12The Good Enough Family

ELINOR OCHS AND TAMAR KREMER-SADLIK

THE BURDENS OF MORALITY

When working parents slide into bed after a long day, they often feel quite exhausted without exactly knowing why. This volume lays bare the fleeting but consequential moments in which working parents dedicate themselves to the family as an enterprise. Ethnographic video recordings captured the myriad efforts they exerted to achieve daily routines; photographs documented the ever-needing-to-be-tidied-up intimate spaces; in-depth interviews exposed parental desires and frustrations; and cortisol sampling revealed the hidden story of individual family members’ stress levels over the course of their day.

CELF parents were constantly responding to situational exigencies that arise in the course of a day. That in itself was enervating. But, in addition, parents’ handling of these exigencies was subject to moral examination, which further burdened them. Sometimes moral examination took the form of explicit judgments. More pervasively, parents sensed that their actions and decisions, as well as those of their children, were accountable to standards set by a tribunal of educators, physicians, spiritual leaders, scientific authorities, neighbors, other parents, and the popular media. CELF parents faced family life in an era of heightened insecurity about the future and disjuncture with the middle-class American Dream that once held so much promise for post-World War II parents.1 They felt that they had to double up on their efforts to protect their families and give their children every possible advantage in a very fragmented and unstable twenty-first-century American society.2

Decades ago the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott introduced the concept of “the good enough mother,” who need not be perfectly intuitive but rather good enough to provide a secure environment and adjust to her child’s needs and desires at different points of maturity.3 “The good enough mother” concept presumed the mother to be the natural anchor of the family and source of success or failure of the infant’s developing self. Subsequent scholars discussed the strains of being a good enough mother in relation to other roles, commitments, and desires of women.4 Some advocated a rethinking of “care” as an ethical enterprise.5 “The good enough family” was promoted, wherein responsibility for self-aware and resilient children and families lies in the hands of all family members.6 Yet what constitutes “the good enough family” remains elusive to working parents in the fast-paced twenty-first century, in which moral frameworks are constantly updated. What also eludes scholars and family members alike is how “the good enough family” is achieved through family practices. Parents in the CELF study faced everyday situational imperatives to make “good enough” decisions and perform “good enough” actions for themselves and their family, and it was not always easy.

Immersed in the experiential particulars of one’s own family, it is tremendously difficult for family members to reflect upon what an “ordinary” family is and how an “ordinary” family acts.7 Sometimes, however, the presence of a CELF researcher or a video camera moved a family member to transcend the ordinary to reflect upon and even contest the conditions of his or her family life. These reflections indicated a pressure-filled striving to be “the good enough family” and the worry that the moral standard is beyond reach. In the discussion that follows, we distill commonalties and variation in the day-to-day production of an ethical family life.

THE MORAL GAZE

While the panoptical gaze of social authority has been analyzed in schools, prisons, asylums, and other institutions, the family is the quintessential site for moral assessment.8 After all, what is more consequential than acts that cast the die for children’s physical, social, and emotional development or the resilience of couple relationships. In the everyday lives of CELF families, the panoptical regard operated both from without and within the family, as one’s actions and stances as mother, father, son, daughter, and spouse or partner were subject to constant evaluation.

Inside the family, parents judged children’s behavior from morning to night, and spouses constantly directed moral glances at one another. For example, parents often told children what they “need to” do. Dinnertimes echoed with “You need to sit down”; “You need to eat”; “You gotta eat your lima beans”; “If you are going to burp, you need to excuse yourself.” At the same time, children often resisted: “I don’t want to eat”; “I don’t need peas”; “I would rather starve than eat this.” In one family, a father despaired, “He doesn’t eat any greens,” to which his child responded, “Stop lecturing us with fruits and vegetables!” From a Foucauldian point of view,9 parents used discipline to control and educate their children to be “ethical subjects,” while children struggled for the freedom to assert their own counterdesires.

Similarly, wives and husbands often scrutinized one another’s actions and attitudes.10 During dinnertime in the Khakkar household, for example, the mother, Raya, briefly left and returned to the table to find that her husband, Sam, had let their son Dar leave the table without finishing his hamburger:

RAYA: Where is his plate?
SAM: I don’t know, he didn’t finish it.
RAYA: No, he has to finish his burger.

After this admonishment, the younger son, Moni, joined his father in laughingly revealing that the hamburger had already been thrown away. Raya’s moral injunction against her spouse qua father was swift: “Why did you let him get away with it?”

A similar moral judgment between spouses transpired in the Slovenski family. Susannah spent much of the afternoon monitoring her son to make sure that he completed his homework. When her husband, John, returned home and looked over the homework, he found errors and criticized her for not teaching the child so that he could do the exercises independently. After John finished going over the boy’s homework, Susannah looked at him and inquired, “Did I do it right?” In this utterance Susannah opened the possibility for her husband to criticize her by voicing her insecurity and eliciting his opinion of the quality of her assistance, which he provided.

