Family not Business

Republicans and conservatives are always talking about how we need to run our country like a business; they also talk a lot about family values but never link the two together.

We would be far better served if we decided to run our country like a family - a good family not a dysfunctional one. Good families put their frailest and most vulnerable members first, making them a priority. Families sacrifice for their children and their elderly, giving their time, energy and resources to those who can least go out into the economy and world and fend for themselves. The adults in good families know they are protecting the future -- of themselves, their families, and society -- when they put their children first, and that they are acknowledging the sacrifices of their parents when they put their elderly first.  Good families do not abandon or kill their children and elderly when money gets tight, they look for new resources, a second job, government assistance, even illegal sources of income (not condoning the latter, just observing).

Businesses on the other hand, when money gets tight, put stockholders and top executives first and throw away the most vulnerable of their workers, forcing retirement on older workers, laying off workers, abandoning the very people who make the business work.

Our present government leadership (both Houses of Congress and the Presidency) are taking a business rather than a family approach to running the country, cutting off the vulnerable (cutting programs), rather than expanding resources (returning taxes to previous levels before the huge tax cut giveaway of 2018):

House GOP plan would cut Medicare, Medicaid to balance budget https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/house-gop-plan-would-cut-medicare-medicaid-to-balance-budget/ar-AAySglD?li=BBnb7Kz

This Congress has already cut the programs that care for children (food stamps, welfare, education, and many others), and now it's taking aim at our elderly. All to give those who already have enormous resources, more than they could possibly spend in their lifetime, even more. Let's start thinking of our society as a family and not a business.

The Revolutionary Nature of Same-Sex Marriage

Same-sex marriage has become legal everywhere in the United States. I have actively supported the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples for over two decades, and supported LGBT rights in general for forty-five years. One of the reasons that I support marriage rights for same-sex couples is because as a sociologist I know that same-sex marriage has the potential to radically change the nature of marriage and families. 

I was recently reviewing the original lectures that I wrote fifteen years ago for Kentucky's first fully on-line introductory sociology course.  This was at least four years prior to the first state (Massachusetts) legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States. In that 15 year old lecture I stated the following: 

"Family is the most important agent of socialization in our childhood, and it is the place where we first learn gender. It is also the one social group in our lives in which all the roles held by individuals are "gendered." One is a husband or a wife (not a generic marital partner), a mother or a father (not a generic parent), a son or a daughter (not a generic child). "  [emphasis added]

Same sex-marriage has the potential to create generic marital partners and generic parents, and thus potentially substantially diminish stereotypic gender role socialization in children. This transformation is not automatic, nor will it happen quickly.   Some same sex couples, especially those involving transsexual individuals, often incorporate rigid gender-role stereotypes into their relationship with one person playing a stereotypical husband and another a stereotypical wife role. Moreover, research continues to demonstrate that parents still unconsciously treat male and female infants and small children substantially differently. These unconscious behaviors convey gender stereotypes to the next generation in ways that  highly resistant to change because they are unrecognized by those who engage in them.

How much control do parents have?

I read a Facebook post this morning by a young woman I know - mother of two daughters - and found myself utterly surprised to find that I no longer agree with her position. She said:

"With few exceptions, kids are the way they are because that's how they're being TRAINED. If we don't like the current situation, we must do something differently."

I might have said that myself forty years ago as a young sociologist. We sociologists were trained to think primarily in terms of nurture, and to lay everything at the foot of the "socialization" process. But I've seen a lot in the past 40 years and what I've seen tells me that while  socialization is the primary contribution to  our development, parents and primary caregivers have far less control over the process than most people imagine. Parents really are not "trainers" of children. 

First, parents exercise very little control over the world in which they and their children live. Things happen that have deep and sometimes traumatic effect on children that are beyond the control of parents. Examples can include illness, death, accident, job loss, financial reverses, war, earthquake, flood, tornado, home loss, and many, many other things that may be completely beyond the capacity of a child to understand. Parents often make vital decisions, decisions necessary to survival and well-being of themselves, their children or their whole family, but a child understands nothing of those decisions and the reasons behind them. The child only knows how he or she is affected, they only know the fear, uncertainty, loss, anxiety, and other emotions that circumstances can create.  

