Podcast: Creating a nest
A discussion of families and their different forms
Podcast by Aria Nguyen
Transcript:
[Intro Music]
Aria Nguyen
Welcome to Klipsun Out Loud podcast from the spring 2023 edition of Western Washington University’s award winning student magazine, Klipsun. This edition theme is home. I’m your host Aria Nguyen, and today we’re going to be talking about the different forms of families and the stereotypes that may go along with them.
[Background Music]
[Music Fades]
Aria Nguyen
Families come in all shapes and sizes. However, throughout history one particular family dominated the media and society. This was the nuclear family, consisting of a married mom and father with children.
In 1915, as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics describes, it was common to see children living their coupled biological parents. Divorce was uncommon, and so the nuclear model thrived. Adapting to the times, we have seen the increased appearance of single parents and families that go outside the heteronormative expectations of society.
If divorce and other shapes and forms of families are more present today, then why do we still hold certain traditional ideals of families?
I recently had the pleasure to speak with both community members and experts to get their perspective on what society likes to label “non-traditional” families. I also got their opinions on biases that society still holds regarding families. Our first guest today is Natalie Hrabik. Natalie, a community member of Bellingham, Washington, had an upbringing that was not typical of her peers in western Washington. Here’s Natalie and I to describe what that experience was like.
Natalie
I guess my relationship with non-traditional families coming from a home that was a little long, the chaotic side. I would meet other kids who came from I guess, quote, unquote, broken homes since it was so lovingly referred to us as we were kids. And we would have all these like great strong friendships with kids who understood what it meant to grow up in kind of a chaotic, crazy household where there might not have been a lot of love, and if there was it was not consistent.
So, a single parent, I guess, it comes with a lot of inconsistencies.
There have been people in our lives be like, ‘Oh, your mom’s such a strong single mom like you’re so proud of her. Aren’t you so grateful for her?’
Stuff like that. My brother and I would kind of sit there and go, ‘Yeah, you know, she puts roofs over our heads and yeah, she’s great. She’s fantastic. She’s awesome.’
And then there will be people from like a more conservative community like some of our extended family, or depending on what school we went to, our own teachers and classmates. They’d be like, ‘Oh, only one parent. Like that’s a little shameful. That’s a little different. You’re from a broken home. You’re a bad kid.’
This…There would be like bullies from school. My brother and I might do something weird because we didn’t quite know how to interact with the world, and they’d say weird things. You know, like, ‘Oh, this is why this parent left you’ or ‘this is why this parent is in the hospital, because of you. Because of something you did.’
So, at times, it can be really brutal and really cruel, but other times there are people who saw it as very uplifting. And to kids, that can get kind of confusing.
Aria Nguyen
After learning more about Natalie’s childhood, we had a brief discussion about why there are mixed feelings toward different family types, especially single motherhood.
Natalie
I think for so, so, so long, they, they were just like implemented into us. And if we go, if we look like into the history of marriage for a hot second, you know, there were husbands and wives who stayed together, but not because they love each other. It was because they had like land and kids like way back in olden times when cell phones weren’t a thing.
You know, it wasn’t necessarily about love and how we’ve now twisted the idea of marriage to consider love and soulmates. You know, there was this new expectation around it. Then we decided that well if we weren’t being treated properly, we weren’t going to stand by this. If we weren’t happy, we weren’t going to stand by this silly little notion that you must remain married. So that was a whole, I feel like that was a shift in people’s thinking on such a grand scale that not everybody could quite keep up. And I feel like it’s also been very recent too.
I remember my mother thinking like, ‘I have to find a new husband. I have to find the kids like a stepdad or something like, we’ve got to get a man in this house.’ It never ever happened, but that was like a big thing for her. She’s like, ‘Okay, like we gotta get somebody in the house. We’ve gotta…” She wasn’t one of those like serial dating moms who brings home a guy every other weekend, she only ever brought one guy back, we met one guy in Canada, but it was still like external factors and external thinking, coming into her. Like, ‘I need to get a guy in this house that needs to be a husband there needs to be a dad for the kids like maybe then we’ll be seen differently.’ She eventually gave up on that and just embrace the single motherhood, happily, but I remember her mentioning that like, finding work was hard, because she’d have to find childcare.
And that a lot of employers they can’t like discriminate against you or something, but she remembered having Be careful what she said. You know, ‘Do you have kids?’ ‘Oh, yes. You know, they’re older’. Not mentioning that she had like little kids or that she was a single mom or that she’d have to wake up at four in the morning and drive her two kids to daycare so she can get to work on time. Any other 6 year old who gets up at 4 a.m. I want to meet them. It was all this like extra work too, and I feel like that all went on appreciated by the rest of the world.
And nobody really thought to think like ‘Oh, being a single mother.’ It’s hard and then to perform basic duties. You’ve got to jump through 10 extra hoops and you’ve got to kind of hide information away from people who don’t understand your situation.
Aria Nguyen
After discussing stereotypes, biases, and childhood upbringings with Natalie, I also wanted to get an expert opinion on families, specifically the way people categorize and label families. For this. Our next guest is Benjamin Garber. Let’s see how our conversation went.
Ben Garber
My name is Ben Garber. I’m a New Hampshire licensed psychologist formerly worked as a guardian ad litem. My career over the past 40 years has included a great deal of clinical work, directly with children, families, parents and the community. Over the last 10 years or more, it’s really evolved into a primary focus working with the children involved in the courts, particularly children who are caught up in high conflict, divorce, abuse, neglect and similar sorts of circumstances.
Aria Nguyen
While having a conversation with Ben. The topic of raising children was brought up, Ben had input on the upbringings of children and how the type of family structure does not matter. Any kid, no matter who they are raised by, has the potential to be happy and healthy. Here’s how that part of our conversation went.
Ben Garber
We know that empirically, children who are raised in the, now kind of old fashioned, Kibbutzim in Israel, where their opportunity to have individual parent contact day to day is quite different than what we’re used to here in the United States, grow up just fine. Children raised in the longhouses of, again, not so current, but African communities, to the limits of my knowledge, grow up to be just fine. There was once not so long ago, a huge controversy about children raised by same sex couples. We know, now know, that they can grow up to be just fine.
I don’t know the literature, but I would be shocked to see if anybody has researched multigenerational parenting configurations. As I said a moment ago, Mom living with her mom and her uncle, Dad living with his grandparents. So long as the caregivers involved are able to cooperate, to communicate, and to put the children’s needs, as opposed to their wants, first. Those children can grow up to be fine. I would just add one further thought. Certainly, you’ve heard the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child,” I firmly believe that I believe the literature in my field supports that. But I don’t think that that’s the full story. It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes caregivers who can collaborate together to raise a healthy child.
With the exception of researchers who have to make fine distinctions for the purpose of their professional audiences about this kind of family versus that kind of family, with that exception, I’m not clear why we need to use different words for different configurations. I would contend that when one or more adults collaborate, to serve the needs of one or more children within the confines of their cultural expectations, that that group should be called a family. It’s also important to be clear that what I just said is actually a subset of the larger context of family. I don’t want to negate the idea that adults living together with no children and no interest or activity, serving the needs of children, they also constitute families. They’re just not the type of family that we’re talking about.
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Aria Nguyen
That’s it for this edition of Klipsun Out Loud, podcasts from the spring 2023 edition of Western Washington University’s award winning student magazine, Klipsun. Thank you to my guests and thank you for listening.
