Spring 2006 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra
The Changing Nature of Family Ties
For More Information on Family Trends
Danielle A. Bessett ’96, a visiting assistant professor at Williams College, suggests the following resources for those interested in digging more deeply into changing family structures.
The U.S. Census puts out great, easily accessible reports on this data that I think readers would be interested in. Those that seem most appropriate for this article are:
› Fertility of American Women, 2004
Fertility rates, by age, race, employment, education; overall drop in
number of children; maternal employment; rise in non-marital
childbearing; drop in teen childbearing
› America’s Families and Living Arrangements, 2003
Shows increases in people living alone, cohabitation arrangements, intergenerational living arrangements, percent of children living in two-parent versus single-parent family structures. (Note: Census figures do not typically include lesbian/gay families, because they are unsurprisingly not designed to count them.)
There are also several really great, readable books that I would recommend to a lay audience, even appropriate for a good summer read:
- Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (reprinted 2000, Basic Books) and The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America’s Changing Families (1998, Basic Books)
- Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas’s Promises I Can Keep (2004, UC Press)
- Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels’s The Mommy Myth (2004, Free Press)
Other Alumnae Speak Out About Changing Families
On being an older mom:
“I took custody of Theo 3 days after my 40th birthday. My husband and I started trying for a baby rather late and, well, one thing didn’t, in our case, lead to another. He is a French citizen and we currently live in Marseille, France and so had to undergo the grueling process in a country well-known for its bureaucracy. It took us 2 long years, but more than anything, a lot of patience and persistence, in order to find and adopt a child from Armenia. My take on this is that I couldn’t have done it at a younger age. I just wasn’t strong enough or focused enough or willing enough to give up all the time and energy and ... life ... necessary to pursue the project. … I was also adopted, and there are exactly 40 years between my mother and myself, and now I am repeating the cycle, a fact that I find indicative of some sort of fate.… Someone once said that a middle age crisis isn’t about what you’ve done with your life, it is about the realization of what you haven’t done and probably won’t ever do. Theo has been the perfect answer to my crisis, because whatever I haven’t done suddenly doesn’t seem very important next to the absolutely awesome task I’ve been given - to protect this wonderful little person and ensure that he learns everything he needs to know.”
—Judy Berberian Ichkhanian ’86
“I was 39 3/4 when I had my daughter, who ended up being my one and only child. Initially, [being an older mother] seemed to make a difference to me, and I even joined an over-forty mother’s group to help me through a very lonely period that I expected would be much more social than it really was. Now that my daughter’s in school full time, and I’ve gotten to know a lot more mothers, it’s not as much of an issue. In fact, the older I get, the more older mothers I meet!”
—Ellen Gitelman ’80
“My husband and I adopted a baby from Siberia a few months before my 50th birthday. ( I pushed Deena in a stroller in the Alumnae Parade at my 30th reunion — shocking my classmates, I’m sure, many of whom had college-age kids!) Little did I know that my 2 years of Russian language with Prof. Igor Ivanovich Mihelshenko (sp?) at MHC would come in so handy, for our 2 trips to Siberia!
—Jamie Kotch ’74
On Interfaith, Intercultural Families
“I am in an interfaith, intercultural marriage, living with extended family. My husband of 8 years is a Hindu, originally from India. I met him through a MHC friend. I am a volunteer executive board member of the North American Chapter of the International Association for Religious Freedom, and a Unitarian Universalist Sunday School teacher. I am also involved in the Indian American Forum for Political Education. My husband travels a great deal for business and I often get to accompany him. I also visit my in laws in India every year for a month. I am very grateful for the education, opportunities and experiences provided by MHC. These helped give me the intellectual confidence that served me well in graduate school, as well as the poise and social confidence to be comfortable talking to folks in an Indian village, as well as at a corporate black tie function.”