JOHN: Yeah, but you didn’t tell him how he has to get those numbers
SUSANNAH: What? Yes I did!
JOHN: He said all he has to do is change the things. And I said “Do you know how the numbers came out?” And he said “No.”

When John blamed her directly for failing to do the right thing, Susannah was put on the defensive. She then called her son to “testify” that she worked with him to understand how to solve the math problems. Our video recordings evidence her arduous efforts to this end in the midst of caring for a toddler, cooking, and her son’s lackluster attention. In the end, however, the homework answers were incorrect.11

Parents, especially mothers, were also prone to self-reflection, sometimes self-disparaging, sometimes frustrated at the corners they had to cut to get through the day. Mothers themselves also voiced their unhappiness that they had to assume the daily burdens of going over homework with their children. To get a sense of its physical and mental toll, let us listen in on the “confessions” of Jeri and her friend Shelly, who chatted about teachers and homework while their daughters were playing together. Shelley began by complaining about a teacher who gives a lot of homework, and Jeri commiserated.

SHELLY: But it’s the homework that you don’t want to [sit and straddle
JERI: [That’s right yeah.
SHELLY: All—every day ((pause)) you know.
JERI: HHH!

The use of “straddle” here alludes to the existential condition that mothers face when they leave the workplace, namely, that they begin a “second shift” of domestic undertakings.12

Shelly and Jeri went on to expand the emotional toll of just thinking about their children’s homework.

SHELLY: I wake up in the morning and I think about okay what’s Becky going to—got to do for homework today.
JERI: I know ((pause)) I know! [it’s just—it’s like going through school all over again.
SHELLY: [It’s makes me crazy. And then I come home and the first thing I say to her is “Did you get your homework done?” instead of “Hi. How was your day?”
JERI: Right.
SHELLY: Hhh.

Here we see how homework looms as a huge hurdle for mothers to manage from the time they wake up. Our video recordings show that the topic of homework assignments dominated conversations between mothers and their children immediately upon first contact after school and work.13 This exchange captures a mother’s guilt moment: Rather than being the “good mom” who shows care and interest (“How was your day?”), she is the bossy, nagging mother who has to make sure the homework is done.

At this point the two mothers turned their normalizing judgments away from themselves to their daughters to critique the quality of their homework.

JERI: She usually gets it done though.
SHELLY: Uh ((pause)) she rushes through it sometimes ((pause))
I have to look at it.
JERI: But yeah.
SHELLY: She ((pause)) she ((pause)) says I got it—
Her—her big thing is to say “I got it done” but then I look it over and it’s
JERI: Not correct.
SHELLY: Really sloppy.
JERI: Right.
SHELLY: And really fast.

Having raised these issues, the two mothers returned the moral gaze to themselves, this time justifying with embarrassed laughter their morally compromised response to the homework quandary.

JERI: Well I get to the point where I’m so tired I give Anna the answers. ((laughs))
SHELLY: ((laughs))
JERI: I’m just like.
SHELLY: “Here let me do it for you.”
JERI: I’m just like
((Pause))
I try my hardest but I’m like “Yeah yeah that’s it.” ((laughs))

Throughout this conversation Jeri and Shelly portrayed homework as an ethically conflicted activity that marred their relationship with their children and their own integrity. They treated themselves as objects of moral inspection.14 Both confessed to giving answers and doing the homework for their daughters. Jeri justified these lapses as the result of being “so tired” and trying “my hardest.” The mothers finished each other’s sentences and laughed together at their untenable predicament. Of course, this behavior was exactly what the father in the previously mentioned example was criticizing—the fact that his wife ended up giv-ing the child the answers rather than making sure he knew how to do it alone. The conversation between Jeri and Shelly provides insight into why mothers commit such moral transgressions—because homework activity is so lengthy, rife with tension, unpleasant, and tiring. Indeed, CELF video recordings attest to just how time-consuming homework is.15

This kind of morally charged conversation about homework is going on all around the country. The defensive sensibilities expressed by these two mothers form a backdrop to the panoptical gaze of those husbands who arrive home later in the evening and who upbraid their partners for providing inadequate help with children’s homework. The good child, the good mother, the good father, and the good partner—all infuse the practice of homework. Or, putting it another way, practices like homework entail certain standards of conduct that are part of the “ordinary ethics”16 of being a family. These ethical entailments, in turn, may be sources of contestation, liberation, or transformation, adding a certain open-endedness to one’s family and one’s day. As such, ordinary family ethics involves continuous self-production and a dynamic form of social engagement that can be emotionally and physically taxing.

THE MORAL COSTS OF PRACTICAL LIFE

It was not the intention of this volume to rethink the contours of morality and ethics, which have been subject to considerable academic debate over the centuries. Yet our study speaks to the locus of ethics in ordinary contexts. We agree with Eagleton, who argues that “the ethical is not a seductively unattainable ideal but a common material practice. We are speaking of the shape and texture of average lives, not of the aesthetic splendour of isolated acts.”17 When one thinks about daily life, the notion “mundane” comes to mind, meaning both “ordinary” and “prosaic.” Morality in this context would seem to be a run-of-the-mill disposition to be good that is built into seamless and routine ways of living. It turns out, however, that this picture is far from complete. The day-to-day workings of family life are punctuated with episodes of frisson wherein what is moral is contested.

