Breakdown of the family?

What this family we “know” is like, is not only the family to which we belong. The knowledge of our own family is inserted into our “knowledge” of family life around us. Those who came from what we call a “one- parent” family experience this family not only through actual experience but experience as constantly referred to by those around us, by the media, by priests, pastors and by teachers. It is they who from expectations about what family should be like and by the same token define some families as atypical, abnormal or undesirable.

This question of the family has been very much in the news this year. The incidence of crime, running for this year at approximately 540 murders in a population of less than 1.5 million, has been explained by “the breakdown” of the family. So have differences in educational achievement. So has teenage sex. And so has every social problem that we faced. When we look more closely at this, what is often meant by “breakdown of the family” is the changing nature of women’s social roles. If we take the concern over girls doing better than boys at school, once upon a time they did not. Girls were then more likely to be kept home to “help” with large families. Girls’ schools did not always teach the full range of academic subjects and particularly science. Families were more likely to educate boys for professions at a time when girls were required – sometimes by regulations – not to work after early in their first pregnancy. This has changed not only in the middle classes, but in rural areas. Girls may well be doing better because discriminatory conditions have been lessened or abolished. But does girls doing better equate to boys doing worse? Or are there conditions outside of girls-boys competition, which adversely affect the performance of boys today? There is some indication that what is considered “manly” may well orient boys away from books while at the same time reinforcing male expectations or authority. If this is so, then boys doing worse than girls may well be the result of what a boy “is expected to be like” by the society. But this does not mean that there is the “breakdown” or a “crisis” of the family.

Children, having children

The situation of “children having children” raises other issues. This refers to teenage pregnancies. But the incidence of teenage pregnancies has not increased. It has substantially declined since the 1940s and 1950s when not only were there teenage pregnancies outside of marriage: young marriages particularly of girls, were encouraged. This was not only true of rural Indian marriages. It was also true of the urban middle class girl. It is partly explained by the inordinate fear of middle class parents that daughters could fall pregnant before being married and therefore damage the status of themselves and of their family. There is today less pressure to marry quickly even if there is pregnancy. But does this adversely affect the family? There is no indication that it does. Rather it has removed a compulsion to marry which should never have been there.

Why then this “children having children”? It comes, not from our experience, as much as from American and British experience.

I have used these two examples of alternative explanations for what has been quoted as “the breakdown of the family.” But what is our model of the family and from where does it originate? It needs to be underlined that in principle, the Hindu and Muslim family is the joint family, ie the families of all the brothers living under the same paternal roof or in the same paternal compound, even if sometimes cooking separately. This it seems did not necessarily happen here.

French’s biography of Vidya Naipaul records the joint family, yes. But in the maternal household. The belief that the black working class family is a survival or retention of the African family raises more serious problems. That for another time. Here I will only underline that where in African groups descent is traced from the mother, inheritance and therefore power, is vested in the mother’s brother. In any case few “matrilineal” ethnic groups, remain. In practice today here as in India or Africa the urban middle-class family is increasingly like “western” families. What then is the model?

The model of perfection

The first problem is the model of perfection that we use. That model of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus is not simply that in the Bible these are mentioned together in what could be seen as a unit. The model of perfection is constructed during the nineteenth century with the rise of the middle classes. Then too there was much anguish over the family in crisis and about what was perceived as a certain looseness in morality. It was helpful that Queen Victoria was on the throne of Britain and that after the death of the Prince Consort Albert, she remained dressed in the black of widow’s weeds.

It was also the time of the Industrial Revolution and an agrarian revolution. This eliminated much of the British and some of the French peasantry. These drifted to the towns with all the dislocation in family life that that implied. Stability was offered in the picture of a family, the father as breadwinner and wife and mother at home. This however was far from the reality even of the middle class.

Where they could afford it middle class parents sent their children to boarding school. It is these boarding schools and not parents, who trained the next generation of the middle classes. The aristocracy was still given to tutors when they could find them. The “great unwashed” was catching what they could with neither time nor money for the niceties of Victorian luxury. We now know more about those years when incest and prostitution were rife in Britain and France and when the servant girl often served the unmarried sons of the master’s house, in more than housework. The birth rate was high. So was the infant mortality rate. So were deaths in childbirth and early deaths due to what was then the dreaded disease: TB. It is during this period that, with all the talk of Human Rights, women lost some of the rights that they did have. These included certain ownership rights while migration abroad, was the real crisis of the family.

Much of this is related – and coded – in Dickens or Hardy. Little of this information trickled down to the colonies. Even information, in much later work, like the place of mothers and wives in Britain’s mining families or the Irish girls going north for factory work in Belfast, arrived here. It was believed that European families conformed to the picture given us of the Holy Family. They did not. Neither did the Holy Family.

One man and one wife marks them off as probably being relatively poor. Wealthy Jewish men of the time were more likely to be sporting a number of fashionable wives. The marriage would have been carefully arranged and both families would have checked and double checked lineages. It is highly likely that Mary was Joseph’s mother’s sister’s daughter: Jews at the time practised what anthropologists call cross-cousin marriage. But she could have been his niece: very pious Jewish men favoured marriage to their sister’s daughter. Either way what was one of the major concerns of parents of daughters, would have been laid to rest, ie the question of a powerful mother-in-law. The fact that there is cross-cousin marriage, suggests that the family under one roof, was more than the nuclear unit, and more than one generation. None of this approximates the model of the perfect family of Victorian times.

Ending myths

What is peculiar about Trinidad and Tobago is that in spite of the often repeated “breakdown of the family” there is neither the demand for information on the real condition of family relationships nor is there any demand for training in those academic disciplines which govern research on the family.

Comparative analysis may well suggest that while there is change in family relationships change does not mean necessarily crisis. It may also suggest that “crisis” is rather problems of employment, housing or transport which then have an impact on family relationships. That is the major result of research in Britain, Ireland, France and Italy. It may well be the same here.