Standard North American Family Research Articles

What's Wrong With Family Diversity? Five Cultural Assumptions About the Standard North American Family

ABSTRACTAcceptance of family diversity has increased. However, families that differ from the standard North American family (SNAF) are still confidently portrayed as the cause of numerous social problems, even when evidence may be lacking or mixed. This article describes and critiques five assumptions that inform advocates' claims: the belief that the heterosexual nuclear family is the most (1) real, (2) divine, (3) natural, (4) longstanding, and (5) functional form of kinship. These ideas, though dubious, can exert harmful influence on Americans in their personal lives and in public policymaking.

“Is This Your Baby?”: Gay Fathered Families’ Experiences Navigating Heteronormativity in the United States

ABSTRACT Little research has directly analyzed the ways in which gay fathered families navigate experiences stemming from the fact that their family type stands out and challenges heteronormative family ideologies and the culturally dominant “Standard North American Family” or SNAF model. Using interviews with 37 gay fathers and integrating queer theory as a theoretical tool, this study examines these experiences. Results show that fathers queered the family by openly and honestly addressing family, friends, and strangers that questioned or commented on their families. They also queered education by urging schools to have books and other media normalizing and explaining families outside of the heteronormative SNAF and by challenging how the SNAF is used to organize routine school events. These findings reveal how gay fathered families can broaden our definition of family and change the institutions of the family and education by confronting heteronormative binaries that surround gender, sexuality, and family.

Surfacing Family Privilege and Supremacy in Family Science: Toward Justice for All

In family science, a great deal of scholarly work has focused on marginalized and disadvantaged families with stated goals of improving family outcomes and well‐being. Yet little attention has been paid to family privilege and the ways in which the advantages of privileged families are maintained within a White heteronormative hegemonic society to the continued disadvantage of others. In this article, I define family privilege and consider how it intersects with other privileges (e.g., White privilege) to maintain the supremacy of the Standard North American Family. I theorize how family privilege is masked yet perpetuated and instantiated in the field of family science. I conclude with a discussion of approaches that family scientists can employ to surface and redress family privilege in the self, family privilege in family theories and methods, and the mechanisms that perpetuate family privilege and the maintenance of advantage. This work is critical to advancing family equality and social justice.

Narratives on the Autism Journey: “Doing Family” and Redefining the Caregiver Self

Drawing on 50 in-depth semistructured interviews with primary caregivers of at least one child diagnosed with autism, this study demonstrates how the current social experience of caring for a child with an ambiguous and invisible disorder upsets the identities of primary caregivers and challenges their ability to perform the traditional Standard North American Family ideal and normative ways of “doing family.” Accordingly, I employ a narrative framework to (a) understand deeply how everyday autism care work affects family life, caregivers’ identities, and feelings of family marginalization and (b) investigate how symbolic resources, like support groups, can provide a space to reorient and transform ideas and practices of family and caregiver identity. Through their intensified care work and psychosocial experiences on the autism journey, caregivers demonstrate how they understand, negotiate, and redefine identities and dominant ideas of family in complex and fluid ways.

Single Mothers “Do” Family

This paper explores how single mothers both incorporate others into family life (e.g., when they ask others to care for their children) and simultaneously “do families” in a manner that holds out a vision of a “traditional” family structure. Drawing on research with White, rural single mothers, the author explores the manner in which these women both endorse their children’s attachment to other caregivers and maintain boundaries around issues of discipline and attachment vis‐à‐vis these others. The author demonstrates that single mothers are willing to share this protected realm of family life with a new man (a fiancé or cohabiting boyfriend) as they pursue the goal of what has been called the “Standard North American Family.”