Working parents struggle with the pull of a moral regime that their own parents lived by and that no longer seems tenable.18 A common American image from textbooks to cinema is that each new generation forges ahead, crosses frontiers, and does not look back. In addition, the rapid rise of the dual-income family has meant that parents have had to improvise a “good enough” way to raise a family. Families may con-tinue to eat dinner, for example, but what they eat is often a prepackaged “convenience food.” As such, the ordinary ethics of each nuclear family is cobbled together from childhood experiences and present-day exigencies and aspirations of family members.19

CELF working parents experienced disjunctures between idealized images and actual lived ways of being a family. The moral criteria for being a good parent, a good family, and a good worker were reexamined on a daily basis. It was not simply that parents transgressed some “principle” of goodness. They also expressed guilt, frustration, and ambivalence regarding the way that managed raising a family. Jeri and Shelly, for example, regretted how they took over their children’s homework assignments to save time. Other women felt bad that they were unable to take time off from work to volunteer in their children’s classes, not matching an ideal of being a good mother.20 Some fathers returning from work hoped that their family would welcome them home but also recognized that their spouse and children were engrossed in homework, dinner preparation, and media activities. Fathers either found a way to penetrate the walls of consciousness of the rest of the family or, more often, resigned themselves to being ignored. One returning father who tried unsuccessfully to compete with a video game for his sons’ attention muttered, “God forbid they should know anything else besides play, huh?”21

Parents at times conveyed conflicting messages to their children about what is ethical. They told their children what they expected, but their actions belied a different expectation. In one family, a father directed his son to get himself dressed, signaling a desire for his child’s autonomy, but he then caved in to his son’s demand that he untie and then tie the shoes for him and cringed when his son called him “a control freak.”22 Similarly, CELF parents asked their children what they “want to” eat, then told them what they “have to” or “need to” eat. Sometimes in these situations parents even told the children what they “want to” eat (“Rory you want to eat everything”). As the philosopher Zizek noted, this practice exhibits an extreme mechanism of power, in that parental desires are decreed to be the desires of their children.23

In this manner, the existential condition of the family is that ordinary ethics is far from a taken-for-granted sensibility and more a daily challenge. The studies presented in this book have explored the unfolding of this ethical endeavor, highlighting how this daily project evidences discrepancies between culture, historically rooted principles and aspirations, and more immediate situational contingencies, as parents operate within the fine lines of doing that which is right, possible, necessary, inevitable, rational, and easiest in the quest to raise a family. At times parents relinquished that which they espoused as “the right way” for a more practical and easier alternative.

It is striking that some innovative tactics that parents adopted to simplify their lives generated unforeseen complexities, with the family as a whole unhappily bearing the consequences. For example, many parents used “time-saving” preprepared meals that can be easily microwaved, although they disclosed in their interviews that they wished they could serve home-cooked healthy meals. These frozen packaged meals, however, often turned out be a source of discontent during mealtimes, in that they could not be easily modified. Children frequently complained that they disliked something about the combination of ingredients in these meals and insisted that they be served an entirely different microwaved meal from a list of choices that were stocked in the freezer that parents rattled off to them. These complaints and ensuing negotiations negatively colored the family gathering.24 Over time such practically motivated strategies and situational decisions affect the felicity of the family.

COMMUNAL AND INDIVIDUAL MORALITIES

An important ethical consideration for CELF families was how to accommodate the individual wants of family members in relation to the family as a communal enterprise. Individualism and communalism have often been portrayed as historically and socioculturally rooted polar ethical sensibilities. As discussed in philosophy and the social sciences, individualism favors autonomy, freedom, agency, creativity, desire, will, personality, character, charisma, intention, subjectivity, and the self. Communalism, in contrast, promotes civic consciousness, public good, duty, citizenry, regularity, continuity, collective responsibility, and socially distributed knowledge and labor.25 In some paradigms, communalism is the moral albatross that dulls and constrains individual will and self-knowledge, from which individuals are beckoned to free themselves.26 In other perspectives, individualism is viewed as an ever more sweeping globally decadent presence:27

Some see a preoccupation with self-development as an offshoot of the fact that the old communal orders have broken down, producing a narcissistic, hedonistic concern with the ego. Others reach much the same conclusion, but trace this end result to forms of social manipulation. Exclusion of the majority from the arenas where the most consequential policies are forged and decisions taken forces a concentration upon the self; this is a result of the powerlessness most people feel.

In the first approach the communal order gives way to self-preoccupation; in the second, self-preoccupation is a response to being left behind by prevailing powers.

