6 Chapter 6 – Family and Social Class

Engels (1909) argued that changes in modes of production from hunting and gathering to modern industrial societies have been responsible for the changes in kinship connections from larger clan arrangements and communal ownership of property to the nuclear families in industrial societies.  Some anthropologists contend that before the shift to patrilineal societies where wealth passed from the male head of household to his son, most societies were organized along matrilineal lines with women (often sisters) living together and raising their children in a communal fashion.  Marriages were dissolved without much of an impact on children who continued to be nurtured and protected in matrilocal households of extended relatives and friends.  The agricultural revolution of the Neolithic time period changed the situation – with the rise of agriculture came private land ownership and the latter was accompanied a need to guarantee that the progeny who inherited a man’s property were indeed his children.  For Engels, the nuclear family with a man and a woman with their children living in one household is a modern arrangement and is not more than 200 years old.  Aries (1962) uses this conception of changes in family life to argue that childhood itself is a modern phenomenon.  In hunting gathering and foraging communities, child-rearing was a collective enterprise and the whole community helped with the maintenance of the clan unit.  Anthropologists note that women would breast-feed other children in the community and children would spend more time with other related and unrelated adults as compared to their biological parents.  Most children were contributing members of their communities as early as 6 years of age and at the same time adults spent many more hours of the day in leisure as compared to adults today.  The difference between childhood and adulthood was not as starkly defined as it has been over the last one hundred years (Diamond, 2012).

Historical records indicate that early settlers in the new world often professed that they crossed the ocean for the sake of their children.  However, records also demonstrate the invaluable role that teens played in the development of North America into its current state (Elliott, 2015).  Children worked on family farms, were active in the logging industry, worked in factories, apprenticed in artisan workshops and worked in retail.  In colonial America, parents needed children as much as children needed parents (Carlson, 2017).  Youth and adolescents contributed enormously to the family needs.  Most children worked and contributed to the family income.  In return, parents offered children religious and moral education and training in a trade.  The family was the focus of economic production as well as mutual support.  Despite the presence of child labor, there was still a labor shortage in the new world (Coontz, 2016).  On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in cities across England, young adolescents were spirited away to the Americas, either through enticement or through force.  In most cases by the time parents became aware of the disappearance of their children and came after the kidnappers, they were long gone.  When children did not want to go, they were forced.  They often became indentured workers until they became adults.  Young women were in demand and were married before they became adults (Daniels, 2014).

The seventeenth century family was a place of refuge amid the chaos in the new environs.  However, it was highly unstable because of the high death rate of children and partners in a marriage.  The consequence of the instability was that the ties that bound members of a family were loose.  There were many stepparents and stepsiblings within the same family.  In Northeastern settlements, the family was the ultimate authority in all manner of things with the father having the most power over the members.  Both girls and boys worked for the family at a very young age.  They engaged in spinning, gardening, candle-making, and cooking for the family unit (Coontz, 2014; Townsends, 2018).  Right from the inception in early settlements there were but vague notions of what childhood or youth meant.  Marriage was often a marker that distinguished adulthood from youth.  Prior to that point, children were considered not quite morally complete.  All the New England states had laws that forbade people from living outside families.  The difference between youth and adults was that youth could contribute to their families while the adult went off to form their own families.  This contributed to the stability of the society (Field & Syrett, 2015) at a time when death rates were high and resources scarce.  As new Christian norms took root in the new world, family structure changed from a matrilineal and matriarchal system that was common among the native American peoples, to one of patriarchy and a patrilineal system (Columbia Gorge Community College, 2013).

Throughout the 18th century, young men and women in their mid-teens found ways to become independent from their families.  The cities and the American frontier towns were places with work for youth.  Children in their teens were often stronger and more powerful than their parents.  The new-found freedom that youth enjoyed in these settlements alarmed some clergy and religious leaders and writers.  In 1730, Jonathan Edwards wrote that young people were “addicted to night walking, frequenting the tavern, lewd practices, wherein some, by their example exceedingly corrupted others.”  Religious leaders made direct appeals to youth and youth responded to the call without having to go through their fathers on whom had rested religious authority in earlier times (Coontz, 2016a; 2016b).   With the loss or at least, a loosening of the economic dependence on one’s parents, young people began making significant choices about the paths their lives would take about religion, career, romantic partners and values. Parents were forced to offer increased flexibility in terms of their children’s needs.

In an earlier era when marriage was arranged by families, wealthier youth married earlier than working class youth but as individuals began to choose their own partners, the marriage age of youth from different social classes began to converge.  In fact, girls and boys, men and women from upper class families increasingly chose to postpone their own marriage.  Thus, the early European settlers in North America saw a sea change in how the family functioned and its role in adolescent and youth lives.  We still see the impact of those early social changes in the notion that is commonly held by social leaders that the ages between 14 and 25 are pivotal in determining what kind of an adult a young person is going to be.

For Blacks, the role of the family and the responsibilities and rights of children varied considerably from their European peers.  By 1860, slaves who were brought here during the transatlantic slave trade began having children and more than half the slave population were people under the age of 20.  The largest proportion of trading in slaves were of children.  Since mothers were expected to work long hours, it was usually the very elderly that looked after young children.  Most slave children began working around the age of 7-9 prior to which white and Black children played together.  Young slave children and youth were subjected to harsh punishments when they disobeyed their master and sexual abuse was endemic to their lives – in the eyes of the slave owner they had to be trained for a life of servitude.  There was also the constant threat that they could be sold at a moment’s notice and separated from their families (King, 1995; 2011; Rawick, 1972; Walter B. Hoye, 2017).

