Family Trouble

Ara Francis

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780813570525
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813573618
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'infanzia in sociologia

Our children mean the world to us. They are so central to our hopes and dreams that we will do almost anything to keep them healthy, happy, and safe. What happens, then, when a child has serious problems? In Family Trouble, a compelling portrait of upheaval in family life, sociologist Ara Francis tells the stories of middle-class men and women whose children face significant medical, psychological, and social challenges. 
 
Francis interviewed the mothers and fathers of children with such problems as depression, bi-polar disorder, autism, learning disabilities, drug addiction, alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and cerebral palsy. Children’s problems, she finds, profoundly upset the foundations of parents’ everyday lives, overturning taken-for-granted expectations, daily routines, and personal relationships. Indeed, these problems initiated a chain of disruption that moved through parents’ lives in domino-like fashion, culminating in a crisis characterized by uncertainty, loneliness, guilt, grief, and anxiety. Francis looks at how mothers and fathers often differ in their interpretation of a child’s condition, discusses the gendered nature of child rearing, and describes how parents struggle to find effective treatments and to successfully navigate medical and educational bureaucracies. But above all, Family Trouble examines how children’s problems disrupt middle-class dreams of the “normal” family. It captures how children’s problems “radiate” and spill over into other areas of parents’ lives, wreaking havoc even on their identities, leading them to reevaluate deeply held assumptions about their own sense of self and what it means to achieve the good life.   Engagingly written, Family Trouble offers insight to professionals and solace to parents. The book offers a clear message to anyone in the throes of family trouble: you are in good company, and you are not as different as you might feel...

1

Parents in Trouble

Nathan1 was eleven years old when his parents noticed that something was wrong. He had spent the week at a science camp—it was his first time away from home—and when he came back, he was not himself. His mother, a soft-spoken woman in her early forties, recalled, “Something was off. Something was different . . . [he had] insomnia . . . dark circles under his eyes . . . stomach aches. [He kept] crying in the morning, begging not to go to school. [He was] very panicky.” Joan took her son to their pediatrician. Then, when test results indicated that everything was normal, she sought the help of a child psychologist. It took her a while to find a practitioner she trusted, and when she did, the news was not good. “[My son was] having difficulty with cognition and organization of thought. The Rorschach test showed a lot of depression, anxiety, a sense of helplessness . . . he was at risk for suicide.” The worst-case scenario, the doctor said, was that Nathan’s condition was psychologically degenerative. When Joan asked what that meant, the doctor replied, “Schizophrenia.”

Sergio, who is Joan’s husband and Nathan’s father, remembers how difficult it had been to find a good psychologist in the first place. They had been in and out of so many doctors’ offices and received conflicting diagnoses. “We were going to doctors on a weekly basis . . . [one of them] kept going back to attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and we knew it wasn’t that . . . [then] we had one doctor say he might have a type of cancer in his brain.” The thing was, Sergio was not convinced that his son needed a doctor. “He’ll grow out of it,” he thought. So, even though he dutifully accompanied Joan and Nathan to every appointment, Sergio did not help Joan search for psychologists, and he was not interested in researching his son’s symptoms.

Upon hearing the word “schizophrenia,” Joan worked around the clock to find a well-respected psychiatrist and effective pharmaceuticals. “Early intervention was key,” she said. “I had to keep going until I fixed him.” Joan is a mortgage broker, and she was working more than forty hours per week during this period. It was not long before the stress overwhelmed her. “I was physically and emotionally wiped out and drained and fearful of the future. And I couldn’t fix my son. . . . [I felt like] it was my job to do that and that I would be failing him if I didn’t.” Eventually, she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a condition she attributes to the stress associated with Nathan’s problems.

Meanwhile, Joan and Sergio were growing apart. Sergio was worried about his son, to be sure. “When the doctor said that the worse case scenario [was] schizophrenia and possible suicide, that really freaked me out,” he said. “I could just hear my son in his room, talking to the wall or trying to hang himself. [I could imagine myself] waking up in the morning to see him hanging from his ceiling fan.” But he rarely expressed these fears to Joan, who became increasingly angry and resentful. “My husband initially would downplay everything. ‘Oh, Nathan is doing fine.’ When I would express concern . . . I was quickly shut down. Sergio just didn’t want to talk about it . . . [he] thought that I was overreacting.”

I talked with Joan and Sergio five years after Nathan first developed symptoms. At that time they still had not received a satisfactory diagnosis, but Nathan’s condition was stable, and he was taking medication to prevent a psychotic break. Things had gotten better for the three of them, but they were by no means “back to normal.” Joan continued to suffer from migraine headaches, neck pain, and fatigue. Sergio was seeing a psychotherapist and, in retrospect, felt awful about having been “in denial” about his son’s problems. Joan and Sergio had considered separation but were desperately trying to make their marriage work. When trying to summarize everything that had happened to them, Joan put it this way: “Pain radiates in the family . . . [when] somebody is ill, to the extent that they can’t be the way they were, it just upsets the whole dynamic.”