From an anthropological perspective, however, communal and individual, like interdependence and autonomy, are not principles that differentiate entire societies but rather coexist in variable guises and to varying degrees of importance and elaboration within a single social group.28 Indeed, lifelong human development and learning universally involves a combination of a strong sense of self-knowledge, self-differentiation, and self-reliance plus the ability and will to enter into webs of social coordination, empathy, and support with others to achieve common goals. In the contemporary United States and other societies, certain freedoms and potentialities associated with individualism (including the freedom to resist the status quo and to pursue alternative ideals) tend to be exalted, while the excesses of single-minded self-advancement and indulgence are deplored. As such, individualism is morally Janus-faced.

Looking at CELF households, we did not see evidence that the “communal order” of the family had broken down or that individual family members typically privileged their own desires over family concerns. Rather, what we observed in most families was a socially and culturally structured ongoing tension between these two orientations. The cohesiveness of the family was a focus of considerable moral inquietude of CELF parents, who talked about the need to carve out of the busy week a special “quality time” to be together. Parents often voiced the concern that they fell short of their own ideal. CELF researchers came to the conclusion that such feelings of inadequacy stemmed in part from the fact that parents idealized family time as a “special time” apart from others in which the whole family participated in a planned event. Curiously, many spontaneous moments of intimacy and enjoyment between parents and children tended to go unrecognized as family time.29

The tug of the individual and the communal within the family is also seen in the use of private and public home spaces, participation in family dinners, reuniting and withdrawing after work, familial fallout of individual health habits, and limited opportunities for parental leisure in the face of housework and childcare.30 Across these contexts, individual desires often uneasily came into play with communal goals.

Home Spaces and Possessions. The domestic architecture of contemporary middle-class homes of CELF families embraced both communal and individual values. In contrast to societies where dwellings consist of an open space, CELF houses constructed before 1980 maintained the culture-historical arrangement of rooms oriented for communal/family activity, especially the kitchen, separated from rooms identified as more personal and private, especially the bedroom.31 Household possessions enhanced the communal/individual distinction of spaces. While hallways and other living areas in CELF households were decorated with family photographs, heirlooms, or mementos, bedrooms, especially children’s bedrooms, were branded as personal havens.32 Children’s names appeared on the bedroom door, trophies, and awards; walls were plastered with their artwork, logos and images of favorite sports teams and celebrities, and collections of beloved stuffed animals and other toys.

While there is a trend in U.S. remodeling toward opening up kitchen, dining, and family rooms to enhance communality there is also an architectural drift toward enhancing private spaces within the home. Newer homes are larger, providing bigger and more rooms (e.g., home offices, more bedrooms and bathrooms) for inhabitants to distribute themselves at some distance, if they so choose. Of particular relevance is the observation that the most frequently remodeled space in CELF homes was enlargement or creation of a master suite, perhaps as a hoped-for Shangri-la retreat.33

Dinnertime. The confluence of the desires to come together as a family and to pursue individual aspirations revealed itself at dinnertime. Family members, especially parents, voiced a desire to eat together, yet they sometimes missed dinner because of competing individual commitments.34 In some households, family members who were at home tried to eat together. In other households, the moral freedoms of individualism prevailed: the family ethos allowed family members to eat dinner at different times or in different rooms. The centrifugal pull of family members away from the dinner table was promoted by another cultural property of contemporary mealtimes. In some families, family members ate individuated packaged meals. While most parents expressed a desire for their children to eat with them, the children sometimes wanted to take their own self-contained food away to consume while pursuing an interest.35

Reuniting after Work. As soon as working parents walked through the front door after work, the desire to unite with the rest of the family often conflicted with individual pursuits of family members in the walled-off rooms within the home. Children were absorbed in television, computer games, or homework.36 Spouses were often mired in meal preparation or childcare. In many CELF households it was hard for parents to accept that they were nearly invisible to the rest of the family. If we look a little deeper, however, we find a somewhat different story, one that features workplace stress seeping into family life. Working fathers more than mothers tended to withdraw from the family after they returned home from work, perhaps as a way of compensating for a difficult day at work. In contrast, CELF mothers did not have the same luxury of alone time as did fathers, a fact related to their involvement in housework and childcare.37 Although the CELF study took place in twenty-first-century middle-class households at the end of the day in “tony” Los Angeles, these divergent paths regarding engagement in individual and communal activities followed socioculturally rooted gender expectations.

Healthy Living at Home. Morality is not simply a set of abstract understandings of right and wrong but also a heuristic for acting in the world.38 Family members are constantly making big and small decisions about what to do and worry about the consequences for themselves and others who touch their lives. Decisions that benefit the ego may have costs for the family, while those that give priority to the family may have personal costs. It is not a far stretch to realize that some of these consequences have an impact on the health of individuals and families.

