Family estrangement and modern parenting

Photo: The Guardian

I caught 1A with Joshua Johnson the other day, and was happy to hear my friend Joshua Coleman featured. The discussion was about family estrangement, which is Joshua’s clinical specialty (he’s a psychologist), and the subject of his book, When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along. Joshua works with a lot of parents who have been estranged by their adult children, which in the social media era doesn’t necessarily mean being cut off, like it might have once upon a time — now it might mean being subjected to constant reminders of children’s social and family lives that deliberately exclude parents.

Of course, the freedom to estrange oneself from a family is very important, and a great thing about modern family life. But it’s also often awful. And it highlights the intense and rapid generational changes we’re going through as well. So this is something to wrestle with, which is what the show did.

I took the liberty of transcribing a few of Joshua’s comments, which I then ran by him for permission and a quick edit, and present here more or less in their original form. Joshua said:

One of the things that’s confusing for so many of the estranged parents I work with is that what gets called abusive or traumatizing behavior today would not have been considered abusive or traumatizing in their generation. This relates to what [Nick] Haslam refers to as “concept creep”: the process of expanding the definition of what is considered harmful behavior. From my perspective as a psychologist this causes some adult children to justify their estrangements or negative evaluations of their parents’ actions.

…

Much of what gets labeled as abusive or traumatizing today on the part of the parent, does not strike me as genuine abuse or trauma. For example, being controlling, manipulative, intrusive, even critical at times is not necessarily abuse. At the very least, not abusive enough to alter the trajectory of a life in the way that it’s commonly portrayed. But part of the problem is that we live in a culture that’s very much dominated by a kind of  psychological narrative where people are led to believe that the way that their lives turn out are almost exclusively explained by their childhoods, while contemporary research doesn’t really show that to be case. In fact, parents play a relatively small role in adult outcome while genetics, social class, economics, peer group, and random good or bad luck can all be considered equal if not more powerful determinants of outcome. [Post-show addition: As Jennifer Silva wrote in her book Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty: “Family pathology is invoked both to explain (to themselves and to others) why they have not achieved traditional adult milestones and to map meaning, order, and progress onto their experiences of stagnation in the present.”]

We also live in a society, and at a time where so much is being put onto parents’ shoulders, that other cultures have the wisdom to not put onto the parents’ shoulders. For example, in most Western industrialized nations there is free or highly subsidized childcare, free or highly subsidized college, free or highly subsidized insurance – while in America this is all up to the parent. So there’s a reason that today’s parents are deeply worried and over-involved and concerned about their children’s safety and well-being because it’s all on them. Not only are their adult children sometimes accusing them of not doing enough or doing it well, but so is everyone else including self-help authors and politicians.

When host Joshua Johnson asked for clarification, Joshua Coleman added:

There is of course real abuse and trauma that occurs at the hands of parents; I’m not saying it never occurs, I’m just saying the concept has been so greatly expanded that it’s becoming more of a problem than an asset.

Gender on the Diane Rehm show in September

The last Media Matters report on the Sunday TV talk shows reported that 73% of guests were men in 2015, a little less than the 75% recorded for the previous two years. (That includes journalists as well as politicos.) I expect my local NPR station, with its liberal audience, to have a better showing for women, and it does. The Diane Rehm Show, which is produced at WAMU but distributed nationally as well as podcasted, had 129 guests in September, and 80 of them (62%) were men, by my manual count. (I’m not counting the hosts, who changed over the month.)

But what has been striking me lately, and the reason I did the count, was how rarely it seems that women are in the majority among the guests, and especially how often there is one woman and more than one man. Without a whole conversation analysis, you can imagine the kind of dynamic that made me think, “sure is a high male/female word-count ratio in this discussion.”

The count confirms this. The show averaged 2.8 guests per episode. So how are the men and women distributed? Of the 46 shows aired in September, 12 featured just one guest, 8 of whom were male. Male guests outnumbered female guests overall in 29 episodes, or 63% of the shows. Female guests outnumbered men in only 8 shows (17%), with the remaining 9 (20%) being gender balanced. What accounts for my annoyance, maybe, was that in those male-dominated shows, more than half (16 of 29) featured just one woman and more than one man. The reverse – one man and more than one woman – happened just three times. Details in the figure.

The most common configuration is one woman and two men. 

My point is just that a 62% / 38% gender split leads to a lot of small-group discussions where men outnumber women, and especially solo-women versus multiple men, which is its own kind of gender situation. I imagine you get this pretty often in cases – say, at an academic conference – where there is some effort to reach gender balance on most panels, but women are less than half altogether. (You can see they were paying attention because there were no all-male panels of four or five.)

I’ll leave it to Media Matters to do their annual report again next year, but I did take a quick look at some of the Sunday shows for September. On Meet the Press I found 62% men, and 75% of the shows were male-dominated. On Fox News Sunday 71% of guests were male, and every show was male-dominated. Face the Nation had 72% male guests but also every one male-dominated. (Incidentally, Face the Nation has a convenient list of every guest so far for the year, so I was able quickly tally the gender of their 348 guests, 73% of whom were men, counting multiple appearances. That’s a tiny bit better than their 2015 total of 76%.)