Today, the nuclear family with a married breadwinner man and a homemaker woman with children under the age of 18 is only 23% of all the possible kinship arrangements in the USA.  There are almost as many single parent families in the USA.  The traditional arrangement has been replaced by a mix of blended, cohabiting and remarried families.  There are over 5.5 million heterosexual and homosexual couples living in cohabiting situations without getting married.  In over a third of US households, wives earn more than their husbands.  Over 45% of children under the age of 18 live with a single parent, mostly mothers and among African Americans the proportion rises to about 70%.  Despite the sea change in family arrangements, governmental and social policies are still determined by models that assume that traditional heterosexual families are the norm (Vespa, Louis & Kreider, 2013).  This has had a negative impact on the health of families.  The taking root of capitalism gave rise to the modern nuclear family as opposed to more collective arrangements pre-1700s (Sam Seder, 2017).  Capitalism also demanded new gendered arrangements where part of the workforce stays home to take care of children unlike more nebulous work arrangements prior to the industrial revolution.  We see the impact of the unmooring of the nuclear family from its community roots even today as parents and caregivers struggle with providing adequately for their children (CBS Sunday Morning, 2014).

As societies have grown more complex, the inequality in wealth and social status between families has grown, especially since the 1970s in the US where worker wages have stagnated for much of the population.  The classification in Figure 1 has been proposed by sociologists as a framework for organizing families by their social class in modern capitalist contexts.  Sociologists have debated about what constitutes social class and not everyone agrees with the mainstream classification.  There is a consensus that a family’s social position is a combination of educational achievement, occupational status, income, neighborhood and political power wielded.  The table below outlines some of the major social classes that sociologists recognize and the factors that go towards determining them.  The social and economic class (SES) that a child is born into has an enormous impact on both their development and long-term prospects in life.  The USA is a country of enormous wealth and income inequality and simply living in a society that is extremely unequal has an impact on all people; the consequences of inequality affects everyone (Piketti & Wilkinson, 2015).

In her book, ‘Cut Adrift: Families in Insecure Times’ Cooper (2014) writes about the enormous economic insecurity that modern American families are facing today.  Since 2008, there has been an unprecedented decline of middle-income jobs that offer reasonable benefits and safety for workers.  The steep decline in workers belonging to unions have resulted in a lack of leverage for workers vis a vis contractual agreement with their employers.  Today, 11% of workers are unionized and this has eroded the moral commitment toward fair wages by communities.  Experts point out that financial risk has been privatized to families with pension and savings benefits tied to the stock market which by its very functioning is not very stable (Hacker & Pierson, 2010).  In the new economy, rising debt often resulting from medical bills and student loans accompanied by declines in pay have led to family insecurity even when moving up the social ladder (Thompson & Conley, 2016; Wolff, 2010).  In the current job market, when college grads lose jobs, the next job pays 23% less (Houle, 2014).

Cooper found in her interviews with the very wealthy, they were not immune to the anxieties surrounding economic insecurity.   However, families in different social classes manage their stresses in different ways both emotionally and financially.  While the very affluent families seek to accumulate more in order to build an economic firewall for their children, middle- and lower-class families scale back on their expectations for their families.  For the working class and the very poor, religion often plays the role of the safety net with the church being their last place of refuge.  Thus, the poor according to Cooper, are unable to accumulate an adequate savings net because they give any savings, they have to the church to be redistributed to others.  Having a long-term goal is often painful for poor families and they are preoccupied with holding on to what they have.

In addition to the general gap in wealth, poverty is also related to race and gender especially in the USA.  People of color and women tend more often to be in poverty compared to men and people of European origin.  Experts have a term for the gendered nature of wealth distribution and poverty – the feminization of poverty (or conversely, the masculinization of wealth) (Pearce, 1978).  According to the US department of Labor (2015), women today earn 79 cents to every dollar that a man earns; however, when wealth distribution is examined the inequality is even more stark.  Single women possess 32 cents to every dollar that a single man owns. Black and Latina women have less than a cent to every dollar that a man owns.  As a result, even as women’s wages are rising and they are working in ever larger numbers relative to men, the wealth gap remains.  There are many factors that contribute to the disparity – women often work the lowest paying jobs and they assume caregiving roles at home with both children and the elderly depriving them of the capacity to build wealth.  Today, the proportion of women and children living in poverty is at a historic high and has been climbing for the last 4 decades in the USA according to the US census data.  The US has one of the largest poverty gender gaps of any developed country (Glasmeier, 2014).  Most minimum wage earners are women and so are most part-time workers. Gender is intimately connected with being poor (Emma Keune, 2017).

The calculated proportion of women in poverty (about 21% nationally) tends to be underestimated.  The poverty line itself, some experts believe, grossly underestimates the resources that people need to survive.  The original formula for measuring the poverty line was conceived of forty years ago and while some adjustments have been made for inflation, it does not consider new patterns of resource use and consumption.  The rules also do not make allowances for geographical differences (Meyer & Sullivan, 2012).  However, even with a deficient measure of the poverty line, the evidence is strong that there are a large number of children who live in poverty – almost 20% of children in the US live in poverty but another 20% live in near poverty levels, thus they do not meet the criteria of being poverty stricken but are at high risk for the dangers of being impoverished.  Young adults between the ages of 18 and 25, especially if they have children, are among those with high levels of poverty (Census 2014).  Almost half of young adults as well as children under the age of 6 are poor and a quarter are below the poverty line (Danielle Link, 2017).  The overwhelming majority of young people who are poor have at least one parent who works full-time.