When my brother was 2 he got pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. Back in the 1950's parents were not allowed to stay in children's hospital rooms, parents like any other visitors were limited to official visiting ours. The practice common today of parents sleeping in the hospital ward room was unheard of 60 years ago. It would not occur to the parents and even if it did it would most likely have been met by strong resistance by the hospital, even forcible removal. So a two year old little boy experienced severe trauma and great separation anxiety that translated into many "difficult" behaviors because his parents left him to health care professionals to prevent him from dying from pneumonia. 

Forty years ago a young woman I knew married her high school sweetheart and had two children with him, recognized the necessity of removing herself and her children from his increasingly violent and unpredictable behavior (including substance abuse and criminal activities).  But her small daughter only knew that her mother took her away from the father she loved with all her heart. The daughter acted out, became delinquent, used drugs, ran away, and got pregnant as a teenager, because she could only see her loss and hated her mother for it. 

It is not just the big events that make a difference. The necessity to "tighten the belt" even just a little in daily life to get past some rough economic times, can read to a young child as deprivation, as loss of security, and an unacceptable loss of predictability. The child cannot always understand how today's economies translate into better things in the future. 

Second, every child is unique and has their own temperament, their own way of relating to the world, and multiple children in the family are always at different stages of development. What works well with the 10 year old, is not necessarily right for the 8 year old, or the six year old.  This is true for all the many kinds of ways in which parents try to reach out to their children and teach them. 

Two years ago, shortly after my mother died, my slightly younger brother flew back here with our parents ashes to be interred at my father's Virginia home town. In one of our many conversations during his visit, I was shocked to discover that my brother viewed the many trips we took as children as miserable torture and hated them. These many excursions to learn how timber is turned into lumber, milk into cheese, water into electricity, etc. are some of my most cherished childhood memories. The very trips that underline my life-long passion for learning evoke only the most painful memories for him. It was as if we did not have the same experience at all. 

That is the key.  Every child experiences the world differently. What is pleasant for one child, can be painful for another. What works as discipline for one, may spark the opposition and rebellion in another. Just trying something different may not work either. 

Third, parents may be the most important influence in children's lives but they are far from the only influence. Siblings, grandparents, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, school mates, teachers, television, books, and many other sources affect children. All of those other people and other sources of information with whom children interact, even briefly. We teach children to read, and then they proceed to socialize themselves within fictional worlds.  I think that I may have learned as many lessons from "Marmee" along with Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy as I learned from my own Mama. About a decade ago, I was re-reading Little Women and found this passage: 

"Jo, dear, we all have our temptations, some far greater than yours, and it often takes us all our lives to conquer them. You think your temper is the worst in the world, but mine used to be just like it." 

"Yours, Mother? Why, you are never angry!" And for the moment Jo forgot remorse in surprise. 

"I've been trying to cure it for forty years, and have only succeeded in controlling it. I am angry nearly every day of my life, Jo, but I have learned not to show it, and I still hope to learn not to feel it, though it may take me another forty years to do so." The patience and the humility of the face she loved so well was a better lesson to Jo than the wisest lecture, the sharpest reproof. She felt comforted at once by the sympathy and confidence given her. The knowledge that her mother had a fault like hers, and tried to mend it, made her own easier to bear and strengthened her resolution to cure it, though forty years seemed rather a long time to watch and pray to a girl of fifteen.

"Mother, are you angry when you fold your lips tight together and go out of the room sometimes, when Aunt March scolds or people worry you?" asked Jo, feeling nearer and dearer to her mother than ever before.

"Yes, I've learned to check the hasty words that rise to my lips , and when I feel that they mean to break out against my will, I just go away for a minute, and give myself a little shake for being so weak and wicked," answered Mrs. March with a sigh and a smile, as she smoothed and fastened up Jo's disheveled hair."

Alcott, Louisa May.  Little Women (Kindle Locations 1670-1685).  . Kindle Edition. 

And suddenly I knew where it was that I learned to stifle and stuff down all feelings of anger as a teenager and young woman until those denied feelings found their way out in migraines and suicidal feelings. This was no lesson learned from my own parents, who had little trouble expressing anger.  Indeed the anger of expressed by my parents motivated me to seek a different way, offered by a beloved book character. 

