Negotiating Family Responsibilities

Janet Finch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134888269
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Negotiating Family Responsibilities provides a major new insight into contemporary family life, particularly kin relationships outside the nuclear family. While many people believe that the real meaning of 'family' has shrunk to the nuclear family household, there is considerable evidence to suggest that relationships with the wider kin group remain an important part of most people's lives.
Based on the findings of a major study of kinship, and including lively verbatim accounts of conversations with family members concepts of responsibility and obligation within family life are examined and the authors expand theories on the nature of assistance within families and argue that it is negotiated over time rather than given automatically.

1
Understanding family responsibilities

INTRODUCTION: WHY STUDY FAMILY RESPONSIBILITIES?

This book is about relationships between members of families in adult life— parents and children, brothers and sisters, aunts, nieces, cousins, grandparents, anyone who is acknowledged as a relative. It is based upon a research study which we have conducted into contemporary relationships between adult kin, especially their significance as sources of practical and financial help. At a time when public statements about the decline in family life are commonplace, we were trying to find out whether these relationships within kin groups do have any real meaning. We were especially interested in whether concepts of family responsibility, or duty or obligation make any sense to people living in contemporary Britain.

To introduce readers to the kind of issues with which the book is concerned, and to illustrate that this is a topic which raises many interesting questions, we begin by giving four brief examples from the data which we have collected. These are not necessarily typical cases or common experiences—indeed each one has some features which are rather unusual. But they are all real. They were stories told to us by people in the late 1980s, to illustrate how structures of practical and financial support worked in their own families. All names are pseudonyms (see Appendix A for details).

Example 1:
Sarah Yates and her cousin Mary Mycock

Sarah Yates and Mary Mycock were two cousins, both of whom we interviewed. They were about the same age (in their forties) and both lived with husbands of a second marriage. Each had two children, though Sarah’s were older than Mary’s and one had already left the parental home. Their homes were about 20 miles apart but both had access to a car. Sarah worked full-time as an ambulance driver. Mary was not doing paid work at the time we interviewed her, and saw looking after her two young children as her full-time job for the moment.

Both of them spoke in warm terms about their relationship over the years. Their contact was not necessarily frequent, but each did always feel that she could call on the other if she needed help. It was a relationship in which various types of assistance had passed in both directions. Mary had made clothes for Sarah’s children when they were small, and had agreed to make her elder daughter’s wedding dress. They had each looked after the other’s children at various different times. Mary used Sarah as her main ‘shoulder to cry on’ when her first husband left her with little warning. Over the years they had given each other various types of practical, domestic assistance. Sarah gave us a direct illustration of this, when we asked her to tell us what sort of things she and Mary tended to do for each other. She told us that she had just contacted Mary to say that she needed some urgent assistance. She put it this way:

Sarah Well I could tell you what I am doing tonight for instance. My husband has been out there and taken all the plums off the plum tree. And in my garage there’s fifty-odd pounds of plums. I’m tied up with this fund-raising I told you about, and all those plums are going to go bad if something’s not done with them fast. So I phoned Mary up last night and I said ‘If I bring you about forty pounds of plums and the sugar, will you make the jam?’ [laughs]. And she said ‘Yes’ [laughs], So that’s what I’m going up there for tonight [pause]. So that’s the sort of thing I mean. We just—just natural, normal, everyday things.

Example 2:
Maureen Vickers and her mother

Maureen Vickers was in her early sixties when we interviewed her. She worked full-time for a group of doctors as the administrator of their general practice, and lived in a flat with her unmarried son, who was in his thirties.

Maureen told us in some detail about what had happened when her own mother was terminally ill, many years previously. At that time Maureen was living in London and had a full-time job. Her mother lived in Barrow-in-Furness, more than 300 miles away and in a very inaccessible part of Britain. Maureen had tried to persuade her mother to come and live with her, when she realised that she could no longer cope on her own, but her mother refused. So for two years Maureen and her sister (who also lived near London) managed to look after their mother by an ingenious yet extremely demanding arrangement. Maureen described it like this:

Maureen	She had two years in her own home, with her bed downstairs, and I used to go up and look after her for five days. When I left my sister used to come up. You see, we did it turnabout.
Interviewer	Did you actually go and stay at her house?
Maureen	At her house yes. I stayed there for five days. And then my sister came and she did her five days [pause]. So that we wouldn’t get absolutely bogged down [pause]. Sometimes we used to meet, because there was no train so we had to get the bus, sometimes we used to meet at Levens Bridge. She was getting off one bus and I was waiting for the other. We used to say ‘Hi, is she alright?’ ‘She’s fine’ [pause]. And this used to be about eleven o’clock at night. On this dark country lane, you know, there could be only one person waiting there. I mean if it wasn’t my sister, somebody must have thought ‘That’s a funny woman over there’.