The impact of poverty on children is deep and persistent and includes all aspects of child development.  Family poverty is associated with neural, learning and developmental disabilities (Ullucci & Howard, 2015).  Families in poverty suffer from food insecurity leading to children being malnourished; in addition, they are much more likely to be exposed to toxic chemicals and pollution in the environment and suffer from chronic stress.  They have few resources available to help them overcome the conditions that impede their living in relatively safe circumstances (Evans & Schamberg, 2009).  Even before poor children are born, their mothers are more likely to suffer from poor nutrition and appropriate care (Bradshaw & Main, 2016).  One evidence of this is the smaller volume of the hippocampus and the amygdala leading to a poorer working memory in children born into poverty (Lipina & Colombo, 2009).  In addition, the prefrontal cortex involved in planful behavior is also affected because of the chronic stress associated with living in circumstances of material scarcity (Johnson, Riis & Noble, 2016).  The prefrontal cortex governs many of the behaviors around self-regulation and planning.  When this area is affected, it leads to a cascade of problems in language, emotions, and cognition that may last into adulthood.  Children in poverty tend to suffer from higher rates of AD/HD, autism, depression, anxiety and a host of other mental health issues.  They express pervasive negative thinking, helplessness, lack of control and withdrawal from social connections.  The significance of the relationship between poverty and the deficits described above hold even when other factors like race, ethnicity, neighborhood conditions and education are controlled for (Phillips & Shonkoff, 2000).

Wealth provides both independence and security for American families since the most important investments that US families make towards their future is tied with home ownership.  In the US, race and class are intertwined in that people from certain racial and ethnic minority groups tend to be more often in poverty than white people (Gans, 2005).  A Black family in the US owns only 10 cents for every dollar that a white family owns.  The US government, from its earliest inception helped fund and funnel, land and money to white families.  In addition, white capping (making threats of violence if a family does not move out) was used to force Black people off their lands in the early 1900s resulting in race riots in cities like Memphis and Tulsa. Throughout the 1900s, wealth effectively remained outside the reach of most Black families. Similarly, Blacks were left out of government programs like the New Deal and GI Bill which helped push many Americans into the middle class.  When assets are held constant Blacks achieve higher levels of education than whites  (Mangino, 2010).  However, people from African American backgrounds who have graduated college earn less than whites who have dropped out of high school  (Hamilton et al, 2015).  The capacity of wealth to enable the taking of risks and financing agency is underestimated.  Wealth begets more wealth and racism exacerbates the divide (Hamilton, Darity, Jr., Price, Sridharan & Tippett, 2015).

Black, Latinx, and native children are more likely to be in poverty compared to members from other communities. An astonishing 43% percent of African American and 34% of Latinx children are in poverty.  For all children under 18, the highest rates of poverty are in the South and the Midwest.  Among young adults, Native American youth tend to have the highest rates of poverty at over 47% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017).   Families that belong to marginalized communities in the US thus face immense resource challenges to raising healthy children.

One of the many underexplored areas around the issues affecting poor children is the discrimination that they face in society and the impact it has on them.  Discrimination leads to the chronic stress that poor families and families of color face and in turn, this affects children’s psychological and neurological development (Santiago, Wadsworth & Stump, 2011; Wadsworth, 2012).  While the need for physical and psychological services are clearly important, many poor families have internalized society’s message that their circumstances are the result of their own actions.  They therefore do not seek assistance and are ashamed to express their needs publicly (Kabeer, 2000).  Research on people living in poverty are limited and there are no clear guidelines to assess their needs and offer appropriate services.  It is important for providers of services to display a non-judgmental and caring attitude towards the complex challenges that poor families and children face. Mom2Mom is one advocacy group that uses evidence-based practices to support poor mothers.  They use a three-pronged approach in their efforts to help families with children: reducing the stress of poverty, support mothers in their effort to connect to their children’s education and offer resources that provide social support.  The mothers are also paired with a mentor and a support person who helps alleviate some of the daily stresses that accompany raising children in poverty.  Follow up interviews with mothers reveal that the special relationship with a mentor was the part of the program that mothers most appreciated (Fitzgerald & Ronsley, 2016).

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he number of children with immigrant parents has doubled to almost 6 million in the last two decades and they form an increasing proportion of those who live below the poverty line. One in four children in the country come from an immigrant family.  In some of the larger states like New York and California, the percentage of children with at least one parent born abroad is much higher.  Nine out of ten of these children are US citizens (Turner, 2015).  In 2014, there were almost 31% of children from immigrant homes living in poverty; the reasons are wide ranging.  Immigrant families are more likely to have lower levels of education than the mainstream population, more likely to live in poor unsafe neighborhoods, less likely to have access to quality education and are less likely to speak English.  The poverty rates among legal immigrants as well as unauthorized migrants is higher than it is for the native population.  US governmental policy prioritizes people with advanced level skills when it comes immigration policies; thus, legal immigrants have higher levels of education than the native population.  Undocumented immigrants have the lowest levels of education since many are fleeing poverty, war and persecution in their home countries.  Despite the lower socioeconomic status that first and second-generation immigrants fall into, children from immigrant homes exhibit more positive development outcomes than the native American population.  This phenomenon is called the immigrant paradox (Coll & Marks, 2012).  In fact, the length of residence in the USA seems to be related to declining academic performance among immigrant families (Suarez-Orozco, Rhodes and Milburn, 2009).  Usually by the third generation, the immigrant advantage in academic success is about equal to the native population.  The reason for the paradox seems to be that the longer families stay here the less they buy into the idea of the American dream.  Immigrant children seem to work harder at tasks, have increased flexibility as a result of being bicultural and fluent in more than one language and value achievement.  There is also great motivation in maintaining the family honor among often closely-knit immigrant communities (Crosnoe, 2012; Nguyen, 2006).  Latinx immigrants have some of the best health indicators in California regardless of their lower levels of education (California Newsreel, 2014).