The world often socializes children in ways that cause parents despair despite every effort to block the world.  A favorite social psychology professor in graduate school told us this story: he and his wife (a biologist who earned her doctorate before her husband earned his) made every effort to raise their children, a boy and a girl in non-sex stereotyped ways. They often took their daughter at three to watch her older brother play soccer and made sure to point out the girls on the team, and talk about the skill of those girls as well as the skill of her brother. They offered their daughter stories and images of girls who were adventurous, athletic and brave. So they were totally unprepared for the moment when their three year old daughter announced that she wanted to be a cheerleader when she grew up because they were pretty. 

Children are people, who from their first moments in the world accrue a unique life history.  Influences from all the people the child encounters, all the events in the child's world, all the books, movies, TV, and other media that touch the child's world are woven into a personal tapestry, a self, that is unlike that of any other child, even an identical twin. That self will not always express it self in ways that are pleasant for those around the child or for the child him or herself. 

Last, even the most self-conscious, aware adult human being is to some extent still influenced in subtle and less than conscious ways by his or her own history...and let's be blunt, MOST adults are not particularly self-conscious and aware. There are subtle psychic  undercurrents, hot buttons, feelings of fear, loss and anger from the past, that can be evoked in a second by the right triggers.  Parents act out of their own losses, griefs, fears, and anxieties. We cannot always train ourselves to respond to the world the way we think, when we are thinking, is the right way to respond.  This does not absolve parents of responsibility for the effort to shape their children, but it does absolve them of absolute responsibility for the outcomes. 

There are times when parents genuinely have exhausted all the alternatives and options that are available to them at a given time.  It does not mean they have given up, but rather that they must take a respite, regroup, and sometimes wait with love and tolerance for the child to change within him or herself. 

the report of the "death of marriage" was an exaggeration

November 18, 2010 the Pew Research Center released a research study conducted in conjunction with TIME, that was provocatively, if inaccurately, titled "Decline of Marriage." The research was a survey of Americans' attitudes about marriage and family.

The headline finding of this survey was that 39 percent of respondents to the study agree that "marriage is obsolete." This is an increase from 1978 when only 28 percent thought marriage was obsolete.

The problem is, this is the perception of people, not reality. Moreover, it is the perception of people only 5 percent of whom can accurately describe societies divorce trends for the past twenty years. In other words 95 percent of the respondents to this survey did NOT know that divorce has been declining for the past 30 years.

Turns out that's not the only fact about marriage and the family the respondents got wrong. On seven key questions of fact about marriage and family trends, less than half of the respondents knew what the actual marriage and family trends are.

No wonder their perceptions of marriage and the family are so screwed - they lack the facts.

Definitions -- broad for family, narrow for marriage

Once again, I am fascinated by the responses of my students to my discussion questions on the topic of family in Introductory Sociology.

The overwhelming majority of students, about 95 out of every 100 who respond to the discussion, when asked what a family is provide a very broad definition that focuses on things like "love," "caring," "supportiveness," and other qualities of relationships. These students explicitly include homosexual couples living together, especially those with children, as qualifying to be included in the concept of "family." Sometimes students even will state, that while they do not approve of homosexual relationships, they are still examples of "family."

When the same students when asked about what constitutes "marriage," about sixty percent of them (in Kentucky), are adamant that a marriage consists of one man and one woman only. They reject homosexual relationships as qualifying for marriage, and they reject polygamy in any form as well.

reconstituting working class neighborhoods

I grew up (1954-1969) in a suburb of San Francisco -- San Mateo -- in a neighborhood of blue collar/working class families. Construction on the subdivision in which we lived began in about 1948, and was not fully completed until a few years after we moved there in 1954. The first wave of houses were two and three bedroom, one bath, with a attached single car garage, and lots under a quarter acre. The later wave of houses built between 1953 and 1956, were three bedroom, two bath, with attached two car garages. These were on the same sized lot, so had less yard.

By 1954, solid six foot high privacy fences completely divided the backyards of each single family home from its neighbors. The only shared/public spaces were the sidewalks, the elementary school ground, and the single, large municipal park located across from the elementary school at the center of the subdivision. Children roamed from yard to yard, but adults stayed within the limits of their own yard, and did not socialize frequently with neighbors.