Nowhere is health as a family matter more evident than in the ensnaring emotional and moral ecology of an individual family member’s health-adverse habits. CELF interviews captured the distress of certain parents who appeared unable to do what is right for both themselves and their family by curbing a bad habit (e.g., smoking or drinking). In these cases, moral responsibility for the health and well-being of the family was laden with intraindividual and family-level conflict.39 Such conflicts evidence how far everyday middle-class family life actually is from being mindless and unheroic, as cast by a host of scholars.40 At the end of his famous surrealist poem Plutôt la Vie, written in 1923, André Breton advises, “And since everything has already been said/Choose life instead.”41 Perhaps if Breton could look through the ethnographic lens of the present study, he might find home life rife with reflexivity and human drama, where unhealthy habits can be fiercely contested and relegated to the shadows of the homestead or reluctantly embraced and painfully (not robotically) written into the family habitus.

Housework and Childcare. There is nothing new under the sun to say about the endless efforts entailed in housework and childcare. From self-reports and interviews scholars have been well aware that women continue to bear the lion’s share of these efforts.42 And our observations of CELF families as well heartily confirm striking gender asymmetries and working mothers’ dissatisfaction in the division of domestic labor. Given this, we can conclude that the socially distributed engagement in activities for the common good of the family and for individual ends is linked to abiding gender asymmetries. Importantly, these gender asymmetries may be consequential to women’s health. After difficult workdays, women’s stress hormones did not decline as much as those of their spouses. In these households working women were not getting ample time to recuperate alone.43 Indeed, a number of the working mothers in the CELF study voiced frustration over the load that they carried on the home front. An implication of such dissatisfaction is that gender asymmetries in household work may affect women’s sense of well-being and, consequently, the couple relationship as a vibrant social and emotional unit.

Although many women in the CELF study expressed similar sentiments of displeasure regarding their unequal burden, some did not. Instead, they emphasized the importance of having the collaboration of their partners, whatever it might be, in managing the family and home. In these families, there appeared to be an ethos of “us,”‘ that is, “we work together and share common goals.” These families were characterized by a moral orientation that seemed to mitigate the consequences of the unequal division of household work for the emotional quality of the family relationships. These households were characterized by a sense that the whole family acts as a team, working together toward communal goals of caring for the home and one another, regardless of relative contribution of each member. This orientation assumed that family members were attuned to situational needs and were expected, able, and willing to help.

School-aged children played a major role in the social and emotional dynamics of communal and individual orientations in families. In practical terms, the children occupied two potential social roles: objects of care and active contributors to the smooth-running household. As one may guess, children took up the first role far more than the second.44 Although children in a few households sometimes were loving caregivers of their younger siblings,45 far more often children eight years and older required considerable help from parents to accomplish their homework and basic tasks, even getting dressed.46 This dependency struck us as an enigma, given the value that Americans place on autonomy.47 Moreover, parents often had a devil of a time getting children to help with practical tasks that had to be done. Part of the reason that many working mothers in the study multitasked, we concluded, was that they got little help from their children, even when requested. The entire family was implicated in the domestic division of labor, not just the couple relationship.

These socialization patterns lend insight into why family members’ sense of teamwork, shared goals, and “pitching in” when situations called for help was more important than equally dividing domestic labor for some CELF working mothers. The notion of family-as-team and teamwork that operated in several households in our study is a fuzzy ideology, yet these families seemed to use “team” as a loose metaphor for family members’ cooperation and give-and-take. However, while actual teams crucially rely upon team members knowing the rule-bound parameters of their own and others’ positions and operating according to game guidelines as well as thinking on their feet to meet contingencies, “family-as-team” seems to rely upon team members cooperating primarily out of their care and concern for the well-being of the family and out of their attunement and responsiveness to the practical situation at hand.

At the core of an ordinary ethics of “family-as-team” is the Lockean idea that voluntary free will or goodwill, as opposed to filial or connubial sacrifice or divine commandment, motivates action.48 It assumes that a child (or spouse), for example, will contribute to the common good of the family and cooperate in the social distribution of domestic work because he or she is both a moral agent and inclined to be helpful rather than because of role expectations associated with a implicit family contract. In this sense, placing a value on family members’ spirit of teamwork is highly individualistic: it depends on a person’s psychological disposition and agentive freedom to act in situations. Dependence on voluntary displays of goodwill to get a task accomplished can be far more a roll of the dice, however, than dependence upon a sense of duty.

