Children and Family

Children and Family

I don’t know that the modern-day family would be recognized the same way without the presence of children. The hegemonic definition of family is a biologically male father, a biologically female mother, 2.5 children, and a dog. In the modern-day family, children under the age of fourteen contribute absolutely no economic advantage to the family, and yet are understood as the basic transformation factor in moving from a “loving couple” into a family.
In an article by Viviana Zelizer, “Pricing the Priceless Child,” Zelizer describes a survey conveying this feeling, “A national survey of the psychological motivations for having children confirms their predominantly sentimental value. Asked about “the advantages or good things about having children”, the most common response was the desire for love and affection and the feeling of being a family.” She also later quotes Philip Aries, the author of Centuries of Childhood as having described, “The concept of family…is inseparable from the concept of childhood…”
The “modern family” has not always existed the way it does today. Zelizer writes, “The increasing domestication of the middle-class women in the nineteenth century, as Carl Degler points out in At Odds, ‘went hand in hand with the new conception of children as precious.’” The heteronormative family exists as it does, with a mother in charge of the emotional well-being of the family, the father in charge of the financial well-being of the family, and children contributing virtually nothing else except the social recognition of this group as a family, exists within the realm of also acknowledging that children are genetically linked to both parents, that both parents are of the same racial background, and that both parents are heterosexual. Fact is, not all families fit this formula. While the presence of children works to help “legitimize” these families in society’s view, they still remain sharply outside the normative, expected family structure....

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