“Doing Family Ambivalence”: Nuclear and Extended Families in Single Mothers’ Lives

Little research today examines the connections between and extended family ties, especially among single mothers. I congratulate Margaret Nelson on her refreshing examination of this issue and commend the Journal of Marriage and Family and its editor, Alexis Walker, for inviting a public debate on this article. Nelson examines single mothers' accounts of their family experiences, describing their choices in defining their families and negotiating the relationships with their own parents, nonresident fathers of their children, and new boyfriends or fiances. Importantly, Nelson shows how extended kin ties of single mothers are affected by the cultural expectations of nuclear family ties. Nelson's main theoretical framework is that of Furthermore, her analysis elaborates on this theoretical approach by revealing the structural and cultural forces behind doing family processes. To fully account for Nelson's findings, however, is necessary to combine the notion of doing family with that of family ambivalence. I address three concepts related to the broader family framework-boundary ambiguity, role ambiguity, and intergenerational ambivalence-and discuss their value for understanding Nelson's findings. Further, I discuss her findings with regard to the cultural ideal of the Standard North American Family (SNAF; Smith, 1993) and address the role of and extended families in contemporary American society. DOING FAMILY As mentioned above, Nelson interprets her findings through the lens of family. This perspective emphasizes interactional work and activities that create and sustain family ties, define family boundaries, as well as specify appropriate behaviors for different family members. Nelson is correct to point out that the concept of doing family has been traditionally undertheorized, especially when compared with the concept of the meaning of which is better fleshed out and developed. Although Nelson mentions that her use of the term doing family remains far more casual than the more elaborate notion of doing gender, in fact she develops this concept more deeply than much prior work on doing Agreeing with Naples (2001) that the activities of doing family are most apparent for nonnormative families, Nelson focuses on single mothers. In contrast to much prior work on doing family that focused on activities that create and enhance links between family members (family meals, trips to the zoo), Nelson emphasizes the boundary work that involves decisions on who counts as family and who does not and what rights and obligations are accorded to those who do. Further, in line with the work on doing gender, Nelson also identifies the structural and cultural forces that shape how single mothers perform families. Structural forces involve financial need and the need for child care that require single mothers to rely on their parents for help; cultural factors involve the ideal of SNAP. The combination of these forces introduces a substantial amount of into single mothers' family life. Although Nelson emphasizes doing family in her analytic framework, family ambivalence might be a more accurate description of what is going on in these single mothers' lives. Even though these women construct the boundaries and create the rules, they experience indecision, conflicted feelings, and uncertainty in the process. That is, there is a high degree of involved in their choices. As Nelson puts it, individuals within what might be defined as a family grouping might themselves have conflicting notions of just what family they are doing, and for just what reasons they are doing it (p. 794). Addressing the normative structure of kin obligations, Rossi and Rossi (1990, p. 198) emphasize two primary areas where show up with particular force, grandparenting and remarriage. The single mothers that Nelson studies experience ambiguities and stemming from negotiating the issues related to both of these areas as well as to nonresident fatherhood. …

Mothers and Daughters “Do,” Fathers “Don’t Do” Family: Gender and Generational Bonds

