Families in Troubled Times

Adapting to Change in Rural America

Rand Conger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000159813
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Social Science

This book documents the experiences of rural Iowa families, who lived through the "farm crisis" years of the 1980s, in a fashion that might help families of the future cope more successfully with economic reversals. The documentation could be used to fashion more effective social policies.

PART I
Families and Hardship

Chapter 1
Families in Troubles Times: The Iowa Youth and Families Project

Rand D. Conger and Glen H. Elder, Jr.

It is possible that farm families were pioneers in learning to face, with lowered expectations, a future of declining living standards and limited business growth. More and more Americans may have to learn the same hard lesson in the next decade.

—M. Friedberger, Farm Families and Change in 20th Century America

Economic cycles of boom and bust have left their indelible mark on American families, altering the lifeways of successive generations. Most notably, the Great Depression brought unparalleled hardship to all regions of the country, placing whole communities at risk. Half a century later, hard times returned once again with a severity resembling the 1930s, taking the form of an agricultural crisis, particularly in the midwestern states (Murdock & Leistritz, 1988). In the premier farm state of Iowa, dreams of prosperity were suddenly crushed and replaced by economic nightmares as plummeting land values generated economic decline and dislocation in communities and individual lives. This book examines the experience of over 400 Iowa families, parents and children who lived through the Great Farm Crisis of the 1980s and now face an uncertain future.

These families are members of the Iowa Youth and Families Project (IYFP), which was launched in 1989 at Iowa State University. They live on farms or in small rural communities that are financially dependent on what has recently been a highly volatile agricultural economy (Friedberger, 1989). The rural character of these families may have a significant influence on their interpretation of and response to socioeconomic change, but the Iowa study contains a more general message regarding the role of economic hardship in family life, that of a generality beyond our time and place.

Indeed, as subsequent chapters demonstrate, the experiences of these families substantially replicate and extend results from studies of urban families and children conducted both during the Great Depression (Elder, 1974; Liker & Elder, 1983) and during the past decade (McLoyd, 1989, 1990; Voydanoff, 1990). In addition, the data presented here may well anticipate the fate of many American families, rural and urban, minority and majority, who are entering the economically troubled times of the 1990s.

At the beginning of this chapter, Friedberger's (1989) reference to farm families as pioneers in a new world of scarcity expresses our view, as well as the view of many other investigators (e.g., McLoyd, 1989; Voydanoff, 1990), that the American economy will continue to undergo dramatic structural changes over the foreseeable future and will not soon return to the relatively unbridled prosperity of previous decades. The globalization of world markets has contributed to a decrease in the material well-being of the average American family. The impact of such change has tended to affect specific segments of the economy at different times. During the 1980s, for instance, agriculture and related manufacturing were especially hard hit, and more recently we see major recessions in the high-technology industry of the Northeast and in California's military-driven economy.

The message seems clear. As a citizenry, we will need to become more capable of adapting successfully to economic uncertainty and change. In some cases, negative economic events may reflect rapid decline followed by a fairly immediate recovery. This scenario reflects the experience of many urban centers in rural states during the 1980s (Davidson, 1990). Even more destructive of personal well-being, however, are circumstances in which economic decline produces chronic poverty or disadvantage, social conditions increasingly characteristic of both inner-city urban (Wilson, 1987) and rural areas (Davidson, 1990). For many of the families in this study, the 1980s set in motion a trend toward increasing and continuing economic disadvantage. The information they provide can assist us in the future in helping those families that are likely to experience similar difficulties as a result of economic fluctuations and misfortune.

RURAL IOWA FAMILIES AND ECONOMIC DECLINE

In April of 1992, an editorial in the Times Citizen, a local newspaper in Iowa Falls, noted that "rural Iowa has been damaged the most by the changing economic winds. While not broken, the rural fiber has been stretched until vacant store fronts, lost jobs, dwindling population, and decaying small towns dot the rural scene." This quote helps to illustrate the changing world experienced by the Iowa families in this study who witnessed a dramatic reversal from the prosperous times of the 1970s to economic disadvantage and uncertainty by the 1990s.

A few simple statistics starkly illustrate the economic crisis in Iowa, a state with a population about the size of Chicago's, approximately 2.78 million people each in 1990 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1991). During the decade of the 1980s, the state saw approximately 20% of Iowa farmers lose their operations, 75 banks and savings and loans close their doors, 41% of rural gas stations go out of business, the loss of 260 automobile dealerships and almost 500 grocery stores, and a staggering 46% increase in bankruptcies in 1985 alone (Des Moines Register, November, 1989; Davidson, 1990). Construction sales declined by more than 40% during the decade, and in 1989 economic activity in the state had still not returned to the levels achieved during the 1970s (Friedberger, 1989). Many families in this study felt the pain of these events directly through the loss of a farm, a job, or decreased wages. Others maintained their level of living, but saw friends and family financially decimated by the economic depression.

As one middle-aged farmer told us during an interview, his best mend since childhood, who lived on a nearby farm, had recently committed suicide when it became clear that he would lose his operation, his way of life, and had no viable economic options for the future. This experience not only caused him great sadness and sense of personal loss, but also permanently alienated him from an economic and political system that seemed to have so little regard for rural people. Thus, even for those in our study who maintained their financial well-being, the economic crisis of the 1980s brought much distress through the difficulties of those around them.

