“I learned something new about my children today,” a mom commented as she left the Family Festival, with three kids, three kites, and three wind chimes in tow. That felt good to hear. We put on the family festival to create the conditions for families to discover, learn, and have fun, together. The 100 or so families that came out to the Rajah Street Reserve last Sunday certainly seemed to have fun, many trying out a flat white or a professional massage for the first time. Yet not all families learned, together, as a whole unit. At times, kids were sent off to learn from Allan, the cartoonist, or Matt, the sound guy, while parents hung out at the cafe and supervised from the periphery.
Some of this was a result of the festival’s spatial layout. The tents where there was room for whole families to convene had much more whole family interaction (e.g. our $100 family grants tent). Some of this might be also about normal routines: we’re used to dropping kids off at school and watching them on the playground. There aren’t a whole lot of spaces set-up for parents to be more than passive observers of their kids, particularly as they get older and don’t need mom or dad’s constant help. Some of this might be about parenting discourse too.
Most of the books and magazine articles we’ve found focus on parenting, not on families. Last week at the bookstore, I counted over 100 books on routines, discipline, and day-to-day problems like potty training and finicky eating. I found only a couple of books about the family experience, about planning and making decisions as a whole unit. I found no books helping families to think past the here-and-now, and plan into the future.
This mirrors the academic literature. Attachment theory dominates (e.g. the relationship between babies and caregivers). Parenting style literature is also ever-present. It’s all about children’s development, not family development. Even the research that looks at family strengths is descriptive and not projective. This research tells us strong families have ‘good communication’ and ‘spend time together’ but does not tell us anything about what families aspire to or what they want from each other. The family is not conceptualised as an enabler of anything beyond day-to-day living. Even the themes of learning and discovery are absent from the family strengths literature.
The sameness of the literature seems to help explain the sameness of the practice we are seeing. Most of the services are either about parents or children, not family. There are home visiting initiatives and parenting groups for parents, and then playgroups, after school activities, and holiday schemes for children. All of this is about making sure kids develop in a healthy and normal way. It is not really about family thriving.
This week we’re going to have a crack at defining family thriving, based on what we’ve learned from our family ethnographies and dinners. On Wednesday, we’ll be bringing together our ethnographers, Sophie and Genevieve, to synthesise the stories we’ve heard and identify what we’ve learned from each of the families we’ve met: from the small, single-parent households to the big families of ten. Stay tuned.
It’s great to see a new project recognising the value of the family as a unit of development and discovery. Back in the 1930s, the Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London, also recognised precisely this. There seems to be many links between your project and the work of the Centre all those years ago. See http://www.thephf.org to find out more. Good luck with this exciting project.
Tags
PLEASE SHARE You're free to take what's ours, use it, improve it and make derivative works under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License© Inwithfor 2009-2011 Worldwide
SAY HELLO We love to get your comments and hear about new things. Send us a mail.
Tweets