1997). If one in eight children have been estimated to live in a household with a step-parent for at least some period of time, even if this is a conservative estimate, the majority of children still do not.

Social theorists and commentators often highlight the discontinuity that can be discerned in statistical trends, emphasising family forms and household structures as a facet of the growing impact of the processes of individualisation and democratisation on family life in the UK and elsewhere in the last quarter of the twentieth century (see Allan and Crow, 2001; Crow, 2002b). They point to the way that marriage, sex, childbearing and childrearing have become unhooked. While some commentators regard these changing trends in family forms as a 'breakdown' of the family and see them as bringing social and moral disorder in their wake (e.g. Murray, 1990; Davies, 1993; Dennis and Erdos, 1993; Phillips, 1999), others argue that they have gone too far for a return to the traditional one-marriage nuclear family pattern to be possible, and are more positive about the implications of this:

If this diagnosis [that the nuclear family is falling apart] is right, what will take over from the family, that haven of domestic bliss? The family, of course! Only different, more, better: the negotiated family, the alternating family, the multiple family, new arrangements after divorce, remarriage, divorce again, new assortments from your, my, our children, our past and present families.

(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1995: 2)

Indeed, sociologists and other writers increasingly refer to 'families' rather than 'the family' in discussing the topic (e.g. Berger and Berger, 1983; Denzin, 1987; Cheal, 1993).

Individualisation and democratisation?

For ill or good, though, there is some consensus about the root of structural family change: individualisation. Ideas about individualisation highlight the way that people have been freed from traditional moral obligations and standard pathways, and have greater choices in family form and lifestyle. Previously taken-for-granted ideas about forms of family life and shared norms have fragmented and been replaced by more individualistic responses to lifestyle construction (Cheal, 1991), leaving contemporary family relationships as 'undecided' (Stacey, 1990), 'unclear' rather than 'nuclear' (Simpson, 1998), more 'fluid' and less 'solid' (Bauman, 2000). People are now reflexive authors of their own biographies, rather than following structurally predetermined pathways (Giddens, 1992). They are able to create their own identities, social networks, commitments and moral values (Weeks et al., 2001).

Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (1995) claim that romantic love is being accorded an overwhelming significance as the moral guideline for relationships and new family ties, and Beck-Gernsheim (1998) has elaborated on this to argue that a 'post-familial' family is emerging. Traditional family relationships were built around a 'community of need', comprising unquestioned ties of obligation and permanence. In contrast, contemporary everyday family relationships are increasingly characterised by 'elective affinities', whereby people are charting and negotiating their own personally chosen togetherness. Similarly, Anthony Giddens (1992) has argued that people are pursuing 'pure relationships' based on contingent 'confluent love'.

'Elective affinities' and 'pure relationships' are not necessarily founded on notions of long-term and absolute commitment, but are continued only in so far as both parties feel that the relationship delivers enough emotional and intrinsic satisfaction for each individual to stay within it. As wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Constructing (step-)families: continuity or difference?
• 2 Being 'a family'
• 3 Putting children first? Adults, children and coupledom
• 4 'Doing family': caring, authority and material provision
• 5 'It's just not fair!' The rights and obligations of 'doing family'
• 6 Conclusions: difference, morality and democracy in (step-)families
• Appendix
• References
• Index