'Do' shows the fluidity definitions of who is in and of the families of single mothers and discusses how mothers construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct their Nelson (2006) suggests that single mothers respond to the hegemony of the Standard North American Family (SNAF) (Smith, 1993), a family ideal they cannot achieve practice but one that dominates their conception of what a family should be. These single mothers' own mothers-the maternal grandmothers of their children-come to the rescue times of need. Single mothers are quick to replace grandmothers with their new partners, however. These are men whom single mothers would like to see become involved their children's lives. A single mother wants to incorporate a new partner into her definition of her family because it allows a single mother to approximate the ideal, the heterosexual couple, two-parent family norm. The single mother does not question that this family form is best for rearing her children, even though her family can never quite achieve perfection because of the weak tie, indeed the absence, of her children's biological father. It is useful to think about the fragility of family life that is implied by the term family. The argument is that families are constantly being created, destroyed, and recreated. We all include somewhat different sets of individuals definitions of who is our family. No parent is biologically related to the same set of people as is that parent's children. Furthermore, ties beyond biology abound a world where almost half of marriages end divorce, one third of children are born outside marriage, and repartnering is commonplace. I find the social constructionist, emergent nature of family implied the concept of doing family provocative, but I also think there are limits to the usefulness of the concept and the emphasis on instability family definitions that this notion implies. Families may to some extent be done or constructed, as Nelson (2006) suggests, and a single mother may perhaps hold a vision of the family that leads her to minimize grandmother-grandchild ties once a new lover enters her life. But nonetheless, some intergenerational bonds-those between a mother, her daughter, and her daughter's children-seem rather impervious to deconstruction. On one hand, mothers tend not to leave their children. Maternal grandmothers support their daughters and grandchildren and provide a safe haven to which daughters can return when bonds between single mothers and the men their disintegrate. Fathers, on the other hand, do leave their children and consequently, men seem much greater danger of being defined out of families than mothers and grandmothers. Grandmothers' primacy may fade with a new partner-they may recede into the background-but they do not disappear. Margaret Nelson's (2006) title, 'Do' could as easily be Mothers and Daughters 'Do' Family. Women rear children the face of the exodus of men from family life and they do so by bonding across generations. Although the article makes interesting points about mothers' desire to control their childrearing and mothers' eagerness to reconstruct the SNAF by transferring care of children to new partners, what really stands out is the picture of intergenerational exchange and bonds of dependence, obligation, affection, and caregiving. We are left with two questions that are at the heart of the intersection of gender, family, and generation: Why are ties along the maternal line so strong, especially times of crisis? Why are biological ties between fathers and their children often so weak? Gender and Generational Ties In his Burgess Award Lecture, published Journal of Marriage and Family February 2001, Vern Bengtson argued that ... for many Americans, multigenerational bonds are becoming more important than nuclear family ties for well-being and support over the course of their lives (Bengtson, 2001, pp. …

Compromises to Carework: The Social Organization of Mothers' Experiences in the Low-Wage Labor Market after Welfare Reform

Using institutional ethnography (IE), this article explores the social organization of mothers' carework after welfare reform. Carework experiences are shaped by the conditions of low-wage work, welfare policy, and the discourses in which these mothers are embedded. Three discursive frameworks emerge in these women's discussions of the ways they balance carework and paid work: the mothering discourse, the ideological code of the Standard North American Family (SNAF), and a discourse of work enforcement (Piven 2001). Mothers engage these discourses in various ways that recruit them, to varying degrees, into participating in the ruling relations of neoliberalism, which subordinate them.

“How Could a Mother...?” Matricide and Text-Mediated Relations of Family Discourse

On September 3, 1998, Khoua Her, a 24-year-old Hmong refugee living in St. Paul, Minnesota, killed all six of her young children and attempted suicide. On the surface the worst case of matricide in United States history, a careful reading of the numerous press-generated reports reveals that for years, Her struggled against the ravages of poverty to keep her family together. Referencing the Standard North American Family (SNAF) narrative of mothering, press coverage of this horror story seeks to address the question, “How could a mother do this to her own children when the children are so innocent?” The author argues that a deep reading of the press-generated story surfaces evidence that, having exhausted all resources for keeping her family together, Her gave up. The article concludes that SNAF transforms evidence of Her’s mothering work into proof that she was a “bad mother.”

The Standard North American Family

This article describes the “Standard North American Family” or SNAF as an ideological code. An ideological code is analogous to a genetic code, reproducing its characteristic forms and order in multiple and various discursive settings. Its operation in two settings is explored. The first is the writer's experience (shared with Alison Griffith) of designing and carrying out a study of the work that women do as mothers in relation to their children's schooling. Although the researchers were committed to feminist methods and to a critical perspective, SNAF reproduced itself in their conceptualization, their interview practices, and in how women responded to them. The second is William Julius Wilson's consideration of the Black family in his study The Truly Disadvantaged. An analysis of his text demonstrates its SNAF-governed order and how its representational credibility is sustained by the SNAF-generated statistics of government agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Census. It is suggested that such ideological codes may have a significant political effect by importing representational order even into the texts of those who are overtly opposed to the representations they generate.