The earlier psychological models exploring immigration and its impact on positive identity were biased and assumed that total assimilation with the dominant group was positive and helped in development (Liebkind, 2001).  One classic model proposes that when immigrant families first land in a new cultural context, the tendency is to preserve the traditional beliefs, rituals and practices from the culture of origin (Gordon, 1964; Alba & nee, 2003).  After a time of residence in their new setting, most immigrant families begin to adopt some cultural practices from their new home but still preserve important basic elements of their native culture.  Eventually, fully adjusted immigrant families become acculturated by adopting the mainstream norms of their new culture.  Under the traditional models of adjustment, the goals were always assumed to become completely assimilated into mainstream society; it was assumed that the healthiest strategy for new immigrant families was to aim to adopt fully, the values of their host context (Brown & Bean, 2006).  The immigrant paradox throws this traditional model into doubt; there is evidence that new immigrants are healthier the less they are assimilated into the dominant culture.  The longer members of new immigrant communities stay in the US, the less healthy their children tend to be.  Thus, policy makers will have to be mindful of the host cultures of immigrant families as they are settled in their new context.  Services and resources ought to maintain a balance between helping them assimilate while providing spaces for the maintenance of their cultures of origin.

Berry (1997) came up with a model that was dynamic and more flexible than the traditional models of acculturation.  He argued that immigrant attitudes towards their host culture is independent of their attitudes towards maintaining their original cultural values and practices. Under such an assumption, there are four possible strategies that immigrant families could implement in new settings – fully adopt cultural values from the new context and give up one’s original culture (assimilation), fully maintain one’s traditional cultural practices with little influence from the host context (separation), adopt practices from both cultural contexts to a high degree (integration), and finally, reject both traditional context and the new culture as well (marginalization).  Berry proposed that integration is the most adaptive strategy for immigrant families while marginalization had negative consequences for children in immigrant homes. Recent studies complicate this narrative.  Bosky (2008) found that immigrant adolescents distinguish between private and public spheres.  They maintain their heritage culture at home while opening themselves up to mainstream influences in public.  This allows them to strengthen community ties both at home and in school.  One of the factors that determine the strategies that youth adopt to adjust to mainstream society include the extent of discrimination that the group faces from the dominant culture.  When there are multicultural policies adopted in the community, youth are more likely to use integration as a strategy.  Discrimination forces youth to turn inward and adopt separation and in-group identification to cope with the alienation and social exclusion they experience.  Similarly, the social class of the immigrant family plays a role in how youth integrate into mainstream society.  Middle class immigrant youth assimilate into the mainstream middle class of the host context while working class immigrant youth tend to assimilate into the underclass leading to lower achievement levels in school and a lack of opportunities to succeed (Phinney, Berry, Vedder & Liebkind, 2006).

In 2017, there were a series of executive orders on border security and a travel ban on families from certain regions of the world that had a deep impact on children and youth.  The orders and enacted policies threatened to separate parents from children and detain children who were already in the US.  Parents of unaccompanied refugees who were minors were threatened with incarceration and there was a massive roundup of undocumented immigrant adults and children with no criminal record.  The American Pediatric Association issued a statement that opposed these measures as having a negative impact on children, especially those seeking shelter from the violence and insecurity of their countries of origin.  Children that migrate without authorization face steep odds against healthy development; for many of these families and unaccompanied undocumented children the migration journey can take months and even years.  Adult workers in immigrant households are subject to exploitation at work with its consequent negative impact on children.  Overcrowded living arrangements and insecurity of access to basic needs is a norm among these families and children.  Unlike the immigrant paradox experienced by other immigrant communities, children and youth from undocumented families exhibit lower achievement in schools even when they are US citizens if they have one or both parents who are non-legalized.  The risk of deportation prevents parents from seeking helpful resources for their citizen-children.  In addition, the constant threat of arrest of parents by homeland security personnel leads children to exhibit high rates of depression, anxiety, attention problems and conduct issues.  Men tend to be deported at much higher rates than women leading to the splitting up of families and additional stress on the women and children.  Children of undocumented parents often exhibit sleep disorders, nightmares, withdrawal and an intense fear of law enforcement (Brabeck, Lykes & Hunter, 2015; Capps, Fix & Zong, 2016).

Traditional psychological literature has historically viewed the family in heteronormative terms – a man and a woman living together with the sanction of the community they are residing in, along with their children.  Thus, most mainstream psychological research have been on heterosexual, nuclear families.  The family’s central role in child-rearing has been emphasized by the earliest writers from Freud to researchers today (Stone, 1975).  For Freud, the child’s personality is almost completely formed by the age of 5 and parents are central characters in this development.  According to Freud, the earliest stages of infancy provide spaces for parents to play a role by stimulating them orally and then by fostering appropriate toilet training opportunities in toddlerhood.  However, it is around the age of 5 when children are most affected by their interactions with parents; according to Freud, children at this age develop a sexual attraction towards the parent of the opposite sex.  By now, children are aware that the parent they are drawn to is attached in a romantic fashion to the parent of their own sex.  In order to win the favor of the parent of the opposite sex, children are forced to identify with the same-sex parent.  He called the phenomenon the Oedipus Complex for boys and Electra Complex for girls (named after Greek heroes).  He thought this process was crucial to the development of morality in young children.  Children learn that they are not the center of the world through this process of identification (Robinson, 2001).  According to some experts, Freud changed his theory to make the central attachment figure the mother for both boys and girls at a later point in his professional career (Freud Museum London, 2015).  Thus, from very early on in the history of developmental psychology, the impact of the family has been examined through heteropatriarchal framework (Gillis, 1998).

