Family Power

You put your weight on the left foot and a mine goes off on the right; you shift to the right and the left side explodes.  That's how it feels sometimes to write about families.  Since almost everyone came from and belongs to a family, this gets personal.  It gets personal even for those who like to think of themselves as detached scholars!  I ponder this uncertain ground as I try to articulate the importance of productive families.  "A good marriage makes it measurably more possible to build a productive family," I might state.  "There you go, demeaning single parents," says a voice from the left.  "I hope you don't mean gay marriage," chimes in a voice from the right.  My book focuses on families formed by moms and dads because men and women bring children into the world, most kids are raised by them, and relations between men and women are complex enough on their own.  Grappling to be sensitive, I add that I know that other kinds of households, including those formed by gays and unmarried people, are raising children lovingly.  "What a shamefully narrow view!" says the left, condemningly.  "Don't open the door to gay families!" you hear from the right.  You'd like to think that starting with kids and the kinds of communities that are best for them would establish some kind of common ground for public dialogue.  But in today's climate, think again. 

For some years now, I have been the one in our family who cooks dinner.  I prepare all kinds of dishes - pastas, roasts, stir fry meals, soups, and others.  One of my sons' favorites is a mac & cheese casserole that is part Kraft and part more original combinations of diced tomatoes, sausage, tomato puree, beans, and spices such as chipotle pepper.  Sometimes, instead of the sausage, I toss in sliced hot dogs or ground beef.  I've wondered at times whether the kitchen becomes a more masculine space when dad, as oppposed to mom, has the lead role as chef.  How would one know?  What would be the indicators?  More dishes named after football formations?  No, that's not what I mean!  What cooking does for me as a dad is it gives me one more role through which to paticipate in shaping the life of the family - diet, budget, and frequency of family meals, for examples.  My wife cooks breakfasts and bakes bread, so she also has her footprint in the kitchen.  We quietly celebrate the meals we create that include vegetables and herbs from our garden.  Our kids take it for granted that mom and dad both cook. If the kitchen becomes a more masculine space when dad cooks, it's a pretty subtle change. Rather, in our case cooking does give dad ways to shape the family's habits and rhythms that he would not have enjoyed otherwise.

The quest to expand the school day in Chicago and elsewhere reflects the fact that neighborhoods and homes are lacking as decent developmental environments for children, especially during the late afternoon and evening hours.  Kids are too often left to supervise themselves, making them vulnerable to gangs, bullies, or free to spend hours watching television or video games.  Extending the hours that children are in formal school will not fix the problem of depleted neighborhoods and empty homes.  Because these empty or unmonitored spaces are so vital to a community's capacity to educate its children, keeping children in schools for an extra period won't make up for what they have lost elsewhere.  There is no adequate substitute for a family that is sufficiently present to co-teach its children with the schools.  Parents who teach must be more present no matter when the school day might end.

Relative to women in the US, men seem to be in decline.  They - we - are outnumbered in universities.  Fewer women see men as marriageable.  Many American males seem unable to adapt to an economy that increasingly values social skills over physical strength.  More males are around who have been partly responsible for bringing children into the world, but are not engaged actively as fathers with those young ones.  My wife, Maureen, commented yesterday while watching another TV commercial about a new video war game that men need to find new things beyond combat and sports to get excited about.  She's right! How about broadening our visions about how we can build a better world or, more modestly, better communities?  Family-generated community building sees men and boys involved in all kinds of production - enterprises, safe neighborhoods, food-growing lots, and many other actions that really matter.  Because the women have expanded their productive capacities, we can be freer to broaden ours as well. 

Productive families come in many forms.  Like our family, there is usually a decided messiness to them.  Some families are more productive as gardeners, some locate their work at home, while others emphasize the home as the base for education.  It's messy in that productive family life usually isn't organized tightly like a formal business or agency.  There is looser scheduling, unpredictability, and fluid spaces like recreation rooms that are used for many purposes at once.  There can be many styles of budgeting and varying levels of debt.  The key thing is that productive families control their time, space, and resources to do enough for themselves so that they aren't merely being run around and pushed about by employers, advertisers, schools, government agencies, and television programmers.  The productive family is not entirely independent of such entities and in many respects needs them. But, its ability to do some things for itself and to set terms for how it will co-produce some goods and services with those formal institutions is empowering.