Familial Sentiments Research Articles

Birth Order and Familial Sentiment: Middleborns are Different

Effects of birth order on several aspects of family relations and self-identity were examined in three studies. In Study 1, first and lastborn undergraduates were more likely than middleborns to refer to kinship in characterizing themselves. In Study 2, subjects were asked to whom they would turn under two scenarios of duress. First and lastborns were more likely to nominate parents, whereas middleborns were much more likely than other respondents to nominate siblings. In Study 3, analyses of historical archives and of an Internet questionnaire indicated that genealogical research attracts many more firstborns and many fewer middleborns than expected by chance. In all three studies, first and lastborns were much more likely than middleborns to nominate their mothers as the person to whom they felt closest. These substantial effects support Sulloway’s claim that birth orders constitute significant family “niches,” which differ with respect to the perceived dependability of parental investment and therefore also differ in the social orientations that they engender.

Michael Jordan’s Family Values: Marketing, Meaning, and Post-Reagan America

Michael Jordan ’s body offers a significant site to explore larger cultural meanings and anxieties in post-Reagan America. Informed by cultural studies sensibilities, this paper explores selected sporting and advertising accounts to suggest that representations of Jordan’s athletic body are constructed by promoters in ways which rely on particular associations of Black masculinity, sexuality, and the nuclear family. The carefully crafted image of Michael Jordan offers an enticing portrait of Black masculinity, playing off notions of natural athleticism and family sentiment in ways designed to induce devotion. This public persona of Jordan participates in the moralistic “family values” climate of post-Reagan America, while simultaneously working to deny historical and stereotypical depictions of Black masculinity as overtly erotic and dangerous. Thus marketing strategies encourage a voyeuristic, albeit “safe” enjoyment of Jordan’s commodified body.

Childcare Choice and Constraints in the United States: Social Class, Race and the Influence of Family Views

One of the most pervasive aspects of the Cultural war (Hunter 1991; Wolfe 1993) over family life in the 1990s and next century is over the raising of children. Daycare versus within the family for children under school age is one highly contested aspect of this battle. Because of ideological conflicts, especially over family forms and family norms (Hartmann and Spalter-Roth 1994),and because of the history and politics of attempted family policy, there is no recognizable or coherent proactive family policy in the United States (Pleck 1992) but only a regulatory function unevenly present and enforced (Maynard and McGiniss 1992). In the absence of policy-making in the United States and societal agreement that would legitimate access to a variety of types of non-family for young children, couples are forced to make individual, complex, time-consuming decisions. As a result, and with trepidation, couples rely on community and extended family to inform and legitimate their decisions. Each couple alone comes to terms with integrating two jobs and the presence of young children in the household. Ideology in the U.S leads us to expect that we are constantly exercising free-will and that we are agents acting on our preferences. This paper will demonstrate that decision-making is as much influenced by constraint as by choice. Unlike all other industrialized countries (cf. Moen. 1989; Hartmann and Spalter-Roth 1994), the U.S does not provide either universal subsidized childcare (except Headstart) at any age or paid and extended parental leave. By contrast, in European countries, between 73% and 95% of children, aged three to five, are in publicly funded daycare. Even in these countries, for children under age three is largely not subsidized and pieced together. Parents use a combination of some subsidized in-home care, cooperative arrangements among families, family daycare, and center-based for infants. The overall absence of direct childcare subsidy for infants and young toddlers is mitigated somewhat by generous parental leave policies which allow the mother or father to remain home with the child during infancy without loss of income. For example, in Sweden most children under the age of nine months have one parent at home, which is made possible by State mandated policies (Ferber and O' Farrell 1991).' Despite ideological controversy in the U.S. over who should raise the next generation of children, mothers of young children remain in the work force in dramatically large numbers (Hayes et al. 1990). Thus, daycare is a reality for most U.S. families regardless of social class (Hayes et al. 1990; Pleck 1992). Because childcare is largely not subsidized in the United States, besides rent or mortgage payments, childcare is the single largest cost couples have. However, cost is not commonly the most important factor in choices about childcare. In this study reported below, we found that childcare decisions were embedded in implicit family sentiments. We discuss changing family practices and views of motherhood, the factors couples consider in the selection of childcare arrangements, the meaning of altering the mother's role and replacing her. Then, we turn to an examination of various consequences of workplace constraints and the strategies couples develop in order to participate in daily childcare. These concerns are also addressed by the kinds of childcare options from which parents can choose. The broad range of types of childcare are represented by the couples in this study: including live-in or live-out providers (nannies or persons who are not relatives), relatives, family daycare (based in the provider's home), center-based daycare (which include centers opened from 7 to 6.30 five days a week and centers which have more restricted hours). Additionally, most families supplement their primary arrangement with other adults who provide either back-up care when a child is sick, or occupy transitional hours from primary childcare arrangements to home. …

A Slave Family in the Ante Bellum South

Twentieth century scholars of Afro-American history have offered two basically different interpretations concerning the effect of slavery on the black family. In his famous 1932 study Negro Family in the United States, Negro sociologist E. Franklin Frazier asserted that slavery destroyed the black family. Fundamental economic forces and material interests, he said, shattered even the toughest bonds of black familial sentiments and parental love. Supporting Frazier in the 1959 comparative analysis, Slavery: A Problem in American Intellectual and Institutional Life, white historian Stanley M. Elkins listed four reasons for the destruction of the black slave family: sexual exploitation, separation, miscegenation, and restrictive legal codes. The law could permit no aspect of the slave's conjugal state to have an independent legal existence. In an examination of the urban South, historian Richard C. Wade likewise concluded that For a slave, no matter where he resided, a house was never a home. Families could scarcely exist in bondage. law recognized no marriage. And Daniel P. Moynihan, in his 1965 report, re-iterated that slavery had an extremely negative effect on the black family.

Transition from Familism to Nationalism Among Chinese in Hawaii

Shifts in group loyalties and identifications among immigrants and their descendents, particularly with reference to the institutions of political and social control in which they participate, constitute an index of their progressive assimilation into the new society. Early institutions established by Chinese migrants in Hawaii, although based on traditional familial sentiments, represent an expansion of Old World local identifications. Development of nationalistic societies, taking forms corresponding to movements in China, indicate further enlargement of the migrants' social world. Another shift in the area of group loyalties is revealed in the establishment of institutions designed to deal with problems confronting the Chinese community in Hawaii as a whole. Increased identification with the envolving Hawaiian society is represented by individual migrants who became citizens and functionaries of the Hawaiian government. The assimilation of the Hawaiian-born Chinese must be analyzed in terms of this changing configuration of identifications and loyalties of the immigrants.

Family Sentiments

Family Sentiments