Aunting: Cultural Practices That Sustain Family and Community Life

Notes

185 notes Preface 1 Milardo, 2010. Introduction 1 See, e.g., Bould, 2003; Edwards, 2004. 2 The National Center for Children in Poverty estimates: Over 13 million American children live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level, which is $21,200 a year for a family of four in 2008. The number of children living in poverty increased by 15 percent between 2000 and 2007. There are 1.7 million more children living in poverty today than in 2000. (Fass & Cauthen, 2008, ¶1) 3 Clinton, 1996. 4 Hansen & Garey, 1998. 5 Coontz, 2000; Coontz, Parson, and Raley, 1999; Hansen & Garey, 1998. 6 Floyd & Morman, 2006. 7 Johnson, 2000. 8 Johnson, 2000. 9 E.g., Christiansen & Brophy, 2007; Sturgis, 2004; Traeder & Bennett, 1998. 10 Milardo’s study (2010) was published as this book went to press. His interviews with 104 aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews were designed 186 NOTES TO PP. 4–16 “to recover what aunts and uncles do, how they think about their positions , and how they are consequential” (p. 29). His analysis revealed that aunting and uncling may involve a wide range of relational roles and responsibilities, among them second parenting, mentoring, befriending , buffering, kinkeeping, and caregiving. See also O’Reilly & Abbey, 2000; Peington, 2004; Rich, 1976. 11 Turner & West, 2006. 12 Fictive kin (Stack, 1974); quasi-kin (Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991); chosen family (Weston, 1991); pseudo-family, ritual kin (Ebaugh & Curry, 2000); intentional family (Muraco, 2006); constructed kin ties (Rubenstein , Alexander, & Goodman, 1991). 13 Ellingson & Sotirin, 2008. 14 Coontz, 2000. 15 Jago, 1996, p. 497. 16 E. Stone, 2000, p. x; Langellier & Peterson, 2004. 17 Koerner & Fitzpatrick, 2002. 18 Coontz, 2000. 19 Wood, 2002; Ferguson, 2001. 20 As Jorgenson and Bochner (2004) remind us, both researchers and participants tell narratives of family that do not merely reflect but shape the experiences and possibilities of family life. 21 Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Gergen, 1994, 1999; Hacking, 1999. 22 Ellingson & Sotirin, 2006, 2008; Sotirin & Ellingson, 2006, 2007. 23 Fox & Murry, 2000; Osmond & Thorne, 1993; Thompson & Walker, 1995; Thorne, 1992. Chapter 1 1 E.g., Wellman (1998) argues that the increased mobility of families and the prevalence of divorced, single-parent, blended, and isolated families affords individuals and families less social capital, or relational resources that they can draw upon to help them to cope in times of need or transition and to lend a sense of security all the time. 2 See Coontz (2000) for a discussion of the fallacy of the nuclear family’s functional independence. 3 See Leach & Braithwaite, 1996; see also Albrecht & Goldsmith, 2003. 4 Hochschild (2001) coined the concept of the “time bind” to explain the challenges faced by parents whose careers demand increasing numbers of hours spent at work, while at the same time they struggle to provide care for children. 5 Stack & Burton, 1998, p. 408. 6 di Leonardo, 1998, p. 420. NOTES TO PP. 17–25 187 7 E.g., Stewart, Witteborn, & Zediker, 2004. This axiom was advanced by Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson in their classic work published in 1967, Pragmatics of Human Communication. 8 Psychologist Alvin Rosenfeld, as quoted in Trestrail, 2001. On the frenetic schedule of contemporary families, see Warner, 2005; for commentary , see Sotirin, Buzzanell, & Turner, 2007. 9 The idea of motherhood is readily available to us culturally, and we tend to reach for it to describe many types of relational activities and roles (Hayes, 1996). 10 For a discussion of the feminized, unpaid “reproductive” labor that the production of capitalism takes for granted and does not consider to actually be labor, see, e.g., Riley & Kiger, 1999; also Jackson, 1992. 11 Stack’s classic study of an urban African American community illuminated the complexities of bartering and sharing resources among those struggling in the working class and those on the fringes of poverty (Stack, 1974). In a more contemporary case study of the “time bind” experienced by children whose parents both work full time outside of the home, Hochschild explored two girls’ diverging experiences with day care. A working-class girl was cared for by an aunt and felt no resentment against her mother for working, while the daughter of a professional woman manager expressed anger and resentment about being left with a series of paid caregivers. The author speculated that the normalizing of kincare in the working-class girl’s family network eased the transition between home and her time with a caregiver (Hochschild, 2003). 12 E.g., Bould, 2003; Putnam, 2001...