Her comments cut to the heart of the matter. Nathan was no longer himself, no longer the child that she and Sergio had known or imagined him to be. Perceiving a change in her son—once a “healthy child,” now a “child at risk”—Joan changed too, immersing herself in the research and work related to Nathan’s problems. This shift had a profound impact on her physical and psychological health; she, too, was no longer who she used to be. Even Sergio, determined though he was to view his son’s condition as a phase, could not avoid the repercussions of these changes. Visions of his son’s suicide haunted his imagination, and his marital problems led him to a therapist’s office where he tried to experience and express emotion in ways that would reconnect him to his family.

This book is about people like Joan and Sergio, middle-class parents whose children have problems. The conditions themselves are quite variable; I interviewed the mothers and fathers of children with depression, trichotillomania, attachment disorder, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, developmental delays, learning disabilities, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, drug addiction, alcoholism, truancy, aggression, brain injury, Fragile X syndrome, hyperinsulinism, fetal alcohol syndrome, and cerebral palsy. What ties these parents together is that all identified their children as having “significant problems” and, at one time or another, all had sought the help of experts when trying to remedy those problems. Parts of this book are concerned with mothers’ and fathers’ varying interpretations of children’s conditions and behaviors and the gendered nature of child rearing. Other parts focus on parents’ efforts to find effective treatments and to successfully navigate medical and educational bureaucracies. But above all, this book examines how children’s problems disrupt middle-class parents’ taken-for-granted realities. It captures how, in Joan’s words, children’s problems “radiate” and spill over into other areas of parents’ lives.

Throughout the book, I argue that middle-class parents who identify their children as having significant “problems” experience what I call “family trouble.” For Joan and Sergio, “normal” children are a central feature of personal life, and parenthood is a foundation upon which much else depends. Children’s problems—or, as I will explain, the collective interpretation of children’s conditions and behaviors as problematic—disrupted this foundation, and trouble was the result. My conceptualization of “family trouble” takes up the time-honored sociological tradition of examining how personal troubles are social in nature. I focus primarily on how children’s problems resulted in the disruption of micro-social order and the patterns of action and interaction that made up parents’ daily lives, but I also situate those patterns in the broad cultural and historical contexts of childrearing and families in the late-Modern West.

This book is not merely about disruption, however. Parents’ troubles also reveal the illusory yet powerful nature of “ordinary” children, families, and life trajectories in the late-modern United States. Thus, by focusing on what happens when, from parents’ perspectives, “thing go wrong,” this book challenges culturally dominant ideas about “normalcy.” Privilege, and its role in shaping parents’ expectations, is an integral part of that story. Although conditions like Nathan’s are not class-specific, their ramifications for parents are. With this book, then, I set out to understand how a relatively affluent group of parents—most of whom are white, heterosexual, college educated, and have steady incomes and homes of their own—made sense of problems that compromised their attainment of what they had imagined to be “the good life.”

Trouble

Understanding the general concept of “trouble” begins with the premise that life has no inherent meaning. Most of us prefer not to linger over this idea, it seems too serious or too dark, but the notion that human life has no given purpose is an underlying assumption of most, if not all, of the sociological research conducted today. This is because the sociological perspective rests on the notion that reality is socially constructed, and this implies that life’s meanings are not inherent but are, instead, generated by human beings. People tend to associate social constructionism with particular schools of thought—ethnomethodology or symbolic interactionism, for example—but in reality, the discipline of sociology has operated under constructionist assumptions since at least the 1930s.2

If reality is born of social processes, then it follows that human life has no inherent meaning. That is not to say that life is meaningless. The need to create meaning, to make sense of life, is just as central to the human condition as the need for food and shelter. This is another foundation of sociological thought. In their study of how the homeless eke out a meaningful existence in the face of dehumanizing conditions, for example, David Snow and Leon Anderson challenged the conventional wisdom that self-worth is a higher-order need than physical comfort.