The residents of the homes during the 50's and 60's were primarily nuclear families, consisting a husband employed in a blue collar or working class occupation, wives who were rarely employed outside the home, and 2+ children. Occasionally a home was occupied by a retired couple, without children. Many of the men in this subdivision worked in maintenance departments of major air lines based at San Francisco International Airport (less than 8 miles away). There were also large numbers of men in the construction trades -- carpenters, electricians, bricklayers, plumbers, etc.

Almost all of the adults were from outside California, and many of the older children had been born outside the state as well. None of the families were related to each other, all were stripped of kinship ties. Grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all resided "back east" or in the Midwest, rather than California. Rarely families would go "home" for brief vacations, usually during the summer months. Even more rarely kin would come for short visits. Thanksgiving and Christmas were holidays celebrated by isolated nuclear families.

Those of us who grew up in these communities took this isolation from kin for granted. Leaving behind extended family, to move great distances for work opportunities, and new communities was the norm for the majority of white working class families in California of the 1950's and 1960's. So it was not unexpected that most of the first wave of children would leave the area to go to college, find work and build futures in other cities and other states.

Attending college in Ohio and later graduate school in Kentucky, most of my fellow students had also left their homes and families some distance away. So the family and neighborhood patterns of my childhood seemed quite normal. It was not until I obtained my first full-time teaching position in Johnstown, Pennsylvania that I got a good, close hand look at a very different pattern of working class family and community life.

In Johnstown, the majority of working class and lower middle class adults lived within a few miles of their parents and grandparents, frequently on the same street, and not uncommonly in the other half of a double house -- a two or three story house under a single roof, that was divided down the middle into two distinct separate living units with separate kitchens, etc. This type of housing is extremely common in older working class neighborhoods of older industrial cities and towns east of the Mississippi.

Not only did the generations stay close to each other physically, but they often formed cooperative economic and social units. Children were cared for by grandparents, while parents worked. The increasing necessity for married women to be employed outside the home, made the assistance of grandparents in child care more and more crucial to economic well-being of working and lower middle class families in the 1980's.

The period of time that I spent in Johnstown included 1984-1985 during which time official unemployment rose to 25 percent as Bethlehem and U.S. Steel closed down the majority of their steel works. The permeable boundaries of family/household across generations was essential to many families survival, as those who retained jobs shared income with those who lost jobs. Many of the family and community patterns chronicled by Gans in Urban Villagers were alive and well in Johnstown in the 1980's.

I have since observed that trans-generational/trans-household family patterns are also exceedingly common among the working and lower middle classes in small town Virginia and rural Kentucky, and part of long standing traditions of kin helping kin.
What I find fascinating is that fifty years later in the 21st century, working and middle class families in San Mateo are reconstituting similar family and neighborhood patterns. This is being done both by new ethnic in-migrants to California (Filipino, Tongan, Vietnamese, Cambodian etc.) and by the later generations of the original working class families that populated the second wave in San Mateo's subdivisions.

It has become extremely common for two to four houses on one street to be owned by successive generations of the same family, and for other homes to be inhabited by cousins or other relatives. Because of vastly inflated housing values, often the older generation owns several homes that are rented to younger couples starting out. One family that first bought into the neighborhood in 1962 (the second wave) has three generations living in four houses at one end of one street. Two other houses nearby are owned by cousins who settled in the neighborhood in the 1970's and their adult child.

The entire neighborhood that was once populated by isolated nuclear families has become a complex web of family ties across generations, and extending out to collateral kin. The behavior of these families, providing assistance, child care, and financial aid, is far more similar to the old working class neighborhoods of Johnstown, than to the same neighborhood in the 1950's. All it took was time.

changing sexual norms and Twilight

Fifty and even forty years ago fear of disease and pregnancy were fairly effective in getting most teenagers, at least teenage girls, to view sex before marriage as dangerous and risky.

I remember quite well the film that we were shown sophomore year of high school that was intended to discourage sex. A teenage boy and girl were shown getting into the back seat of a car, the car did some rocking, and the teenagers got out with rumpled clothes; fast forward a few weeks and you see the teenage girl with her doctor getting the news that she has some unnamed, loathsome disease that could render her sterile. While we were amused by the car rocking and rumpled clothes we believed in the disease risk.