Indeed, it has been argued that human beings are never quite free to choose the obligations they enter into, either because freedom is constrained by an evolutionary impulse that favors altruism toward family members as a means of maximizing their fitness49 or because infants come into a social world saturated with role expectations and then operate accordingly. Moreover, a voluntaristic sense of teamwork minimally assumes that parents have ensured that their child has been socialized to (1) notice what needs to be done in a situation, (2) be empathetic and willing to help, and (3) have the practical skills to complete the desired task. This socialization zeitgeist, however, was in evidence in only a handful of households. In highly child-centered middle-class families, most parents tended to be deeply accommodating to the perceived needs and wishes of children, who in turn were often absorbed in their own enterprises.50

ETHNOGRAPHIC WHAT-IFS

A good deal of the CELF study has relied on ethnography. Ethnographers are keenly aware that their presence as observers changes the dynamics of the social order they seek to understand. Yet, all things considered, there withstands an anthropological conviction that ethnography is an amazing gateway to the orderly and not-so-orderly lives of individuals as they act, think, and feel alone and in concert with others. Immersing ourselves in households in the rush of early mornings, late afternoons, and evenings over the course of a week privileged us to the little intimacies that make having a family fulfilling and that make having a family so utterly demanding. Sometimes the CELF study has been compared to reality TV, and to some extent it harks back to the 1970s documentary of the Loud family, An American Family, without its close-ups, divorce plans, and sexual identity revelations, and the reality series The Osbournes, without its theme song and heightened eccentricities. Like the Louds and the Osbournes, CELF family members knew, or at least thought they knew, each other all too well; faced challenges that were both of their own making and handed to them by the times in which they were living; and operated as if each day was a major accomplishment that required the support of others.

The televised series cut through the hours of footage to present crisply edited family life. In contrast, the CELF study steadfastly went through more than 1,500 hours of video recordings and many other data points we gathered to follow family dramas and satisfactions from their inception to their denouement. One distinct advantage of looking through unedited ethnographic video recordings is that we can see how family lives unfold minute by minute. Unlike an edited family reality show, with its cuts and fade-outs from one scene to the next, CELF family living just went on, drifting here and there, and we kept our eyes glued, following right along. Also, the CELF study had its eye on thirty-two families and not just one, which is far too many lives to distill and edit down into a nonfiction narrative for a television episode. For CELF, however, this breadth gave us the distinct advantage of tapping into the sociocultural and psychological threads that characterize middle-class family life in twenty-first-century Los Angeles. And we could also see how the same family moment—coming through the door after work, dinnertime, bedtime—could be so differently managed from one household to another.

Now that the filming is over and we have looked carefully at what transpired between parents and children and between spouses, we are tempted to imagine the way a family scene might have turned out if a family member had acted differently. We have spent our academic efforts documenting and analyzing what transpired. Can we, as ethnographers, also ask, “What could have happened if . . . ?” No one can wave a magic wand to transform a family structure that is entangled in ideologies, practices, expectations, and values. But families might gain some insight into their own practices from the spectrum of different strategies and relational dynamics that distinguish one CELF family from another. What would happen if a routine practice in some households was adopted by other families? Sometimes a what-if alternative comes from knowing how families do things in other societies. Could it be useful to know how Swedish and Italian middle-class households manage to raise families and to imagine what if a particular strategy drifted into one’s own household? And sometimes a “what if” alternative is simply a modest, possible, and perhaps “logical” modification that might make a big difference in diminishing tensions between individual and communal pursuits and other moral conflicts in twenty-first-century U.S. families. The CELF study in its entirety allows consideration of the power of seemingly small behaviors and decisions in shaping how family life unfolds.

The idea of creating a what-if world that tweaks existing institutional paradigms and practices has been integral to the scholarship of Russell, Vygotsky and Luria,51 among others. Over the past several decades, for example, cultural psychologists have introduced techniques of “remediation” as a means of improving children’s learning beyond what traditional schools typically offer.52 Remediation reconfigures learning settings in ways that are supportive and conducive to cognitive change. In this perspective, change is lodged not so much within the individual as through activities that bring the individual and others into different kinds of cognitive and social engagement. Here the individual and the communal are not opposing forces but rather collaborative resources for the potential well-being of both.

In this spirit, we consider a few what-if possibilities that hold some promise for changing members’ perspective on and experience of being a family. Without disabusing parents of the social and economic uncertainties that the twenty-first century has brought, we put forth a few what-if options that may strengthen families from within through everyday practices that support family members and the family as a community. Our hope is that entertaining a few of these possibilities may in itself be a remediation tool for alleviating the practical and moral weight that parents, children, and spouses shoulder, even if the alternatives are not actually implemented. In line with Vaclav Havel’s view that the seat of change lies in heightened awareness (“Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around”),53 the cognitive activity of reframing assumptions and practices may open the landscape of what a family should be and do. Below we put forth a selection of what-ifs to ponder.

What if working parents were routinely greeted when they returned home? Anthropologists have long noted that greeting someone is equivalent to a gift, in the sense that it gives support and respect to a person’s face.54 When we greet a family member, we acknowledge him or her as a valued human being and smooth the way to more sustained social interaction. In this important and universal manner, a greeting is a gateway to intimacy. The briefest of greetings—a “Hi Dad!”—takes only a few seconds, and more elaborate “How are you” greetings usually occupy ninety seconds or less.55 Rewiring families to engage in this modest ritual could mitigate some of the effects of a day’s stressful experiences by offering affection and a moment to air information and feelings and receive support. In that greetings are exchanged, they have the potential to instantly bring family members up to date and emotionally connected to each other’s lives.