John Bowlby a developmental psychologist, used Freud’s framework to forge his own theory on attachment during the early years of the child.  Early in his career he concluded that, “the infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment” (Bowlby, 1951, p. 13).  He drew on the empirical work of Harry Harlow who found that rhesus monkeys that were separated from their mothers and deprived from contact with other monkeys, suffered numerous damaging psychological consequences.  Bowlby asserted that the attachment between child and mother is especially crucial during the earliest days of infancy and when infants are deprived of physical contact with their mothers, the negative consequences can last for a long time (Harlow, 1958).

Ainsworth, a student of Bowlby expanded his theory with several studies in the laboratory where she explored children’s reactions to being separated from their mothers in order to assess the quality of children’s attachment to the caregiver.  She was interested in the moment when the caregiver and child reunited after a brief separation in the lab – she called them the Strange Situation experiments.  She found that there were individual differences in how children responded to being reunited with their caregiver (Ainsworth, 1969; 1978).  Ainsworth divided attachment quality between child and caregiver into three types – secure, avoidant and ambivalent.  Securely attached children were immediately calmed when the caregiver picked them up after a parting.  Avoidant children showed little positive response to the caregiver returning while ambivalent children were almost hostile when their caregiver returned after a brief absence even when they were distressed during their absence.  Ainsworth connected these responses to the consistency and quality of care that children received at home.  According to her, feeling loved is crucial to secure attachment while unresponsive or inconsistently responsive caregiving will produce avoidant and ambivalent attachment types respectively (Bretherton & Ainsworth, 1974).  There has been considerable criticism of the Strange Situation experiments, chief among them being that there are significant cross-cultural differences in how children respond to being separated from their principal caregiver.  Critics contend that the framework used to study attachment has been typically white and middle-class and the methods are not sensitive to other forms of attachment dominant in other cultures and social contexts (Harkness, 2015).  In summary, Bowlby and Ainsworth inspired a new generation of child development researchers to explore the impact of parent-child relationships on child outcomes.  The word ‘parenting’ (a verb coined from the noun parent) was not part of the vocabulary prior to the 1950s but has since become a significant topic of study in child development with thousands of articles published in peer reviewed journals.  Some critics would argue that the focus on ‘parenting’ and the relationships within nuclear families is reflective of privatization of child-rearing that happened after societies increasingly turned capitalist.

One of the most influential frameworks introduced within the annals of family research in psychology is that of parenting styles in the late 1960s by a psychologist called Diana Baumrind.  While parental practices refer to specific behaviors of parents towards their children, parenting styles purported to move beyond to measure the emotional climate in their home (Smetana, 2017).  Baumrind mainly worked with families of white suburban children in the USA. Based on her observations of familial interactions she categorized parent-child interactions into three major types which she called parenting styles.  As the phrase parenting styles indicate, these are enduring qualities of family interaction.  According to her observations, the parent-child interactions were typically stable across time and they comprised of qualities that mostly rested in the parents and less in the child.  In other words, while the child may have minor influences on how the parent interacted with the child, the parents could govern and mold the interactions (Baumrind, 1971).

The three parenting style categories described by Baumrind (1971) and the fourth introduced by Maccoby and Martin (1983), are based on two dimensions of parenting behavior – a) responsiveness to child needs (warmth), and b) expectations and demands on the child by parents (control and autonomy).  Table 1 below explains the four resulting parenting styles – authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and negligent.  As the table demonstrates, parents who are authoritative score highly in both the warmth and the control that they exert over their children.  According to Baumrind, the authoritative parenting style is the most appropriate for children of all the four categories. Authoritarian parents are very strict and often cold towards their children, permissive parents are excessively laissez-faire and allow their kids unrestricted freedom with few limits while being high in warmth.  Neglectful parents abandon their children emotionally and physically.  Authoritative parents establish an emotionally fulfilling relationship with their children, gradually relinquishing control as children grow older.  They believe in communication and give their children opportunities to express their feelings and thoughts. Rules are often followed by explanations as to why they are important.

Some researchers have linked authoritative parenting styles to better self-regulation in children, higher achievement in school, mature behavior, and higher self-esteem (Gonzales & Walters, 2006; Mackey, Arnold & Pratt, 2001).  Studies demonstrate that children from authoritative homes are high in self-esteem, less susceptible to peer pressure, have high self-regulation and perform well in school.  Those from permissive homes have trouble regulating their feelings and have low interest in school. Children from authoritarian homes have low self-esteem and poor social skills while children who have been neglected have some of the worst outcomes in terms of academic achievement and social skills (Darling & Sternberg, 1993; Spera, 2005).

Research using Baumrind’s model and its associated findings have been criticized by writers and researchers from several perspectives.  Stewart and Bond (2002) question the notion that the dimensions that measure parenting style are universal – i.e., the concept of warmth or autonomy is the same regardless of cultural context.  Similarly, Peterson, Steinmetz and Wilson, (2003) question the idea that autonomy and interconnectedness are opposite ideas in all cultures.  Kagitcibasi (2001) found that parental expectations and values differed more across social class and cultural lines than within these groups.  The cultural values around parenting are very slow to change even when there is a change in the social context.  Some of the most significant critiques of parenting styles research have come from psychologists who work with populations located in the Global South and in marginalized communities in the industrialized world.  Since culture determines the modes of communication, parenting styles, values, expectations and coping skills, some researchers posit that culture would not only play an enormous role in how parents engage with their children but also the outcomes of those interactions.  Josh and Krishna (1998) found that Indian parents valued interdependence with the larger extended family over autonomy and independence.