Example 3:
Leona Smith and her brothers

Leona Smith was a young woman in her early twenties, studying for a degree at a college in the north west of England. She had been brought up in Leeds and came from a family of Caribbean descent. Her parents had both migrated to the UK before Leona was born. They had been divorced for some years by the time we interviewed Leona. She had always lived with her mother but also had regular contact with her father.

Leona was the only daughter in this family and had four brothers, three older than herself and one younger. The youngest one was still at school but the older three all had paid jobs—as a cabinet maker, a computer programmer and an electrician. Leona told us how these three brothers, as well as her mother, had all helped her financially during her time at college.

Leona	My mum and my brothers, those who have been in employment, have played a major supporting role as regards my education. I do have a grant from the local authority but it is inadequate to deal with everything I require in producing and performing well as a student. Money has been coming regularly from my mum even though I don’t ask for it. I think she understands that, as a student you need to do certain things, you need to buy certain books, so she’s actually supported me there. So havemy brothers—not just financially but they come and see how I am, see if I need anything [pause].
Interviewer	The financial help which you get from your brothers, does that come direct to you or is it sort of channelled through your mother?
Leona	Oh it’s direct to me. Sent in a letter. Sometimes they’ll make up the amount my mum sends me in a letter that she writes to me —which is really good.

Example 4:
Alf Smith and his mother-in-law

Our last example concerns Alf Smith’s relationship with his mother-in-law. He is no relation to Leona Smith. Alf was in his forties when we interviewed him and was living with his wife and his two teenage daughters. He was employed full-time as a gardener for the local council. He had done various manual jobs in the course of his working life, one of which had been as a driver working for a transport company.

Alf told us of an incident which had happened at that time, when he got caught trying to steal a large carton full of packets of butter. He did this while he was picking up a delivery from a warehouse storing grocery products. He planned to sell the butter to the nearest transport cafe, to earn a bit of money on the side. With hindsight Alf considered that he had been stupid to try to steal the butter because he knew that this firm had good security. As a consequence of being caught, he lost his job and was prosecuted for the theft. The court fined him but he had no money to pay. At this point his mother-in-law stepped in to help. Alf told the story like this:

Alf [After I had been caught] I phoned my firm up and they said ‘You’re fired’. I said ‘Fair comment’. Anyway I finished up in court and it were a fine of five pounds, which I hadn’t got at the time. Two days to pay. I thought ‘Where am I going to get five pounds in two days?’ No job, sort of thing. Well down at my mother-in-law’s, it were the wife, she called at her mother’s coming home [pause] and she were telling her all this. My mother-in-law, straight into her purse, you know. She said ‘There you are. Tell that lad to get straight up to the courts and pay his fine. And he can pay me the money when he’s got it,’

These four stories are in many ways very different. They concern different relationships—parents and children, brothers and sisters, in-laws, cousins. They are about very different types of help—money, practical assistance, looking after someone who is ill. The circumstances outlined are very diverse—from ‘natural, normal, everyday things’ (as Sarah Yates puts it) to a case where the need is extreme, like the care of a dying elderly woman. What they have in common is that they are all examples of one relative helping another. At the very least, they show that in these four families, kin relationships do have some significance in adult life as the means through which people receive various types of assistance.

But examples like these raise issues beyond the simple observation that, at least for some people and in some situations, kin relationships can ‘ work’ as support mechanisms. We can see this by posing the more analytical question: what is going on here? This can be developed in several ways. We can ask for example: in what sense are any or all of these people helping their relatives because they are relatives? We might imagine that Maureen Vickers is unlikely to take on the kind of caring role which she decribes for someone who is not a relative; possibly she would not do it for anyone other than a parent. This reasoning also may apply to other examples—the fact that people are related seems central to understanding why they help each other. But what about Sarah Yates and Mary Mycock? Is the fact that they are cousins of any real importance in understanding the nature of their relationship and the assistance which they give to each other? Or are we really looking at a pattern of mutual aid which could just as easily grow up between two friends? They happen to be cousins, but this may be of little relevance to understanding what is going on between them.

Even in those examples where we might feel more confident about saying that help is given because the person in need is a relative, can we assume that the help flows from a sense of family duty or responsibility? Are the people who provide help doing it because they feel that they ‘ought to’, that they have an obligation to help a relative which would not apply to other people? Again in a case like Maureen Vickers’ the idea that her actions flow from a sense of duty seems quite plausible. It seems much less plausible to see Alf Smith’s mother-in-law in that light. Does she really pay off Alf’s fine because she feels a sense of duty to the son-in-law to whom she refers as ‘that lad’? Or is she actually more concerned about the reputation of her family in the eyes of her friends and neighbours, and therefore keen to see that the fine does get paid? Or perhaps her real concern is to ensure that there is not too much financial pressure on the household where her grandchildren are being brought up. If a sense of duty is involved here, it may be a sense of duty to her daughter and her granddaughters rather than to her son-in-law, who is the person she actually helps.