But the real fear of sex in the 1950's and 1960's came from the risk of pregnancy. The pill was quite new and hard for teenagers to obtain; with the much higher dosages of the time the pill had more negative side effects; few if any alternatives to the pill were available to teen girls, and the attitudes of the time -- that condoms were only used with prostitutes -- meant that a "good" girl would be offended in the extremely unlikely case that her boyfriend suggested them. Abortion was of course illegal in the 60's, and while some girls found a way, there were often deadly consequences of illegal abortions. If you got pregnant in 1968, your world came to an end, or so it seemed to us at the time. Pregnant girls were thrown out of regular school; the girls who got pregnant and dropped out were the subjects of scandalized whispering campaigns.

Books written for teenage girls in the fifties and sixties, could and did realistically depict ordinary teenage girls, deeply in love with their ordinary boyfriends steadfastly resisting sex, and saving themselves for marriage. The tension and drama of those novels was generated by an accepted tension between fear (of pregnancy and disease) and desire. Few of us who consumed those novels thought this was ridiculous or silly or old fashioned, we found that tension reasonable and realistic, and romantic.

While today there are religious people, including religious teens, that consider sex before marriage sinful, or at the very least undesirable, the type of mortal fear of sex that existed in the 1950's and 1960's has disappeared from popular thought. Diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis are, rightly or wrongly, viewed as easily cured and inconsequential. Even AIDS, an incurable life shortening disease, doesn't work well as a scare tactic because, true or not, popular belief view AIDS as a disease that only affects homosexuals, needle using drug addicts, and poor black people.

It is extremely unlikely that teens would view pregnancy as the life ending event we did in the sixties, when they observe classmates who are pregnant, and know girls with babies going to college. In a time when a conservative, evangelical, Republican candidate for Vice President is open and accepting of her teenage daughter's pregnancy, the idea that pregnancy will ruin one's life and destroy one's reputation are viewed as nonsensical by today's teens.

In this world in which the old dangers of sex no longer hold water with young people, enters Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight series. On her website she writes:

I am also a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or Mormon, as we are commonly called—for more info on what that means, see www.mormon.org ) and that has a huge influence on who I am and my perspective on the world, and therefore what I write (though I have been asked more than once, "What's a nice Mormon girl like you doing writing about vampires?").

I would argue that Stephenie Meyer writes about vampires because she is a Mormon.

Her religious tradition like most conservative, Christian traditions views sex outside of marriage as sinful, and preaches that young people (male and female) should preserve their virginity until marriage. There are many Christian novels written, published and in bookstores these days that tell stories of romance between young people who remain celibate and do not consummate their relationship until after the marriage vows are complete. None of those novels ever makes it on to the best seller lists -- but the Twilight series has had phenomenal commercial success.

The genius of the Twilight books, is that Stephenie Meyers (as the result of a vivid dream) has found a way to recapture the old fashioned romantic tension between danger and desire, without being viewed as out-dated or absurd. Instead of fear of sexual transmitted diseases or pregnancy, we have fear of the vampire lover who might lose control during sex and devour his partner. By evoking an iconic and well established fantasy creature -- the vampire -- Meyer can deliver her message of abstinence within a framework that seems exciting, dangerous and modern, rather than old fashioned.

cultural values and social practices

Cultural values often are disconnected from social practices. The values reflect ideals that are often disconnected with the realities of daily life.

I am suddenly reminded of a joke from my childhood, when the primary method of birth control used by Catholics was the rhythm method.

Old Joke:
"What do you call a couple who uses the rythm method?"
"Parents."

New joke:
"What do you call parents who teach abstinence-only to their teens?"
"Grandparents."

alone together

Alone Together: How Marriage in America is Changing by Paul R. Amato, Alan Booth, David R. Johnson, and Stacy J. Rogers, might not be a book that most people would read for pleasure. It is however, a sociologist's delight. Amato, Booth, Johnson and Rogers are sociologists at Pennsylvania State University, an institution well known in the discipline for large scale quantitative research. This book is the result of two major surveys done twenty years apart (1980 and 2000) which asked the exact same questions of a representative sample of married Americans under 55 years old. Their primary research question was "how is marriage in American changing?" What they found was that there were many changes, but that one could not make simple generalizations. Their data suggests that neither the folks who say that marriage is in decline, nor those that consider marriage to be changing but in fine health, are entirely correct. Their research suggests that marriage is a multi-faceted relationship, the quality of which varies on more than one dimension, and not always in the same direction.