What if parents relied more on delegating tasks to children and less on eliciting their voluntary help? The few families in our study that had socialized their children to routinely do tasks experienced fewer conflicts around housework help than the many families who primarily depended upon a child’s goodwill to help out.56 That is, households that delegated tasks generally ran more smoothly than households in which parents had to request children’s voluntary help in each situation. A great boon to family well-being would be to assign responsibilities to children and apprentice them into how to competently perform these responsibilities at an early age.57 While it may be monumental to contemplate such a shift in family tectonics, what if once or twice a week each family member completed preassigned tasks, such as cleaning one’s room or watering the garden, in addition to daily chores such as clearing the dishwasher or setting the table? Everyone may get a sense that they are working together toward a common goal of making everyday life run more smoothly. Moreover, parents, and especially mothers, may feel less burdened by caring for it all on their own.

What if parents secure eye contact when asking children to perform tasks and remain close at hand to ensure the tasks are at least begun? CELF parents who looked a child in the eye while issuing a directive and hung around while the child followed through with what was asked were far more effective than parents who called out directives from another room and were enmeshed in many tasks at the same time.58 Keenly aware as we are of the many pressures on working parents when they return home, we believe that establishing mutual eye gaze and sustained parent-child focus may actually save time and emotional fallout from children’s failure to act as requested.

What if fathers returning home offered mothers the opportunity to withdraw from the family and took over the tasks that needed to be completed? CELF mothers arrived home on average two hours before fathers, who worked longer hours. These two hours were tremendously exacting for working mothers, as observed in other studies as well.59 If mothers could withdraw at some point, they could get a chance to recover from a difficult working day followed by the early evening intensity of housework and childcare, and they could rejoin the family when they felt more resilient.

What if parents paused while shopping to consider the impact of their consumption on their densely cluttered home and the seemingly unending task of housekeeping? This “what if” may be difficult to implement in the face of the desire to use dual-parent incomes to purchase objects for the family, yet the inclination toward hyperconsumerism ends up giving considerable distress to families. Many CELF parents felt that they were being choked by the many objects piled up around the house and up to the ceiling of the garage. Tidying up was overwhelming and a source of friction between parents and children, as children’s bedrooms were bursting with mountains of toys and other possessions. At the cash register, it may be worthwhile for middle-class parents to project the exertion and hassle that that the purchase will exact from them once it is placed in the home.

What if parents did not fill their refrigerators and freezers with individual packaged snacks and meals and drinks for children? That children often complained about what was being served for dinner as they came to the table, insisted on different meals, and tried to take their food to another room to eat by themselves may all be tied to the ubiquity of pre-prepared single-serving food items in many homes.60 Refrigerators chock full of easily microwaveable pizzas, pastas, and other dishes offered children the opportunity to snack and lose their appetite before dinner. In addition, these multiple food options may have given children at the dinner table reason to demand that an alternative meal be provided and for a parent to comply. Rather than enhance the family mealtime experience, these all-in-one food items created additional work for parents and were handy for children to take away to consume elsewhere in the house. What if once or twice a week parents and children made dinner together from scratch? Dinner would more likely be a shared meal in which family members invested attention, thought, time, and effort.

What if once or twice a week family members ate dinner later in the evening when everyone has returned home? Given that fathers’ work schedules sometimes precluded their presence at the family dinner table, we wondered why dinner was served before the time fathers returned home. Most fathers were back in the house by 7:00 P.M. Why not serve dinner after that hour at least some nights of the week? Dinner at that hour may have a greater chance of bringing everyone together around the table to touch base about their day and plan logistics of upcoming events.

What if families sometimes became more aware of the little moments of pleasure and togetherness that everyday activities afford? CELF parents, like many other working parents, often felt guilty about not having enough time to be together with their children, yet studies repeatedly show that families spend more time together than ever before.61 It seems that part of the problem lies in what counts as being together. CELF parents often talked about their desire and need to achieve family time with their children engaged in special activities, such as watching a family movie, going to the beach, or going to a theme park.62 These activities required planning, effort, time, and money and elevated expectations for a grand time—and possible disappointments when the event turned out to be not so successful. Yet intimate moments peppered the routines of many of our CELF families when parents and children shared a joke, a hug, a story, or a concern, offering families many opportunities to connect and experience togetherness.63 If parents became more aware of these moments, they might feel less concerned about the amount of time they spend with their kids and less burdened by the need to organize special activities for the family.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS

In profound ways the everyday lives of twenty-first-century families are orchestrated by social and economic conditions that have given rise to dual-earner households, 24/7 workplaces, and child-rearing practices geared to ensuring children will be successful in a much less secure future world. At the same time, there are many aspects of family life that cannot be accounted for by these large-scale forces. The idiom “the devil is in the details” refers to the critical impact of seemingly low-level details of structure and content on the success of an endeavor—be it a building, a legal document, or mathematical model—that one should not overlook. As applied to families, the devil lies in the details of their everyday practices: how family members cooperate to get to work and school in the mornings and reconnect at the end of the day, how opportunities for positive family moments together are created, how conflicts arise and take their course, how family members get access to time alone after difficult days and to leisure moments, how homework is managed, how meals are prepared and eaten, how many possessions are purchased and fill homes, how couples coordinate housework, how children are socialized to be attentive and responsible, and how health management is a daily family consideration.

