The Double Life of the Family

Myth, hope and experience

Michael Bittman, Jocelyn Pixley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367719753
• eBook ISBN: 9781000319491
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The modern family is under strain. What we crave most from our families is intimacy, warmth and self-fulfilment but we often find this difficult to achieve. We hold onto these expectations of our families even in the face of contradictory experiences, so the family sustains a double life.

The authors explore the gap between our values, expectations and yearnings, and our experiences of everyday family life. Family ritual, political rhetoric, advertising images and television family sitcoms are all windows onto what we want and expect - our myths of the family. Yet our aspirations for intimacy and self-fulfilment are frustrated by unacknowledged inequalities between men and women, and parents and children. The inequalities have their origins in the division of domestic labour and in labour markets that disregard family responsibilities.

The Double Life Of The Family argues that our expectations of family life are more powerful than is usually believed and have enormous influence on both the way governments structure social policy and on the decisions made by ordinary people.

1
Is the myth of the nuclear family dead?

If we know something reassuringly well, perhaps even intimately or personally, we use an expression derived from the word family—we say we are ‘familiar’ with it. Of course this usage presumes that we know our family intimately. Because we ‘know’ our own families, by extension we relate to all families—or, as it is often called, the family. The family is an idea that has been used in fiction writing, in song, and in film and television. Some central themes of popular culture revolve around family issues. Seen in this way the genre of romance (girl meets boy), for example, deals with family formation. Soap operas manipulate kinship relations—rarely with much subtlety—to wring new twists out of ever-familiar plots. Commodities are presented as ‘family packs’. The association between ‘family’ and ‘family household’—or ‘home’ as it’s usually known—is the foundation of many an advertiser’s and politician’s appeal. ‘Home’ implies security, cordiality and compassion. There is even a television genre called ‘family sitcom’, most of which is highly conventional. This in turn has given rise to a counter-product—TV programs such as Roseanne, The Simpsons, and Married with Children. Much of their humour is derived from the unexpected transgression of some of these familiar associations. Such events cannot be funny unless the viewer knows what should happen. Humour is a socially acceptable method of saying what otherwise cannot be said: that is why we laugh. The existence of this genre of anti-family sitcoms is, in its own way, a testimony to the normative power of the familiar. At the same time they point the way to a deeper understanding of the family.¹

Not everything is what it seems

By contrast, there is something uncomfortable, even shocking, in reading reports that betray the fact that not all families are as they should be. The divorce rate causes great alarm to many. Criminologists tell us that more people are murdered by close relatives than by strangers (as we discuss later in the next chapter). Recent campaigns against child sexual abuse and domestic violence confirm that the danger lurks within our own homes more than outside. These are events that even Roseanne or The Simpsons rarely broach. At the same time, these events call forth the intervention of health professionals—specialists in sickness and in breakdowns. Victims and perpetrators alike are offered counselling, therapy. In other words, the events are unambiguously treated as not normal, a disturbance of the regular and healthy state of affairs, beyond what can be morally tolerated by society. In short, such events have been treated as pathological Sociologists since Durkheim have been aware of the social significance of the punishment of transgression as a symbolic way of representing the boundaries of what society will accept as morally normal’. In this way the army of experts and professional practitioners are unleashed at the site of these ‘transgressions’ to do the necessary repair work for the maintenance of ‘the normal’.

The central idea of this book is that the family has been a difficult institution for sociologists to study precisely because these regulating ideas about ‘the family’ have been so poorly understood. We will seek to introduce the idea of the double life of the family—normative and actual. We argue that family organisation occurs on, at least, two levels—a behavioural level and normative level. Through tracing the circumstances in which the normative family becomes visible—its forms of appearance—we will try to demonstrate that the normative family exists as a social fact. In so doing we hope to elucidate something of the character of these beliefs and the features of an individual’s attachment to them. It is more than possible that the normative and behavioural can diverge, for if there was no divergence, societies would not need any police or criminal courts. Indeed, one could say, along with Durkheim, that historical and cross-national variation in Western societies is simply a product of the degree of divergence between the normative and the behavioural (Durkheim 1933; 1938).

In subsequent chapters we will explore the dynamics of tension between people’s actual family relations and the normative family, tensions that hold implications for policy-makers and those with an interest in social change. This book is in large measure dedicated to the idea that the normative family—a set of historically and socially produced expectations, values, desires and yearnings—cannot be ignored. The normative family has played a central part in our culture and society, and may even have considerable influence on the electoral appeal of political parties.

