The family is both a social institution central to society and something many of us hold dear. Social problems related to the family occur on multiple levels; within families such as the gendered division of labor and between families such as social hierarchies of which families belong. Sociological theory and research, along with other social science research, have important implications for how our society should address family problems, both within families and in society.
Laws, Policies, and Programs
To lessen the impact of divorce or separation on adults and children, we may consider programs that improve relationship communication, reduce parental stress, or help families navigate divorce. For instance, mediation is the process in which neutral third parties help separating parents resolve conflict and negotiate belongings and custody. These programs have been shown to be effective, though we need more research (D’Onofrio & Emery 2019). Similarly, to ease the difficult experience of family violence, we could strengthen programs that house and care for victims. However, we could also consider programs and policies that address other, underlying social problems.
One idea concerns the many children and families living in poverty or who are otherwise low-income. The programs and policies outlined in the chapter on Poverty and Economic Inequality are certainly relevant for any efforts to help people experiencing hardships associated with being a divorced or separated family and adults or children experiencing family violence. These efforts include, but are not limited to, increased government financial support, subsidies for child care, vocational training and financial aid for schooling, early childhood visitation and intervention programs, and increases in programs providing nutrition and medical care to poor women and their children (Cherlin 2009).
To the extent that much violence against intimate partners and children is rooted in the frustration and stress accompanying poverty, efforts that reduce poverty will also reduce family violence. For instance, because child abuse seems more common among low-income families, efforts that reduce the stressors of poverty should also reduce child abuse. To the extent that gender inequality helps explain disproportionate family violence against women, continuing and strengthening laws, policies, and programs to reduce gender inequality should also reduce family violence. Regarding divorce, much evidence suggests that divorce from low-conflict marriages has negative consequences for spouses and children, and some evidence suggests that these consequences arise not from the divorce itself but rather from the conflict preceding the divorce and the poverty into which many newly single-parent households are plunged. To the extent that marital conflict partly arises from financial difficulties, once again government efforts that help reduce poverty should also help preserve marriages, reducing the negative consequences of divorce.
In all these efforts, the US has much to learn from the nations of Western Europe.
Lessons from Other Societies
Putting Families First: Helping Families in Western Europe
The nations of Western Europe make a much greater effort than the United States to help families with young children. According to sociologist James W. Russell, these nations believe that taking care of their children is a communal responsibility because “society as a whole benefits from having children adequately reared. Children grow up to take over the responsibilities of maintaining the survival of the society. They will also be available to provide needed services to both their own parents and aging adults who did not raise their own children. An aging adult who did not have children may need the services of a younger doctor who was raised by someone else.” In contrast, says Russell, the United States tends to believe that families need to be self-reliant and should not expect very much help from the government. This difference in philosophy leads Western European nations to provide much more support than the United States for families with young children.
This support takes several forms whose nature and extent vary among the Western European nations. Most of the nations, for example, provide at least four months of paid maternity leave after the birth of a child; in contrast, the United States guarantees only three months of unpaid leave, and only for employees who work for companies that employ at least fifty people. Many European nations also provide paid parental leave after the maternity leave benefits expire; the Untied States does not provide this benefit. In Sweden, parents share 450 days of paid leave to care for a new child.
In another striking difference from the United States, all European nations have a family allowance program, which provides cash payments to parents for every child they have after their first child. The intent here is to not only help these families, but also to encourage them to have children to help counter declining birth rates in Europe.
A third very important difference is that European nations provide free or heavily subsidized child care of generally high quality to enable parents to work outside the home. For example, France provides free child care for children ages 2–6 and pays 75 percent of the cost of child care for children under 2.
In these and other ways, the nations of Western Europe help their families with young children and thus their societies as a whole. The United States has much to learn from their example.
Sources: Russell 2011; Shahmehri 2007
Cultural Ideas and Ideals
Not all social change comes from policies and laws. Another important mechanism is changing cultural ideas and ideals. For instance, if cultural constructions of hegemonic masculinity – the expectation for men to be aggressive, powerful, and dominant – help explain the violence men commit against their women partners, as many scholars believe, then efforts to change boys' and mens' gender socialization should also help. Similarly, shifting heteronormative ideals and combating xenophobic stereotyping of immigrants would increase belonging for queer and immigrant families.
However, changing cultural ideas and ideals is a massive task. A meaningful shift must take efforts at all levels and within social institutions. In the institution of family, parents/guardians themselves could engage in socialization practices that minimize hegemonic masculinity. Within the institution of education, teachers and sports coaches could do the same and be intolerant of heterosexist or cissexist behavior in school. Within the institution of media, directors and writers could offer better models of masculinity, less heteronormative storylines, and portray the benefits that immigrant families offer to society. And so on.
Coaches often socialize boys into hegemonic masculinity; however, they can choose to instead offer another model of masculinity that does not center on dominance and aggression.
A Coach Teaching Children at a Soccer Field by Kampus Production via Pexels is licensed under an undeclared CC license
These efforts involve individual agency and organizational change. For instance, some fathers have chosen to raise their sons with an emphasis on expressing and sharing their emotions, and school and prison staff have implemented programs to help boys and incarcerated men learn to process their emotions and identify the harms of hegemonic masculinity and violence (Siebel Newsom 2015).