The devil in these details is the reciprocity of practical assistance and emotional support. We end this volume with the possibility that the “good enough family” depends on the ability and willingness of family members to attune to the commitments and yearnings, as well as the disappointments, weaknesses, and transgressions, of one another and the family as a social and emotional enterprise. A prerequisite for such coordination is a consciousness and sensibility, part instinctual, part socialized, that propels family members to “read” and act upon family situations, that is, to get a pulse on who needs attention and practical and emotional support and what needs to be done.

Family coordination is deeply informed by broader sociocultural expectations and conventions regarding practices and social positions, by the capacity for empathy, and by a flexibility to respond to a curve ball—an unanticipated challenge. Coordination does not necessarily lead to harmonious family interactions; indeed, at times coordination involves assertiveness, confrontation, disagreement, and/or reproof, as when a parent reprimands a child for being irresponsible. In our observations, family coordination does not work well when it depends only upon the goodwill of each family member. It works best when family members can count on one another to carry out delegated responsibilities and when they work in concert. Like a well-rehearsed dance, everyone knows how to contribute to an activity without (in the moment) being directed. At the conclusion of the CELF project, all the researchers were awed by the incredible coordination that family life in the twenty-first century demands. CELF parents performed remarkable, sometimes heroic, feats of coordination in an effort to raise a family in which members thrived individually and together.

NOTES

1. Ortner 2003.

2. Kremer-Sadlik and Gutiérrez, this volume.

3. Winnicott 1953, 1964.

4. Chodorow 1989, 2001; Doane and Hodges 1992.

5. Hochschild 1997; Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2003; Holloway 2006.

6. Govier 1998.

7. Duranti 2010; Husserl [1913] 1982.

8. Foucault 1979.

9. Foucault 1979, 1984, 1988.

10. Kremer-Sadlik, Izquierdo, and Fatigante 2010.

11. Ibid.

12. Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2003.

13. Wingard 2006a, 2006b.

14. Foucault 1988.

15. Willinghanz and Wingard 2005; Wingard 2006a, 2006b; Kremer-Sadlik and Gutiérrez, this volume.

16. Lambek 2010.

17. Eagleton 2009, 302.

18. Christensen and Schneider 2010; Gillis 1996.

19. Bourdieu 1977.

20. Kremer-Sadlik, this volume.

21. Campos et al. 2009; Ochs and Campos, this volume.

22. Ochs and Izquierdo 2009.

23. Taylor 2005.

24. Ochs and Beck, this volume.

25. Eagleton 2009; Weber 1946.

26. Foucault 1979, 1984, 1988; Lacan 1968, 2006.

27. Giddens 1990, 122.

28. Spiro 1993.

29. Kremer-Sadlik and Paugh 2007; Kremer-Sadlik, this volume.

30. See, in this volume, Graesch; Ochs and Beck; Repetti, Saxbe, and Wang; Garro; Arnold; Klein, Izquierdo, and Bradbury; Klein and Goodwin; Kremer-Sadlik and Gutiérrez.

31. Graesch 2007.

32. Arnold et al. 2012; Arnold, this volume.

33. Arnold et al. 2012.

34. Ochs et al. 2010; Ochs and Beck, this volume.

35. Ochs and Campos, this volume.

36. Campos et al. 2009; Ochs and Campos, this volume.

37. Graesch, this volume.

38. James 1977.

39. For detailed analysis, see Garro, this volume.

40. Eagleton 2009.

41. Breton 2003, 68–69.

42. Hochschild 1989, 1997.

43. Repetti, Saxbe, and Wang, this volume.

44. For details, see Klein and Goodwin, this volume.

45. See Goodwin and Goodwin, this volume.

46. Klein and Goodwin, this volume.

47. Ochs and Izquierdo 2009.

48. Jeske 2002.

49. Dawkins 1976.

50. Ochs and Izquierdo 2009.

51. Russell 1932; Vygotsky 1978; Luria 1979.

52. Newman, Griffin, and Cole 1989, ix.

53. Havel 1990.

54. Duranti 1997; Goffman 1963; Goody 1972.

55. Campos et al. 2009.

56. Klein and Goodwin, this volume.

57. Weisner 2001.

58. M. H. Goodwin 2006; Klein and Goodwin, this volume.

59. Schneider and Waite 2005; Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2003; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006.

60. Ochs and Beck, this volume.

61. Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006; Daly 2001b; Gillis 2001; Kremer-Sadlik and Paugh 2007.

62. Kremer-Sadlik, this volume.

63. Kremer-Sadlik, this volume; Kremer-Sadlik and Paugh 2007; Goodwin and Goodwin, this volume.