Amato, Booth, Johnson and Rogers identified five dimensions of marital quality (all based on the reports of subjects): marital happiness, marital interaction, marital conflict, marital problems, and "divorce proneness" (meaning how often the individual thought about getting a divorce, talked to others -- including spouse -- about possibility of divorce, etc.). Over the twenty years between the two studies, the researchers found: 1) that reported levels of marital happiness and “divorce proneness” did not change; 2) that (on the positive side) reported levels of marital conflict and marital problems declined moderately; and 3) that overall levels of marital interaction declined. So on two of the five measures marital quality stayed the same for 20 years, on two marital quality improved, and on one, “interaction,” there was a decline (although I know some husbands and some wives who consider less interaction with their spouse to be a blessing at times).

Each of these dimensions also has multiple factors, which sometimes vary in the same way, but not always. For example, the dimension of “marital happiness” is one in which the factors vary in contradictory ways. The factors the researchers included in “marital happiness” were “agreement” with spouse, assessment of “strength of love,” evaluation of “sex life,” and whether or not they view their marriage as “better than most.” Between 1980 and 2000 “agreement” and “strength of love” increased (improved), while “sex life,” and “marriage better than most,” declined. [One could argue that a decline in assessing one’s marriage “better than most, does not represent a decline in one’s own marital quality but rather an upward assessment of the general state of marriage, or just simply greater realism]. On the other hand, the factor of marital interaction is one in which all four factors (eating main meal together, going out of leisure together, visiting friends together, and working around the home together) all declined from 1980 to 2000.

The authors’ overall conclusion: that reports of the decline and death of marriage are premature, but that all is not perfect in matrimonial land.

The research reported is sound, and provides fascinating insight into the ways that marriage has changed. I have one complaint. The authors refer throughout the book to “rise of individualism” as the cause of many of the changes that they observe, but they have not operationalized nor measured this variable in any way. They depend upon other people’s writing on the topic of individualism (none of which appears to be based on systematic empirical research). Occasionally, the authors use one of their own outcome measures as an indicator of “individualism,” but that involves fallacious circular reasoning. If one argues that an increase in individualism causes marital partners to spend more time alone, one cannot then turn around and say that spending time alone is a measure of increased individualism. That’s like saying that a job is highly paid because it is important, and we know it is important because it is highly paid.

Socialization and Drinking Behavior

A very interesting NYT article Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges? by wine and dining writer Eric Asimov eplores the question as to whether parents can teach responsible wine drinking to teenagers through introducing them to wine as part of meals and celebrations while condemning drunkenness. Asimov cites some solid research that suggests that

“If you are taught to drink in a ceremonial way with food, then the purpose of alcohol is taste and celebration, not inebriation,” he [Dr. George E. Vaillant, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University] added. “If you are forbidden to use it until college then you drink to get drunk.”

I would maintain, based on experience, that not only can parents teach responsible wine drinking, but that young people who have learned such behavior at home can teach it to peers in college.

I grew up in a teetotaling home, where no alcohol was present. At 18 I left home to go to college 2500 miles away, where there was little adult supervision and alcohol was readily available. However, the young people who made up my friendship circles from freshman year on, were all raised in upper middle class homes where the drinking of wine had been integrated into family meals and celebrations, while drunkenness had been highly discouraged. Consequently, their college drinking behavior, although unsupervised by adults (and underage) was responsible and did not lead to drunkenness or excess. As part of these social groups, I learned to view wine drinking as an appropriate part of a fine meal, not as a path to getting "blitzed."

Times change -- for the better

This morning while at physical therapy (for a wicked case of plantar faciitis), I lay behind a curtain with hot wraps on my foot and listened to a familiar conversation.

My physical therapist has recently learned that she and her husband are expecting their first child, and the patient on the other side of the curtain, parent of a 20 month old little girl, was dishing out typical advice. The conversation ranged from car seats and cribs, to diaper bags and what should be packed in them.

It was a conversation I've heard dozens, if not hundreds of times before, as those who are already parents pass on wisdom to the expecting. The only thing that made this different, was that the parent with helpful hints about diaper bags was male -- a father. Moreover, it was clear from his conversation that he often spoke of these issues with other young fathers. He told our therapist that he and his friends joked about their diaper bags being their "man purse."