Chao (1994) has argued that the Chinese parents in her studies were authoritarian and controlling and yet, their children were successful in schools.  Among European Americans these practices that are highly successful within their context, have been found to lead to low achievement and self-esteem in children in European origin communities.  She suggests that the categories proposed by Baumrind are not adequate when examining parenting styles in other cultural contexts.  She has coined the concept of training to explain the unique features of Chinese parenting; Training involves highly engaged parents who are role models of family traditions, enforcing Confucian norms by a display of respect for family elders, maintaining social harmony within and outside the family and an encouragement of hard work and discipline.  In contemporary societies, increasing numbers of marital unions consist of couples who come from different cultural groups and this creates new issues around agreement on socialization of children.  Disagreements over childrearing could result in delayed identity formation and emotional problems (Heath, 1995). When these differences are played out in a transnational setting where there is no immediate connections or guidance from an extended family, it could be stressful for all members of the family (Crippen & Brew, 2007).

While most studies demonstrate some impact of parental behaviors on their children’s lives, some scholars have questioned the validity of the findings of the impact of parental behavior on children.  Furedi (2001) and Harris (2000) both question the notion that parents have significant influence on their children.  Furedi iterates that unless there is severe deprivation in terms of physical and emotional nourishment, smaller differences do not matter and their impact on children is insignificant.  Harris (2000) points to research that demonstrates that the largest impact on children’s well-being is the neighborhood that families live in and not the specific environment within the family.  Harris contends that if there are differences among children in terms of personality and achievement it is more likely to be due to biological variations than parental behaviors since parents are also likely to pass on genetically determined traits to their children.  Parents who are warm are more likely to pass on their genetic trait for warmth to their children.  Similarly, the display of other traits might be more an outcome of genetic variations than environmental factors.  Thus, while popular prescriptions about well-being of children relate it to parenting practices, research has produced mixed results between the two variables.  The one substantiated finding has been that when families live in a community that is inclusive and where the basic needs of its members are met, children are more likely to thrive.  Robert Putnam (2015) offers the concept of social capital to explain the positive impact of living in a community that is safe and supportive (LA review of books, 2015).

One of the most influential studies that examined social class and family functioning was conducted by sociologist Annette Lareau (2003).  She conducted an ethnographic study with 88 black and white families of differing social classes, all with young children.  She found that there were significant differences in parental behavior based on social class.  According to Lareau, the process of classifying people as belonging to a certain economic, social and cultural class begins in childhood.  She asserts in her convincing book that as adults, individuals simply continue making the choices that maintains class distinctions that begin in childhood.  Lareau asserts that middle- and upper-class parents practice a parenting style that she terms concerted cultivation while lower class parents engage in accomplishment of natural growth.  Middle class parents organize and structure their children’s lives, providing guidance, shaping their experiences and placing educational achievements above connections with extended family members.  Poor and working-class families allow their children a natural path to development with few structured activities and experiences.  Among working class families, parents tend to use directives when addressing their children and rarely intervene on behalf of their children within social institutions like schools and health care settings.  The parents themselves had few strategies to engage effectively with authority figures and were often fearful and anxious around them.  One of the strengths of the accomplishment of natural growth is that working-class children are self-motivated and need little parental supervision to entertain themselves.  Lareau made it clear in her study findings that both parenting behaviors came out of concern for their children and both offer different opportunities for growth; however, parents were mindful of the opportunities that their own children would have as adults and adapted their parenting behaviors to help children adapt to their adult surroundings.  In other words, social class offered different environmental affordances for parental engagement with children.  Affordances refer to environmental props that people must work with – these environmental features offer different opportunities and limitations for individuals.  The different parental engagements were just different ways of coping with the challenges posed by one’s class environments.

Lareau (2015) conducted a follow up study with the same families in her original study and discovered that the consequences of those early differences persisted.  Many of the poorer and working-class children, now young adults, dropped out of school or did not study beyond their high school years.  The middle-class children in her sample had extensive preparations and guidance from their parents that led them to choose higher education and professional programs.  Lareau asserts that social class had a profound influence on the pathways to adulthood and the pathways diverge dramatically depending on the social class.

The consequences of abuse on children are like other severe repeated stressors and have a long-lasting impact well into adulthood.  Maltreatment has an impact on brain functioning that could lead to mood disturbances for an extended period of time (Academy of violence and abuse, 2011).  The persistence of violence at home leads to a host of problems for the child – low self-esteem, depression, emotional stunting, inability to trust adults, a lack of capacity for empathy, and resorting to violence to solve their own personal problems (Nemeroff, 2016; Sousa, Mason, Herrenkohl, Prince, Herrenkohl, & Russo, 2017).  The violence may be directed at both others and they themselves, sometimes resulting in severe self-harm.  By the time an abused child reaches adolescence, they have learned to distrust others and may interpret others’ actions in a hostile fashion.  For example, mistakes made by their peers are viewed as arising from malicious motives and maltreated children may react in an aggressive manner to actions by others.  Psychological abuse seems to intensify these reactions over time as compared to physical abuse (Butaney, Pelcovitz & Kaplan, 2011).  For children and adolescents living in extremely threatening circumstances, where their personal integrity is threatened and direct threats are made on their lives, the consequences can be severe with anxiety and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder symptomatology (Wisdom, 1999).  Experts conclude that the PTSD resulting from repeated abuse is more complex psychologically and physically than that resulting from one-time traumatic events as in the death of a loved one.  The results of severe maltreatment include highly elevated levels of stress hormones and smaller brain sizes.  Childhood abuse is a strong predictor of adolescent substance abuse and risky sexual behavior in adolescence (Thibodeau et. al., 2017; Yoon et. al., 2017).