When we first interviewed these rural families during the winter of 1989, their experiences during the past several years created at least four different economic scenarios: (1) those who had experienced financial difficulties during the early and mid-1980s and had not yet recovered, (2) families that had largely rebounded economically after a period of decline, (3) those who had not suffered financial losses and had maintained a satisfactory level of living throughout the 1980s, and (4) families that entered the decade with low incomes and either maintained or improved that status. The important point here is that, for these families, current economic circumstances may reflect several different, earlier financial trajectories. In the following analyses, we examine the consequences of these different trajectories by investigating financial circumstances at a single point in time, 1989. This research strategy provides an assessment of economic status and its consequences after a lengthy period of economic crisis in the rural heartland.

The chapters that follow provide more detail regarding the recruitment and characteristics of these Iowa families. Briefly, we interviewed four members in each of 451 rural families. The families lived on farms or in small towns in eight counties in north-central Iowa that were hard hit by the 1980s financial crisis. The families shared a North European ethnic heritage; almost 80% had a German ancestral history.

All of the families in the study included a seventh-grade adolescent when they were interviewed in 1989. In addition to this target adolescent, both parents of the seventh-grader and a sibling within four years of age participated in the study. This family configuration allowed us to study the influence of economic hardship on the behaviors, emotions, and sense-of-self of adults, children, and adolescents. It also provided the information needed to assess the impact of disadvantage on the several dimensions of nuclear family relationships: marital, parent-child, and sibling. The following review of our theoretical perspective indicates the importance of investigating all of these variations in family process and individual development.

A THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVE ON FAMILY STRESS

This research draws upon an evolving Family Stress Model that we have developed to guide our analyses of family stress processes in general and family economic hardship in particular (Conger, Burgess, & Barrett, 1979; Conger, McCarthy, Yang, Lahey, & Kropp, 1984; Conger et al., 1990, 1992; Conger, Conger, et al., 1993; Conger, Lorenz, Elder, Simons, & Ge, 1993). This theoretical perspective draws from several sources including (1) early research on families during the depression years of the 1930s, (2) contemporary studies of economic stress, including the integration of life course distinctions with more traditional stress research (Elder, 1985; George, 1993), and (3) current conceptualizations of the social epidemiology of emotional distress (Mirowsky & Ross, 1989).

Gore and Colten (1991) suggest that research within the life course or developmental tradition too often assumes a benign social environment, which equally affects adaptation by most individuals. Life stress research, on the other hand, typically does not consider the timing of stressful events in individual lives nor the contribution of earlier life experiences to the generation of later stresses, strains, or coping resources. In the present study we combine the stress and life course perspectives by evaluating the impact of economic difficulties on individuals at varying life stages (parents and adolescents) and by considering stress-mediating factors appropriate to the different developmental levels of adults and youth.

By joining life course and social stress insights, our Family Stress Model illuminates the socially interdependent nature of stressful life experiences, consistent with a life course paradigm (Elder, 1994). In their important review of theory and research on stress processes, Coyne and Downey (1991) note that chronic and acute stresses or strains, including financial difficulties, often have their greatest impact on individual wellbeing through the troubles they create in one's closest social ties, such as those found in the family. Indeed, the conflict and withdrawal in family relations that sometimes result from economic problems may become the most significant stressors in family life, continuing in time even when the original external precipitant, e.g., unemployment for the family breadwinner, no longer exists (Conger et al., 1984; Liker & Elder, 1983).

Our conceptual framework rests on this central idea: For parents and children living together, both the long- and short-term effects of economic hardship, as well as other family stresses and strains, are strongly influenced by the interdependent emotions and behaviors of family members. Within the family, the dynamic of interdependent lives connects broad socioeconomic changes to the experiences and well-being of individual family members (Elder, 1992).

Families of the Great Depression

Studies of families in the Great Depression of the 1930s frequently reported that the way in which family members responded to one another was a major determinant of their eventual adaptation to severe hardship. Angell (1965), Cavan and Ranck (1938), Komarovsky (1940), and others provide rich descriptions of adaptive, mutually supportive families coming together in the face of adversity while less cohesive families became mired in conflict, tensions, and mutual avoidance. These processes have been most systematically documented by Elder and his colleagues, who have studied the records of families living in Oakland and Berkeley, California, prior to, during, and following the decade of the 1930s.

According to project reports (e.g., Elder, 1974; Elder & Caspi, 1988; Elder, Caspi, & Downey, 1986; Elder, Liker, & Cross, 1984; Elder, Nguyen, & Caspi, 1985; Liker & Elder, 1983), income loss in families accentuated the explosiveness and irritability of fathers, particularly those who tended to be more emotionally unstable prior to the onset of financial crises. In these analyses, the father's behavior appeared to set the stage for the family's adaptive trajectory in response to economic stress. When fathers reacted to economic crises by becoming more hostile and irritable, they oftentimes set in motion a sequence of events that led to increased risk for conflicts in the marriage, disruptions in effective parenting, and—through these mediating processes—developmental difficulties for children and adolescents.

An especially important dimension of this research is the finding that the emotions and behaviors of parents largely determined how their children were affected by financial difficulties. When parents, and especially fathers, maintained their emotional equilibrium in the face of hardship, the destructive chain of events just described was much less likely to occur.

Taken together, the cumulative findings from this program of work suggest that mounting economic pressures alter relationships by changing individual behavior, and they also change individual behavior by changing family relationships. These pressures modify and accentuate the dynamics and substantive content of these interdependencies. In Children of the Great Depression (Elder, 1974), for example, the analysis traces the effect of drastic income loss on children through three types of microprocesses: (1) the family economy, which became more labor intensive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• PART I. FAMILIES AND HARDSHIP
• PART II. RURAL FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES
• PART III. HUSBANDS AND WIVES
• PART IV. ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT
• PART V. REVIEWING THE EVIDENCE
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index