—Lee Mohapatra FP’90
On blended and extended families
“At age fifty-two, I entered into a relationship with a man who had three grown children and three grandchildren. I became very close to his family. A fourth grandchild was born “under my regime.” After eight and one half years together, he and I separated. I continued my relationship with his family; I am the only “grandma” (albeit not by blood) that two of the grandchildren have known. When their mother (my ex-partner’s elder daughter) realized she had to extricate herself and their children from her marriage, she and the children came to live with me. I had never had children of my own, and suddenly, at age sixty-one, I had my four dogs and four cats, another adult (who is blind, a Swarthmore grad., and employed full time) and two elementary school-aged children living with me. It was a distinct change in lifestyle, and one I will cherish forever. The appreciation I garnered for parents! After eight months here, they were able to move into their own house, and I have gone back to being just “grandma.” The greatest compliment to me, is that all three still want to visit with me during school holidays and for a few weeks in the summer. With no children of my own, this has been one of the greatest gifts in my life: an incredible amazing wonderful experience I never expected to have.”
—Sudy Smith McLaren ’62
“My family currently consists of twin thirteen-year-old nieces (daughters of my husband’s adopted brother), my eight-year-old son from my first marriage and a two-year-old potty-training son from my current marriage, my husband and I. I guess the three dogs, cat, and rabbit don’t count! I think our family is truly a modern-day blended family. My husband is a pediatrician who first married (me) at age thirty-five and became an instant dad to my son, who was three at the time. My husband also has muscular dystrophy. I changed careers by going back to school when I was pregnant with my youngest son and now work part-time providing recreation therapy in the local public school district after twelve years as a health care administrator. It gives me the opportunity to do work I love during school hours so I can run around like a mad woman in the afternoon to all the after-school activities.”
—Sheila Gaudet ’90
“My family situation [is] something I never thought about before I became a mom. Now it’s really important to me and I am lucky to be where I am. After trying to have a baby for a seemingly really long time (four and a half years) and getting very involved in our university careers in Los Angeles, my husband and I had a beautiful, healthy, daughter and things changed.
I “worked” from home for about 9.5 months, while my husband continued to be both a full time university librarian with awful evening hours and a full-time MA student. That first year was really nice, but tough and I didn’t always really appreciate being at home with my baby, because I was often worried about getting my work done. I really resented my work, especially because I had known for over a year that it was pretty meaningless to me.
I accepted a new job last spring. Aside from its professional appeal, it meant moving back to Phoenix, which I swore I would never do. The fact that my parents are here had a lot to do with my ability to make a big career transition with a baby I had never left before. Happily, I have always had a close, respectful, loving relationship with my parents and as the time to move back came closer, I got more and more excited about the fact we would again be more a part of each others’ everyday lives. Now, I work more than my husband, who is teaching high school, our daughter is in day-care almost full-time and really thriving, and I have my parents near me and they love to be with the baby and take care of her. … I love the close relationship my daughter is developing with my parents, and I am enjoying life in Phoenix and a new relationship with my parents without living under their roof. … I realize how very grateful I am that we are no longer like so many families I know, where people leave home and build lives so far from their parents.
Also, it’s great that my husband gets to parent so much more than many other fathers we know. “Working Mother” recently had an article about fathers “participating in” the housework and child-rearing, but in our case, we really share it all more and more. When we were in LA, that wasn’t at all the case, but now we really have a partnership in our home and family and even some reversal of traditional gender roles.”
—Ariann Stern-Gottschalk ’92
On balancing motherhood and livelihood
“I had my one and only child moments before my fortieth birthday. Worked until the moment I gave birth, and went back to work three months later. That was thirteen years and fourteen Broadway shows ago. … I believe I was the first Broadway production stage manager to do a new musical show with a baby in tow. I say the first because others have stupidly followed close behind. It’s possible that I made it look too easy!”
—Bonnie Panson ’74
“Although my children are now older (Cameron is a rising junior at Johns Hopkins and my son Patrick is a specialist in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Infantry, recently returned from a year in Afghanistan), my husband Gene and I adopted both of them—Patrick when I was thirty-nine and Cameron when I was forty-one. Patrick was born in Chicago, adopted when I was an associate professor working towards tenure (and was told that this was a huge no-no if I wanted promotion and tenure). Cameron is a foreign adoption. She was born in Korea and adopted when I was an associate professor, working towards promotion to professor. Since I managed both promotions, the naysayers were very wrong in their advice not to have children if you wanted an academic career. Our children are the lights of our lives—they were ours from the moment we first saw them.”
—Noelle Parsons Granger ’65
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Thinking is one step, but it can only get you so far. Thinking is as good as your ability to translate it into action. And that action can be speech. — Anika Patterson ’01 |