Opposition between myth and reality

Sociologists have approached the normative family chiefly as a popular misconception to be dispelled by confrontation with the facts. It has been commonplace, for the last couple of decades, for sociologists to debunk the ‘myth of the nuclear family’. Unfortunately, most of their energy has been expended on trying to prove that not all family households are nuclear family households. Little effort has been put into treating the myth of the nuclear family seriously as myth.

There is a characteristic response to this: the broadsheet press and sociologists combine to give the kind of lecture on the family that any undergraduate in the last twenty years is likely to have encountered. This takes the form of debunking the myth of the universal nuclear family. It starts by making some rather imprecise reference to the nuclear family, which is (implicitly) variously defined as anything from a husband and wife with dependent children to the somewhat narrower category of units composed of breadwinning father, non-employed housewife/mother and the standard two children. The lecture then goes on to describe how only a minority of households conform to this definition of the nuclear family, and the newspapers sermonise about being misled by nostalgia for times past.

The main point to be made here is not simply that this unmasking is careless with facts but that it also fails as sociology. If the idea of the ‘myth of the nuclear family’ were anything more than a convenient peg on which to hang a variety of otherwise disparate ‘demographic facts’—if in other words it was taken seriously as myth—this would represent a substantial advance. In our view, what requires explanation is why politicians and their pollsters in the back room should imagine they can attract loyalty on the basis of an appeal to an allegedly obsolete social form. How, a sociologist might ask, is it possible to promulgate this ‘myth of the nuclear family’ when so few have any practical attachment to a nuclear family? Further, sociologists might inquire what the consequences of an attachment to this myth might be.

We will look first, then, at the main demographic patterns in the Australian population, before exploring the numerous forms of appearance of the normative family.

The spurious ‘myth’ of the disappearing nuclear family—statistics misrepresented

In the great exertion to prove the uncharacteristic nature of the nuclear family today, the standard approach fails to ask if this narrowly defined ‘nuclear family’ ever comprised a majority of households. It misses the important demographic changes it was devised to organise. The June 1994 Labour Force Survey² (ABS 1994a) estimated that there were approximately 4.7 million families in Australia, of which 85 per cent were ‘couple families’³ and 49 per cent couple families with dependants present. While there is some formal truth to the proposition that in the survey ‘nuclear families’—consisting of Mum, Dad and the kids—were a minority of households (49 per cent), this does not mean that institutions of marriage and family are necessarily in decline. The statistical illusion of decline is in large part created by examining only cross-sectional data, that is, data collected at one point in time.

It can be very misleading to examine household types at one point in time because family households change. They pass through a series of transitions as children leave home, start new households, have children, divorce, age and ultimately die. This means that households which are not currently nuclear family households’, may have been nuclear family households in the past or, in other cases, may be about to become nuclear family households in the near future. While slightly less than half the ‘couple families’ have officially at least one dependent child, the remaining 51 per cent of ‘couple families’ fall into two broad groups: (1) a larger group—those who no longer have dependent children; and (2) a smaller group of those who have never had children. Among this second ‘childless’ group, it is estimated, approximately 20 per cent will remain childless and the remainder are transitional families on their way to becoming nuclear families (McDonald 1995, p. 44).

Why the numerical decline of the nuclear family

In the following few pages we shall argue that the apparent decline in the proportion of ‘nuclear family’ households in Australia is the result of increasing longevity and changes in fertility, not because the nuclear family form has become unpopular. The demographer Peter McDonald has pointed out that between the 1981 census and 1991 (the most recent census at the time of writing), the proportion of ‘households consisting of one or two persons increased from 47.2 per cent to 52.9 per cent’. This movement towards smaller households has been going on for ‘over a century’ and ‘will continue into the future’ (McDonald 1995, p. 23). There are three reasons for this. The first is to do with the historical pattern of fertility in Australia. The second and most important reason is the ageing of the population and the third is a combination of rising divorce rates and an increased proportion of people who will never marry.

Historical patterns of fertility: the baby boom

In the years following World War II, Australia experienced an unusual episode in its demographic history, commonly known as the ‘baby boom’. The baby boom interrupted a long-term trend of fertility decline. Demographers use the measure ‘total fertility rate’ to estimate the number of children women will have borne by the time they complete their child-bearing. Between 1861 and 1865, each woman in Australia was, on average, likely to give birth to six children over the course of her reproductive life. By 1935 total fertility rate had fallen to a fraction over two children for each Australian woman. However, between 1945 and the early 1970s, the baby boom temporarily reversed this trend in Australia, and the total fertility rate hovered around three children for each woman, peaking in 1961 when the rate was 3*55.