Translated into more general terms, these are the kind of questions with which we began the research whose findings we discuss in this book. They were questions which we were interested in before we heard any of the stories which we have told here. Our interest in pursuing them stemmed from intellectual questions which have their foundations in sociological writings and in the analysis of social policy. We will now spell out these intellectual underpinnings of our work, and address the question ‘why study family responsibilities?’ in a more formal way.

We begin by clarifying what we mean by the term ‘family’ in this context. We are focusing on relationships in adult life, so our work is not about responsibilities for young children. Also we have not been concerned specifically to study the responsibilities of spouses, though clearly these cannot be totally excluded if one is interested (which we are) in the overall pattern of responsibilities which develop in a family. Strictly, therefore, our work is about kinship. If we were being precise we would use only the word ‘kin’ throughout this book. However we have chosen to use it interchangeably with ‘family’ and ‘relatives’ because these are the words most commonly in use among the general population to describe the relationships which we are studying. None of the people we interviewed actually used the term kin. They did use ‘family’ and ‘relatives’ extensively —sometimes interchangeably, sometimes drawing a distinction between ‘family’ who are close and ‘relatives’ who are more distant (Firth, Hubert and Forge, 1970).

We wanted to concentrate principally on responsibilities associated with adult relationships with relatives for three main reasons. First, much less is known about them than about relationships associated with the nuclear family household. A number of well-known studies of family, kinship and community were conducted in the 1950s and 1960s (Young and Willmott, 1957; Stacey, 1960; Bell, 1968; Rosser and Harris, 1968; Firth, Hubert and Forge, 1970) but then this type of research fell out of fashion. Most research concerned with family relationships in recent years has concentrated on the household, thus necessarily focusing mainly on spouses and on parents with young children (for good summaries of this work, see Brannen and Wilson, 1987; Morris, 1990).

Our second reason for screening out parents’ responsibilities for young children, and responsibilities between spouses, was that these relationships have a special status in that the responsibilities which they entail are subject to legal definition. The responsibilities attached to other adult kin relationships are not legally defined in Britain, or at least they have not been since 1948 when the Poor Law was formally abolished. Before that there was a legal expectation that, if the need arose, children were responsible for giving their parents financial assistance, and grandparents as well as parents had a responsibility to support children of immature years. In Victorian Britain the Poor Law authorities attempted to enforce these responsibilities in order to ensure that as few people as possible became a charge on public funds (Wall, 1977; Quadagno, 1982). But since 1948, the responsibilities associated with relationships outside the nuclear family and the household have not been systematically defined in law. Yet it is possible to find examples—like those which we used at the beginning of this chapter—which show that they can be channels through which significant forms of assistance pass, and within which people do appear to operate with a concept of family responsibilities.

Our third reason for being interested in relationships between adult kin concerns the type of social and economic changes which have occurred in the period when little social research on kinship has been conducted in Britain. Interesting and important though the earlier generation of studies is, we cannot assume that its findings are relevant to understanding kinship in the 1980s and 1990s. In the intervening thirty years a good deal has happened in British society which may have had some impact on kin relationships—urban development, shifts of population across the country, an economic recession, the rapid growth in the numbers of elderly people, significant shifts in the political climate, the creation of a multi-ethnic society through the migration and settlement of people from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

The effects of these changes on kin relationships are not easy to predict. On the one hand we might expect factors such as geographical mobility and the break-up of settled communities through redevelopment, to mean that kin relationships have become more fragmented and of less importance in the last thirty years. The earlier generation of kinship studies certainly picked up on the beginning of such patterns (see especially Willmott and Young, 1960). On the other hand some of the social and economic pressures which we have identified might work in the opposite direction. Economic hardship caused by a recession could perhaps mean that more people have had to rely on their kin for help. The increased numbers of elderly people in the population, at a time when the government has been trying to hold down public expenditure, has meant an explicit shift in social policies, to encourage families to take greater responsibility for the care of their elderly relatives. This shift can be traced through a number of policy proposals and is well documented (see for example, Finch and Groves, 1980; Henwood and Wicks, 1985; Ungerson, 1990). In so far as such policies are successful, one might expect to find that kin relationships have become more, not less, important. The tensions which can be created between contradictory pressures—geographical mobility on the one hand, responsibility for the care of an elderly parent on the other— are illustrat...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• TABLES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1. UNDERSTANDING FAMILY RESPONSIBILITIES
• 2. BALANCING RESPONSIBILITIES: DEPENDENCE AND INDEPENDENCE
• 3. NEGOTIATING COMMITMENTS OVER TIME
• 4. MAKING LEGITIMATE EXCUSES
• 5. REPUTATIONS AND MORAL IDENTITIES IN THE NEGOTIATION OF FAMILY RESPONSIBILITIES
• 6. CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX A: METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH DESIGN
• APPENDIX B: SHOULD RELATIVES BE THE PREFERRED SOURCE OF HELP FOR SOMEONE IN NEED OF ASSISTANCE? SURVEY FINDINGS
• APPENDIX C: WHO DOES WHAT FOR WHOM?
• REFERENCES