---

Related on gender composition:

• Gender and the sociology faculty
• The most comprehensive analysis ever of the gender of New York Times writers

Is it me or is the liberal media elite getting more tone-deaf?

In two acts.

Act I: David Brooks

For whatever reason, one of the first things I read today was this David Brooks column, “The Nature of Poverty.” Brooks is selling character these days, so his own brand of vapid exhortation on the subject has reached a fever pitch in his columns. But in this case what struck me was not the pedantic “we’ve done so much and they are still not pulling their own weight” thing (not a quote), but the extreme blindness on the issue of the protests — which he didn’t even mention (after this sociology 101 fail of an opening: “Lately it seems as though every few months there’s another urban riot” — which is a quote).

What I mean is, the Black (and other) residents of the city rising up in protest is staring him in the face as a response to decades of exploitation, marginalization, and repression, and he just wants to talk about the same old problem of lacking “responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.” Amazingly, in the very next sentence, he offers this juxtaposition: “a healthy neighborhood is like a ballet, a series of intricate interactions in which people are regulating each other and encouraging certain behaviors.”

Really, ballet? Could he not think of any of the other millions of examples of social life that fit exactly the description, “a series of intricate interactions in which people are regulating each other and encouraging certain behaviors”? That basically describes any society (even poor ones), or any collective activity. Maybe it never crossed his mind that juxtaposing the character-deprived ghetto with the beautiful ballet might have a slightly elitist connotation? I know ballet is not — and should not be — all White, but it’s pretty White, especially in the popular imagination. Here’s the first page Google image search for “ballet child”:

Of course, social organization is a big issue, and concentrating the efforts of poor communities for successful social change is vitally important. Brooks sees the dysfunction, and the riot, but he doesn’t see the beautifully unfolding protest, the real story of the day.

Act II: Nina Totenberg

After that aggravation, imagine my delight when, as my New York Times / NPR morning unfolded, I found out Nina Totenberg was one of the panelists on the Diane Rehm show’s weekly news roundup. Always rational and erudite, a keen legal analyst, she may be the favorite voice on NPR. But today her cluelessness reminded me a lot of Brooks’.

Seven minutes into the show, they turned from the details of the Baltimore situation to the social context, and Totenberg launched into this description of the city. This is her entire comment:

If you go to Baltimore – and they’re our neighbors here, and we go all the time – it is the quintessential example of a city that once was a thriving manufacturing, also a port, city. And now when you go there, they’ve built up the Harbor, and that’s lovely, but you drive through that city – it’s not that big – and half of it looks boarded up, people are standing on the street corners looking – just hanging out, looking like they’re probably drunk, and with nothing to do. It is sort of – the scene when you drive through the city, if you’re going to Johns Hopkins for something, and you drive through that city, it is reminiscent of what townships looked like in apartheid South Africa. It’s not a pretty sight.

This struck me as the nadir of the elitist media model that the show represents so well. She is telling us about Baltimore, based on her expertise which stems, apparently, from visiting the Inner Harbor and driving through “half the city” on her way to Johns Hopkins University. (Her use of the second person in “you’re going to Johns Hopkins for something” brings to mind Rebecca Skloot’s description in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, in which the poor Black population of Baltimore historically had no contact with the elite White campus in its midst.)

Of course, unemployment is a serious problem in the poor parts of Baltimore — and their addicts can’t as easily conceal their condition as can those with more wealth and real estate. But it’s the old, scared-White-person-driving-through-the-ghetto thing that Rand Paul illustrated the other day with, “I came through the train on Baltimore last night. I’m glad the train didn’t stop.” You would think Totenberg would have watched The Wire at least enough to get the point that behind the unemployed people on street corners — inside the homes that you can’t drive through — there are men, women, and children doing all the other things people try to do everywhere else in the country, but with less money and more police brutality to contend with.

Of course she’s sympathetic about poverty. So I would have let it go, if she hadn’t followed it up with this. When host Susan Page mentioned the controversy over “calling them riots or rebellions,” and Obama using the word “thugs.” She asked, “Nina, how much difference does the language that we journalists use matter in a case like this?” To which Totenberg responded:

Well, I suppose it does. But I don’t see that people who are setting fires and breaking windows and looting stores, that you can call it a rebellion. That’s a really – that’s a stretch for me. You can have terrible wrongs, at the same time that you have a reaction that’s – inappropriate – let’s put it that way. I mean, I read a story that even some of the gang members [chuckle] were helping to calm things down.

First, I’m trying to think of an example from history of something that you would call a rebellion — in anything but a metaphorical sense — that would not include setting fires, breaking windows, and looting stores. To make matters worse, her followup gang comment, rather than illustrating a heightened level of community solidarity that has appeared in Baltimore, is somehow supposed to make the rioters look even more savage, because they’re even offending gang members.