The baby boom was associated with a unique combination of (1) an increasing rate of marriage, (2) a pattern of earlier marriage, and (3) low rates of childlessness. The baby boom, it has been widely argued, was accompanied by an extraordinary ‘marriage boom’ (National Population Inquiry 1975). A good indication of the universality of marriage is given by the proportion of women who never marry. The pattern prevailing for women born in the last half of the nineteenth century was that 14 to 17 per cent would never marry. The proportion of women born after 1950 who never marry is returning to these high levels characteristic of last century and is predicted to exceed them. Among women who were the mothers of the baby boomers (women born between 1920 and 1950) it is estimated that only 4 to 6 per cent never married (McDonald 1995, p. 33). While during most other periods of Australian history less than seventeen women out of every twenty would marry, in the period that gave rise to the baby boom, nineteen out of every twenty women married.

Not only was the rate of marriage exceptionally high during the baby boom but the age at marriage was extraordinarily low. In the years leading up to the baby boom about 30 per cent of women aged 20–24 years were married. Towards the end of the baby boom era (1971) this had risen to 64 per cent, while currently less than 20 per cent of women aged 20–24 are married.⁴ A similar trend is evident among men (McDonald 1995, pp. 33–4).

The third characteristic associated with the baby boom was low rates of childlessness. During the baby boom the rate of childlessness was less than half that of earlier generations and this rate was ‘only marginally above the expected rate of childlessness due to physiological reasons alone’ (McDonald 1995, p. 43).

From the mid-1970s Australia has experienced an equally spectacular but far less publicised ‘baby bust’ (Hugo 1992, p. 15). By 1976 the total fertility rate had fallen below the replacement level.⁵ The estimated number of births has remained below two per woman through the 1980s and early 1990s (Hugo 1992, pp. 8–9). Since 1971 a pattern of postponed birth has become evident, and ‘the percentage of first births occurring to married women aged 30 and over rose from 7.6 per cent to 31.1 per cent’ (McDonald 1995, p. 46). In 1971 one in four Australian women became a mother before her twentieth birthday, whereas the current figure is closer to one in ten (McDonald 1995, p. 47).

Longevity and the effects of an ageing population

A baby boom followed by a baby bust has produced a bulge in the age pyramid. The grey shaded area between the age of 34 and 49 years in Figure 1.1 shows how this ‘middle-aged’ bulge has appeared over the last two decades. In 1911 the age pyramid of the Australian population was very broad in the base and low in height, reflecting a high birthrate and much shorter life expectancy. Since that time the base of the pyramid has narrowed, so that at some ages the total population has actually shrunk in the last twenty years, while life expectancy has risen markedly. Since the fertility among those born in the baby boom is lower than that of their parents, and is expected to be lower still among their offspring, this bulge will become more pronounced. At the other end of the life course there have been remarkable increases in life expectancies in Australia. Male children born in the 1990s can expect to live for an average of 74 years and females can reasonably expect to live to 80 years of age. This is eight to ten years longer than their counterparts born in 1947, and a staggering nineteen to twenty years longer than those born at the beginning of the twentieth century (Hugo 1992, pp. 75, 86).⁶ This historical trend towards greater life expectancy is elongating the age pyramid. It is expected that between 1991 and 2011 the population over 65 years of age will grow at twice the rate of the population overall (McDonald 1995, p. 59). The age ‘pyramid’ has begun to resemble a pear or molten Coca-Cola bottle. And this baby boomer bulge can be expected to move up the pyramid in the coming decades.

Figure 1.1 Estimated resident population of Australia, 30 June 1975 and 1995 (preliminary)

Source: ABS, 1996a.

The oldest of the baby boomers are now at the age when their children are leaving home. A large number are without official dependants because their children are over fifteen and not at high school or in tertiary educational institutions. These changes are producing a disproportionate increase in the number of two-person, ‘empty nest’ households. The post-war baby boom has led to an end-of-the-millennium ‘empty nest’ boom. The overwhelming number of these households were once ‘nuclear family’ households and cannot reasonably be produced as evidence that the nuclear family has been rejected by Australians.

Rising divorce rates and increased proportion of people who will ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of tables and figures
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Is the myth of the nuclear family dead?
• 2 The other life of the family
• 3 The rise of intimacy
• 4 Working for nothing
• 5 At home: the more things change, the more they stay the same
• 6 Pseudomutuality: the disjunction between domestic inequality and the ideal of equality
• 7 Economics, breadwinning and family relations
• 8 How the family is a problem for the state
• 9 The greatest welfare system ever devised?
• Notes
• References
• Index