Fathers have always talked about their children. But this was the first time that I had heard a father dish out the familiar advice about the nitty-gritty details of car seats and dirty diapers to an expecting parent.

As a sociologist who often writes about family, I was happy to mark this conversation as a sign that fathers are becoming more involved in the routine and daily care and nurturance of children.

Family versus Marriage

Two and a half years ago, in November 2004, the voters of Kentucky overwhelmingly (71 percent) voted to adopt a new constitutional amendment that would define marriage as being only between one man and one woman, and provided that "a legal status identical to or similar to marriage for unmarried individuals shall not be valid or recognized." [Unmarried individuals including heterosexual unmarried couples as well as gays and lesbians].

So imagine my surprise during the last six terms that I have taught SOC 101 (Introductory Sociology), when my Kentucky students have overwhelmingly with no exceptions, told me that the term "family" is inclusive of any and all groups of people who love and care for each other, and live together in a supportive relationship.

The chapter on Marriage and Family [authored by me, a fact of which students are generally not aware] in their sociology textbook begins with a descriptive listing of different groups of people: married couples with children, cohabiting heterosexual couples without children, homosexual couples with children, single mothers by divorce and by out-of-wedlock pregnancy and their children.

In my on-line classes, which draw on students from all over Kentucky, we have a discussion forum, and one of the questions I ask in the unit on family is "So what is a family?" I ask them to look at the list and tell which they would consider a family.

Here is a sampling of the responses that I have gotten from students:

Family is hard to define because people have so many different views. But I think family is people that you are close to, where there is mutual love, support, and a level of caring that is somewhat beyond just friendship.

all of the circumstances would prove to be a family. As I said, it is not what others perceive to be acceptable, as a family, but more how one feels when interacting with each other. I cannot state enough how important it is for each of us to feel a part of and accepted by at least one societal circle. To me that is ultimately makes a family unit.

All of the examples in the beginning of the chapter are families. A family is the biggest part of how we function in society. Family helps us to define who we are. Just because you are not married with kids does not mean that you are not a family. Some people think that gay couples with kids are not considered a family. In my own opinion marriage is just a piece of paper. If you are gay does not mean that they can not raise their child to be up standing citizens.

I believe a family is when someone relies on you to be there for them whether it be emotionally, financially, sexually, and so forth. A family is created when there is a strong bond between two or more. This doesn't just have to be man wife and kids, it can be anyone. You always hear of people close friends saying "they are like family to me". This is because they depend on that person to be there for them thru thick and thin. I believe that when you have a strong bond with someone and you know that that person will be there for you always then they can be considered family.

Over the past six or seven terms I have seen nearly a hundred posts that are variations on these examples. Out of that hundred, only one person, ever mentioned that they personally disapproved of gay relationships, but countered that by saying that they still deserved to be considered a "family."

This was so much at odds with what I expected given the overwhelming support that voters gave the anti-gay marriage amendment, that I began asking students additional questions. What I learned was fascinating. My students view "marriage" and "family" as separate entities not necessarily dependent upon each other. The reasoning varied. Some students suggested that "marriage" was a religious institution, while "family" was natural and biological. Others suggested that "family" was based on affinity, affection, and personal choice, while "marriage" was either a religious or legal institution. I found that it was possible for my students to have an open and inclusive view about families, while having a restricted and narrow definition of marriage.

Most formal groups that support anti-gay marriage legislation, have very restricted definitions of family, and generally would like to see all children raised by two biological parents, in a legally and religiously sanctioned marriage. In other words, part of the agenda of many formal organizations that promote "pro-marriage" or "pro-family" (i.e. anti-gay) legislation is to combat the idea that families can be what ever we want them to be.

The dichotomy between my students definitions of "family" and "marriage" may help to explain how a preponderance of open inclusive views about family could exist among students in a state that overwhelmingly supported an anti-gay marriage amendment. However, one must also consider two other possible contributing factors: one is that my students, who are overwhelmingly self described as middle, working and lower class, don't vote, and were not among the 71 percent of voters who passed the amendment; the other is that my students, who are also overwhelmingly female, under the age of 40, and mothers (some married, some not), are significantly different from the over all Kentucky population.

Nonetheless, I think the split in how my students think about family and marriage is intriguing and provocative.