Toward the end of the hour Susan Page gave Totenberg a chance to help herself out a little:

Page: We’ve gotten several emails, directed at you Nina, and a comment that you made earlier. I’ll just read one of them from W. Middleton, who’s writing us from Ohio, this person writes, “I am troubled by the poor choice of words describing citizens of Baltimore. To say that people are just standing around and looking drunk is insulting and in many ways captures a racist portrayal of communities of color.” What would you say, Nina?

Totenberg: Well, I s— didn’t have in mind any particular race. What I had in mind was people who obviously have no job, nothing to do, are standing on the corner, not fully functional, perhaps I should’ve said “not fully functional,” and that is the saddest thing in a, in a country that prides itself on the ability to – uh, as a working country.

Completely missing the point that it’s not necessarily offensive to describe a drunk person on the street corner as a drunk person on a street corner, what’s offensive is describing half the city as a drunk person on a street corner.

Epilogue

The authenticity craze sweeping young people is accentuated by social media, which delivers “real time” information, and smartphone cameras, which are perceived as unedited windows into reality. That these old media elites would say things offensive to poor Black people is of course not news. But what strikes me more and more is that the out-of-touchness of their offensiveness is growing increasingly apparent in contrast to the wave of apparently (if not actually) unmediated, authentic information all around them.

This word ‘generation,’ I do not think it means what you think it means

The people who make up these things drive me bananas.

NPR launched a new series on “millennials” yesterday, called “New Boom,” with this dramatic declaration: “There are more millennials in America right now than baby boomers — more than 80 million of us.”

The definition NPR gives for this generation is “people born between 1980 and 2000.” And it’s true there are more than 80 million of them. In fact, there are 91 million of them, according to the 2012 American Community Survey data you can get from IPUMS.org.* That’s OK, though, because there are only 76 million Baby Boomers, so the claim checks out.

But what’s a generation?

The Baby Boom was a demographic event. In 1946, after the end of World War II, the crude birth rate — the number of births per 1,000 population — jumped from 20.4 to 24.1, the biggest one-year change recorded in U.S. history. The birth rate didn’t fall back to its previous level until 1965. That’s why the Baby Boom went down in history as 1946 to 1964. Because that’s when it happened.

This figure shows the number of living people by birth year, and the crude birth rate recorded in each year, using the NPR definition of millennials (in red), compared with the baby boom (purple):

Even with population growth I reckon the people born in the years 1946-1964 might outnumber the self-promoting millennials if not for the weight of mortality pulling down the purple bars. But if the young NPR reporters want to brag about outnumbering a generation that is starting to lose its older members to old age (and who are, after all, their parents), then I guess the shoe fits.

The Baby Boom was not a generation. It was a cohort, “a group of people sharing a common demographic experience” (in this case birth during the same period). That demographic event happens to have lasted 18 years, which is unfortunate because that may have contributed to the tendency to declare “generations” of similar lengths.

The Pew Research people, who do lots of interesting work on social change that uses generational concepts, use these slightly different definitions for four generations: Silent Generation, born 1928-1945; the Baby Boom Generation, born 1946-1964; Generation X, born 1965-1980; Millennial Generation, born 1981 and later (Pew says “no chronological endpoint has been set for this group,” which is awkward because if they’re really still going, the oldest are 33 and they have children that are the same generation as themselves**). Ironic, isn’t it, that Pew constructs “Generation X” as the shortest of the four (some generation, a mere 16 years!) before declaring them “America’s neglected ‘middle child.’”

Real generations rarely have starting and ending points on a population level. Populations usually just keeping having births every year in smooth patterns of increase or decrease without discrete edges, so generations overlap. Even in families it gets hard to nail down generations once you start moving horizontally; siblings born many years apart are in the same generation, but the cousins get all confused.

Meaningful cohorts, on the other hand, can be defined all over the place, such as: the people who graduated college during the Great Recession, people who introduced the Internet to their parents, and so on. These are not generations.

In 2010, when crisis was really in the air, I was on the NPR show The State of Things in North Carolina, discussing the Baby Boom (no audio online). After attempting to clarify the difference between a generation and a cohort, I offered this dramatic example of a cohort — people born in 1960 specifically:

So if you were born in 1960, graduated college in 1982, and entered the labor force in the middle of an awful recession, then managed to pull some kind of career together, got married and divorced, by the 90s it was time to be downsized already for the first time, you’re 40 in 2000, and it’s time for the dot-com bubble, you’re out of your job again, and here you are ready for your retirement, finally, you’ve been left in your own 401(k), having to put together your own pension, and of course now that’s in the tank and your house isn’t worth anything. So that insecurity and instability is really imprinted this group. We talk about the 60s, and civil rights and antiwar, and great music and everything, but that’s seeming like a long time ago now for people who are looking at retirement.

I don’t know if anyone actually had that experience, but it seems likely.

Anyway, if people really want to keep using these generation labels, and it seems unlikely to stop now given the marketing payoff from naming rights, than that’s the way it goes. But please don’t ask demographers to define them.

Notes

* This is a little different from the population estimates the Census Bureau produces, which are coded by age rather than year of birth. I use the ACS data because they report year of birth, and because it’s easier. The differences are very small.

** Thanks to Mo Willow for pointing this out.