Individual Agency and Collective Action
Changes in belonging and other family problems depend on both individual agency and collective action. For example if you are in a heterosexual cohabitation, you may negotiate with your partner an equitable division of labor, which is a choice that your family is making to disrupt gender inequality in the family. For another example, early activism for gay and lesbian rights focused on recognizing and valuing all of the forms of family that queer people might experience. Because gay and lesbian people could not marry, adopt children, nor make medical decisions for each other, activists marched in the streets to say that “All Families Matter” whether they were legally recognized or not. In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which limited marriage to one man and one woman. Activism and legal challenges at the state level slowly won the right for same-gender couples to have civil unions and to marry (Goldberg 2015). On June 26, 2015, in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples. This combination of social movement pressure and legal action fundamentally changed the definition of marriage in the US.
One group of activists draws our attention: Queer Dreamers, sometimes called “undocu-queers” (undocumented and queer). These young people started organizing in early 2000 to advance immigrant and queer rights and support immigrant and queer families. Undocuqueer leaders have been visible in the immigrant rights movement in recent years. They have been at the forefront of many of the major protests and actions for the DREAM Act. One activist says, “I believe they have played a critical role in making sure that the public becomes aware of our situation and how we are fighting for our rights in this country (Terriquez 2015:344).”
These UndocuQueers (queer undocumented people) are marching in the Washington DC Pride Parade. How do you think that their work being intersectional helps their causes?
“Photo of UndocuQueers marching in DC” by Tim Evanson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Sociologist Veronica Terriquez (pictured below) was interested in finding out more about the relationship between coming out as queer and undocumented. She also wanted to find out if the two social movements – immigrant’s rights and queer rights – supported each other or remained separate movements. Movement activists worked to pass the DREAM Act and DACA, described earlier in the chapter. The social movement work involved in passing DACA was widespread, particularly in California, the state with the largest undocumented youth population (Terriquez 2015).
Veronica Terriquez, pictured here, is a sociologist and the director of the Chicano Research Studies Center at UCLA.
“Photo of Veronica Terriquez” by Ernesto Chavez, UCLA is included under fair use
Some young people organized a “Coming Out of Shadows” campaign (Sirriyeh 2018). This campaign encouraged undocumented people to talk about their undocumented status. The strategy was inspired by the queer process of 'coming out' – telling people you were queer/LGBTQ+. By going public with their undocumented identity, organizers hoped to break the social stigma of being undocumented and gain popular support for DACA. By borrowing an effective social movement technique, immigration organizers became more effective, which is collective action at work.
However, as sociologists, we want to understand more about the sequence of events to begin sorting out correlation and causation. More specifically, Teriquez (2015) wanted to know whether undocumented queer youth came out as queer first and then were brave enough to share their undocumented status or the opposite. She found that although many youth came out with both statuses simultaneously, most youth came out as undocumented first and then as queer. She cites two reasons for this directionality.
First, people who are undocumented have to rely on family support to survive in their new country. Family support is crucial to their survival because they aren’t legally allowed to work and, for the most part, don’t have access to insurance or other social safety net programs. The challenges to coming out are both physical and cultural. Teriquez provides this detail from Samir, a 24-year-old activist:
"We can’t [legally] have jobs, so we already have these financial issues. Once you come out to your family—and if they don’t respond very well—then there is that chance of losing your bed, a place to sleep. There’s a lot more you can lose because you can’t really take care of yourself financially when you’re undocumented" (Samir in Terriquez 2015:252).
Coming out as queer can be a significant emotional and economic risk for immigrant youth. These words from Alberto, a 26-year-old activist from Mexico, highlight the cultural barriers to coming out in a conservative Catholic immigrant family:
"My dad belonged to one of the most conservative organizations within the Catholic Church, and he was very vocal about his distaste for certain things, including homosexuality. So, I thought it was wrong to be gay because I grew up in that environment" (Alberto in Terriquez 2015:251).
Second, Terriquez finds that the experience of organizing for immigrant rights and coming out of the shadows empowers youth. As they experience the support they need to be more visible in their undocumented identity, they are more willing to share their queer identity. Terriquez writes, “As Ixchel, a prominent and openly bisexual leader explained, being open about one’s legal status ‘is a transition that helps queer folks come out; they experience the acceptance of coming out as undocumented, so it helps people come out as queer” (Terriquez 2015:253).
However, this order of coming out is not just about individual agency. It is also supported by the conscious choice of some immigrant rights organizations, particularly at universities and colleges, to engage in intersectional analysis. These organizations were deliberately welcoming to people with multiple oppressed identities. “Contributing to the intersectional mobilization of undocumented LGBTQ activists, this multi-identity work included deliberate efforts by leaders to combat homophobia as well as organizational practices that validated the experiences of LGBTQ members” (Terriquez 2015:354). In other words, some youth Dreamer organizations recognized that in addition to being undocumented, many of their members experienced oppression as women, queer or trans, or poor people. They understood the intersectionality of the oppression they were collectively facing and leveraged their diversity as a strength of their movement.
Some queer dreamers were not supported by wider immigrant rights organizations because they were queer. Some queer dreamers did not get support from campus LGBTQ+ organizations because they were Black, Brown, or Indigenous. In many cases, they formed their own social movement organizations to be their whole selves and access the political power that brought them. They created belonging in their own chosen families – families comprised of individuals one chooses such as close friends, coworkers, or some members of families of origin. They called their chosen families 'families from the heart,' or 'familias de corazón.'
They also use art as a form of protest and power. Julio Salgado, featured in the video below, is a Latinx artist who creates art to illustrate his life and the lives of other undocumented queers.
By coming out as queer and undocumented, these youth are fighting for social justice for themselves and their families.