The personal factors of children that affect the likelihood of being abused are, children who are difficult to manage, are born premature or have special needs. Parents who abuse children are often less skillful in handling difficulties in life and feel powerless in managing their children.  Thus, there is a strong transactional feedback loop between the parent and the child that sets the abuse on a long-term path (Christian & The Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect, 2015).  Once the pattern of abuse sets in, it is hard to eliminate.  Other stresses in the parent’s life contribute to maintaining the abuse like unemployment, poverty, isolation, alcohol and drug dependence, household violence, and overcrowded living conditions (Gelles, 2017).  Community stresses include socially isolating environments that is crime ridden and lacking in communal safe spaces like parks.  As a society, the US has a high tolerance for violence to resolve issues making it more likely for parents and other authority figures to use force on children (Molnar et al., 2016; Van der Kolk, 2017).  Nationally, there is no law that prohibits physical punishment of children in schools though some states have passed statutes prohibiting corporal punishment in schools (AAIEGlobal, 2018; Straus, 2017).

The roots of child maltreatment can be located at every level of society from the family to the neighborhood to larger social and cultural conditions (Fay, 2018; Lee, 2014; Lichty & Palamaro‐Munsell,2017).

The solution needs to be aimed at all these levels.  In some communities, aid to families both material and social has been evidenced to be crucial in reducing child abuse and neglect (Thompson, 2015).  Teaching parents how to address behavioral and conduct issues with their children in a constructive manner can be effective in helping parents find alternatives to physical punishment and emotional abuse (Mendelson & Letourneau, 2015).  Howard and Brooks-Gunn (2009) examined some of the most widespread and popular home visit programs that involved frequent drop-ins by nurses or other qualified professionals.  These included the National Nurse-Family Partnerships, Hawaii Healthy Start, Early Head Start, Healthy Families America and others.  They found that the programs had little direct impact on the abuse itself, but it did result in better parenting practices and generally improved the home conditions under which children live.  Including fathers in the raising of their children has been found to be effective in reducing maltreatment but sometimes there are barriers to their participation due to incarceration and mental health issues (Shadik & O’Connor, 2016).

Moving beyond the family, interventions at the community level must include neighborhood factors that may allow for higher levels of child and adolescent maltreatment.  It is crucial for policy makers to address the isolation that families, especially those that are dysfunctional due to caregiver mental illness, or poverty and unemployment by enacting family friendly policies. Easy access to parks, libraries and other publicly available services help increase connections with the community.  In addition, making sure that families most in need of help have the information that they need to ensure availability of services offered in the area is crucial to reduce stress within the family (van Dijken et. al., 2016).  When all levels of the community are involved in detecting, addressing and preventing child and adolescent maltreatment, programs can be effective in reducing the use of foster-care services.

Any intervention around issues of child maltreatment must involve culturally sensitive methods with well-trained staff and social workers.  Parents who are found to be repeatedly abusing their children tend to come from families where their own needs were not met, and their voices not heard.  Agency staff who interact with them need to be able to develop a nurturing relationship with the members of the family and respect the parents as repositories of knowledge about their children (Ridings, Beasley & Silovsky, 2017).

Today adulthood seems out of reach for many young people until their mid to late twenties.  For youth with institutional support, especially in the form of a family that can support them, weathering this period of life is much smoother than for those who have no support.  As was noted in previous section youth who are poor, belong to immigrant communities and communities of color have less access to support that will likely have an impact on their growth. The youth who most need institutional support are the ones who are least able to obtain it from adult society (Plenty & Mood, 2016; Woodman & Wyn, 2014).  Many of these youth in distress have passed out of foster care, been in juvenile detention centers or have been homeless for extended periods of time. They live in dangerous neighborhoods, go to schools with few resources and work in jobs (if employed) that are dangerous (Berg, 2015).

Equitable societies are not built from market forces but have to be created through data-based implementation of policies that aim to enhance the growth of all individuals – providing adequate safety nets and supports for families, sustainable wages for workers and ensuring support for those who are unable to work or find work.  All the major institutions in society must work towards ensuring a reasonable quality of life for all its members (Berg, 2015).  Currently, our society does not ensure such equity for families across a broad social spectrum, except for those at the top end of the hierarchy.

The current generation of youth live in a post-industrial society where jobs, especially jobs that provide other benefits like health insurance and post-retirement resources, are hard to come by.  Most middle-class families are providing unprecedented levels of support for their youth, but the cultural expectations are still that adolescents ought to become independent by the time they are 18 in the case of working-class families and 22 in the case of children from middle-class families who do go on to complete college.  While families with resources can provide a cushion for young people as they are making a transition into independence, working class youth and the poor are left with few resources to deal with the difficulties of making the change.  Middle class children can come back home to stay with their extended family or may expect their parents to help with down-payment on their first home as they move on to establish their independence.  For poor youth, this is not possible and the transition to adulthood can be fraught with failures and pitfalls.  Adolescence can thus be a time where social class differences are accentuated putting middle- and lower-class youth into very different paths for the rest of their lives.  There is little recognition of these changes in demographics and life conditions by policy makers who withdraw all social support from youth once they turn 18, thereby forcing some youth with little familial support to become destitute or homeless (Waters, Carr and Kefalas, 2011).  Researchers believe that there needs to be a rethinking about when young people should be considered independent from their families and the kinds of supports that communities should be offering them (Rickwood, Deane & Wilson, 2007).