All animals are confronted with the challenge of material subsistence, but only humans are saddled with the vexing question of its meaning. We must not only sustain ourselves physically to survive, but we are also impelled to make sense of our mode of subsistence, to place it in some meaningful context, to develop an account of our situation that does not destroy our sense of self-worth. Otherwise, the will to persist falters and interest in tomorrow wanes.3

This understanding of the human condition—the notion that meaning resides at the core of human experience and that all meanings are socially constructed—highlights the central importance of society for the individual. It also underscores the fragility of human realities. Society is what shields us from “nothingness.”4 In Peter Berger’s words, it “builds a world for us to live in and thus protects us from the chaos that surrounds us on all sides. It provides us with a language and with meanings that make this world believable. And it supplies a steady chorus of voices that confirm our beliefs and still our dormant doubts.”5 At the same time, society emerges from the complex coordination of human conduct and is vulnerable to unexpected events, unanticipated consequences, human error, and willful deviance. From a dramaturgical perspective, people are like “acrobats engaged in perilous balancing acts, holding up between them the swaying structure of the social world.”6 Society, then, is a precarious enterprise. Though it brings meaningful order to human life, it does not once and for all solve the problem of meaning.

The day-to-day work of meaning-making and meaning-maintenance occurs in social interaction. Fundamental assumptions about who we are and how the world operates grow out of, and are continually reinforced, in mundane contexts like homes, workplaces, supermarkets, and sidewalks. The degree to which ontological security, or a person’s basic sense of “okay-ness,” relies on the smooth operation of everyday interaction is revealed by what happens when routine encounters break down. Nowhere is this demonstrated more clearly than in Harold Garfinkel’s classic breaching demonstrations.7 In one case, Garfinkel asked his students to behave as guests in their own homes. They were polite and impersonal with their family members, using “Mr.” and “Mrs.” to address their parents, for example, and asking for permission before eating something from the refrigerator. In another case, Garfinkel encouraged students to engage someone in conversation and behave under the assumption that the person had hidden motives and was trying to trick or deceive them. By violating unacknowledged premises of social interaction (relational history in the first case, trust in the second), these demonstrations resulted in bewilderment, anxiety, and anger. The students themselves were deeply uncomfortable, so much so that they found the interactions difficult to sustain and, in some cases, were unable to complete the assignment.

Garfinkel’s work illustrates how even small fractures in the structure of micro-social life can threaten an individual’s sense of well-being. Even minor interactional failures can lead to anxiety or embarrassment because social order is premised on people adhering to the basic rules of sociability.8 As human beings, our actions are governed largely by culture, rather than instinct; our knowledge of what to do, and how or when to do it, depends on shared definitions of the situation embedded in larger institutional contexts. When something disrupts the routine flow of interaction and the “rules” no longer seem to apply, we easily lose our bearings.

Given its history in sociology, “trouble” is an appropriate term for the disruption of social order and the subsequent disruption of selves. The classic distinction between “personal troubles” and “public issues” conveys how ostensibly personal problems are linked to larger social and historical circumstances.9 Research in the “micro-politics of trouble” explores the interpersonal processes by which people recognize, respond to, contest, and construct “problems” in everyday life.10 Among scholars who conduct conversation analysis, there is a tradition of studying “troubles-talk,” or conversations that touch upon problematic events or situations.11 Finally, gender scholars write about “troubling” gender when a person subverts or confounds the gender binary.12 Sociologists use the word “trouble” informally, in a way that is consistent with its conventional meaning. “Trouble” is “a problematic departure from the course of ordinary events that warrants special treatment.”13 It begins “when someone experiences dissatisfaction, irritation, upset or discontent with some act or attitude on the part of another.”14 To make trouble is to actively disrupt or destabilize.15 However, these uses of “trouble” also convey something beyond that which is usually implied in casual speech. Sociologists conceive of trouble as a collective phenomenon, a property of interactions, relationships, groups, and institutions. From a sociological perspective, trouble manifests between people, not just within them. Also, a sociological orientation to trouble is concerned, fundamentally, with the disruption of social order. Trouble is what occurs when the patterns of social life do not unfold as people believe they ought to. In this way, “trouble” is a distinctly sociological concept. In this book, I refine these ideas and deploy the concept of “family trouble” to illuminate parents’ experiences of distress.

Family Trouble

All interactions are venues for reality maintenance, but not all are of equal importance to the self. Ideologically premised on voluntary commitment, mutual affection, and self-fulfillment, late-modern families are important locales where people form and sustain personal identities.16 For some people, though certainly not all, family relationships are cherished social spaces where they can be “themselves.” Partnership and parenthood also conscript people into roles that organize interaction...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Epigraph
• Chapter 1. Parents in Trouble
• Chapter 2. Constructing Trouble, Losing Certainty
• Chapter 3. Elusive Remedies and Disrupted Routines
• Chapter 4. Stigma and Disrupted Relationships
• Chapter 5. Unmet Expectations and Emotional Turmoil
• Chapter 6. Disrupted Selves, Making Sense, and Making Do
• Chapter 7. Family Trouble
• Appendix A: Methods
• Appendix B: List of Participants
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author