As mentioned earlier in the chapter, sociologists point to the enormous negative consequences for children and youth when they grow up poor.  This is not just because of a lack of access to resources but the continuous toxic stress that children in poverty are exposed to. There is evidence that the persistent stress affects the architecture of the brain.  Children in poverty tend to suffer in much higher numbers from depression, substance abuse and other diseases into adulthood.  One of the great natural experiments in intervening with communities in poverty came from North Carolina where a law was a passed allowing a local Cherokee Native American people, who had endured an extended period of high unemployment rate to operate a casino.  The profits from the casino were distributed equally among the members.  Costello, Compton, Keele & Angold (2003) had been studying this community and a similarly impoverished white community in the area for four years.  Unemployment and poverty were much higher in the native community than in the white community and so too the consequent mental illness incidents.  However, after the supplements from the casino operation arrived, the researchers noticed that there was a marked reduction in mental illness incidents among the Cherokee children.  There was higher school attendance rates and increased school achievement.  They also noticed that the earlier the extra income arrived in a child’s life, the better the improvements in outcomes.  Clearly, Cherokee families were able to afford better resources with the additional income but more importantly, they found that the newly acquired resources allowed children to live a rather stress-free life.  About half of the profits from the casino went into a collective fund that helped build infrastructure and develop substance abuse programs.  In an atmosphere of ‘collective efficacy’ the Cherokee community began to think of their welfare as belonging to the group rather than to individuals.  They also began to exercise more control in how the profits were spent thereby prioritizing the needs of families over individual rights.

Roberto Vargas in his powerful book on Familia activism talks about integrating activism in communities starting with the family and widening the circle to include the community. According to Vargas, “Family activists seek health and success for their families and all others.  They take time to communicate and connect.  They also promote social involvement.” According to Vargas, the system works because everyone feels responsible for every child in the community.  Vargas expanded on an already existing Latinx tradition of formalizing relationships between friends through rituals.  A godparent to a child explicitly vows to perform certain duties towards the child and friends who are inducted into a family as close connections articulate their responsibilities as well.  Children in the families make explicit their responsibilities to the adults involved. One incident that Vargas described involves a group of young men who were constantly tempted by gang activities in the streets.  When these men were drawn into a positive circle facilitating honesty and authenticity, many were able to lean on each other for strength in the face of adversity.  During his community organizing period in Castro Valley in California, one Latinx mother was appalled that a local police officer characterized all Latinx youth as potential gang members.  A group of parents organized themselves and spent some time thinking about their vision for their teenage sons.  As a result of the reflective activities that parents engaged in, they were able to form an organization that furthered the development of their children and communicate to the district and the sheriff’s department the need for respect for their children. In addition, these family groups were connected to other familia groups in the Oakland area which facilitated activism that moved beyond children and family issues to goals that relate to national and international development.

One important space where families can come together to both reflect and resolve community and educational challenges is in the public school.  David Levine (2009) pointed to one group of African American and Latinx parents who organized around issues that mattered to their children in Washington DC.  Many of these parents felt disconnected from the school.  The African American parents felt that they were only called in to meet with school administrators when their children were in trouble.  The Latinx parents were culturally not used to the idea that they could have a say in the school functioning.  A few parents mobilized the others and they began meeting regularly for what was termed story tellin.  Storytelling allowed the parents a sense of ownership over the proceedings of the meetings and allowed the parents to connect in a deep way with others in a group notwithstanding the cultural differences they had.  A bag was placed in the middle of the room and parents had to respond to various prompts that they pulled out of the bag.  One prompt for instance was, my first day at school. The stories allowed the parents to establish a bond with each other.  A few sessions later, the prompts became more about their children and fears for their children.

Over the many meetings, parents began to find common issues that they all identified with.  They were able to feel empowered enough to go to the school administrators and articulate their concerns about the curriculum and discipline at school.  The parent group felt a great sense of unity in the many travails of parenting that they shared that they were able to offer each other assistance when needed.  When a group of parents felt that the school infrastructure needed to be improved, the group was able to articulate their children’s physical needs at school and successfully kick-start the improvements that needed to be made. When the Chancellor of the school district wanted to impose penalties on the school district for lack of adequate performance on standardized tests, the parent group effectively argued against it and the chancellor compromised on her original position.  The group continued to collaborate effectively with teachers identifying strategies that worked and strategies that did not in terms of student academic performance.

At the governmental level, federal and state governments can legislate and implement policies that allow for the health of families. Most families below the poverty line have at least one adult that works full-time.  Yet, they are unable to make it above the poverty line which today is about $24,000 for a family of four.  Passing laws that ensure sustainable wages for all workers will help alleviate poverty to a great extent.  Access to healthcare and dental care will enable both caregivers and children to manage their health and avoid financial stress that comes from medical emergencies and sudden disabling conditions.  Encouraging employers to implement family friendly policies like generous parental leaves, flexible working hours, on-site child care, and family medical leave by offering tax and other incentives contributes to healthy family functioning.  State governments can allocate appropriate funds for public services like literacy and nutrition programs, access to healthcare, elder and child care thereby ensuring that communities can serve families better.  Local governments can facilitate closer community relationships by setting aside land meant for families to enjoy like parks, skating rinks and other recreational activities.  At all levels of the government it is important to make sure that family and communities are served when creating and implementing new laws.