Consuming Families

Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the 21st Century

Jo Lindsay, JaneMaree Maher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136775154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Matrimonio y sociología familiar

This book explores contemporary families as sites of consumption, examining the changing contexts of family life, where new forms of family are altering how family life is practised and produced, and addressing key social issues – childhood obesity, alchohol and drug addiction, social networking, viral marketing – that put pressure on families as the social, economic and regulatory environments of consumption change.

1 Introduction

Family Life and Consumption in the 21st Century

Consumption is the key social issue of our time: socially, environmentally and economically. Our consuming practices, our interactions with goods and markets, our overuse of the environment are all troubling components of contemporary Western life. Yet a focus only on the ills of contemporary consuming practices obscures the sustaining necessities of consumption. Consumption is as crucial for human survival as it is for the survival of market economies (Humphrey 2009). While there may be some choices about what we consume, consumption itself is not a choice. Identities, relationships, belonging, and personal and health outcomes are achieved through consumption. Families too are created through and sustained by consumption. In Consuming Families: Buying, Making, Producing Family Life in the 21^st Century, family consuming practices are our central focus. We are interested in the role of consumption in family life, in the prevalence of negative assumptions about consumption in families, and in the dominance of stories of family failures in consumption control, especially in relationship to children. We explore contentious issues of childhood obesity, alcohol, media use, and sex and sexualisation, but we argue for a more careful and a more generous account of family consumption. Consumption is most often understood in terms of individual desires and satisfactions. Yet much consumption is done for others (Morgan 1999). And even individual consumption decisions may be seen as part of an individual's desire to connect or belong (Featherstone 2010; Pugh 2009). Consumption within families, and by individuals for families, constitutes care, connection and belonging.

We recognise the troubling nature of many contemporary consumption issues. Excess consumption is seen as dangerous to our communities, our health, to the environment and even to the very markets that drive consumption practices (Humphrey 2009). There are widespread fears about increased narcissism, selfishness, changes to intimacies and a lessening of social responsibility (Bauman 2007). There are fears that our materialism is leading to the loss of social and community connection. How do such fears intersect with contemporary ideas about family and family life? The relationship between family and consumption is at once everyday, and contentious and contradictory. Consuming is a necessary part of family life and family relationships; the shelter, nourishment, and caregiving so commonly linked to family life all require consuming practices (Folbre and Nelson 2000; Humphrey 2009). Without consumption, the comfort and care of family cannot be achieved. But increasingly the reach of the market into the spaces of home previously framed as private has been understood to create particular threats to family life, and for vulnerable family members. Fears about the loss of individual social connection and the rise of greed are reflected in fears about reduced commitment between family members and reduced expectations of care, love and affection. At the same time though, obligations for families to ensure good consumption for children in terms of healthy diets, protection from risky consuming especially in regard to alcohol and sex, and corrupting media have intensified. As government supports and care provision shrinks, family obligations to provide moral and educational support and material goods are intensifying. So while some forms of consumption in families are bad, other forms of consumption are clearly part of good contemporary parenting and care.

Consuming Families is concerned with this complex and contradictory relationship between contemporary practices of consumption and the making and shaping of family life. Families have always been key sites for consumption. But in recent decades, contests over childhood obesity, the sexualisation of children, the media practices of children and teenagers, and young people's use of alcohol and other drugs have dominated media and public policy discussions of Western family life. Issues of responsibility, parental control and whether children and young people are too active in a consumer world have become central in social policy debates, and in educational, media and health realms. Family consumption, especially consumption by vulnerable or dependent family members, has become a critical site of social contest, regulation and debate. This spotlight means that for families, the daily struggles about good and appropriate consumption are newly visible and ever more complicated. Consumption choices and consumption practices are often deeply contentious for, and within, families.

For us, this sense of fear about families and family consumption needs to be more carefully and deeply explored. Families are changing. Narrow definitions and meanings of family have been challenged and contested; there is increasing recognition that family forms are diverse and dynamic. Changing patterns of partnership, parenthood, friendship and sociality mean that the traditional (or perhaps more properly modern) conceptions of the family as biologically linked parents and dependent children can no longer be sustained at the centre of debates about families and family life. In most developed countries, this nuclear family form is no longer dominant and new forms of family are increasingly recognised in social convention and by state institutions (Lindsay and Dempsey 2009; Stacey 1998). Even when such recognition is partial or inadequate, new family practices make new family forms (Silva and Smart 1999), which are then included in social life.

These changes have driven insistent calls to recognise other relationships that do the work of family (Budgeon and Roseneil 2004; Lindsay and Dempsey 2009; Roseneil and Budgeon 2004; Stacey 1998; Valentine 2006). Roseneil and Budgeon (2004) argue that the term ‘family’ limits social analysis and understanding; for them the term cannot encompass social thinking about the complexities of love, relationship and support in the 21^st century. The call to recognise relationships beyond the family and ‘new’ families is vitally important. Yet the notion of ‘family’ continues to have strong resonance in everyday life as perhaps the main site of intimate connection, authenticity and belonging (Ribbens McCarthy 2012). The concept of family particularly echoes in enduring nature of care obligations of parents for children.

In Consuming Families, we are primarily focused on interactions between parents and children and the role of consumption in the discharge of caring obligations. This focus is not because we consider that this family form is the dominant or pre-eminent form or because we take for granted the heterosexual couple with children in defining family. The parent/child families we discuss include single parent and post divorce families, and lesbian and gay families though to date there is little specific information on different family consumption practices. We recognise, too, there are many other family types that do not include parents and children. But the consumption issues of interest to us concern interactions between parents and children and how consumption practices and desires are shaping contemporary family lives. The regulation of intake has become central in how we understand parental roles and obligations in the West. The parent-child family is where children's assumed vulnerability is to be protected and where parents are tasked with managing the consumption of media, food, alcohol and sexualised images and products. The consumption of these products in particular, is seen as threatening to children, and to childhood. The protection of children requires competent parental consumption and control, and the training of children as responsible and restrained consumers. The cultural focus on parent-child families as sites for facilitating and regulating consumption, and the dominance of stories of failure and conflict in family life, as children apparently grow fatter, watch more unsuitable television, and develop ungovernable appetites for consumer goods, is our central interest here.

Discussions of families must always recognise the fluid and dynamic nature of family formation, the intricate relationships that exist within families and the situation of the family in terms of the state. Important processes of social change are occurring in gender relations, in modes of parenting and in the social divisions between adults and children, and creating changes in family structure and in roles within family life. New forms of family and new ways of doing gender in family life have emerged. Yet there are predictable continuities too. In heterosexual families mothers continue to do the bulk of consuming work and child care; mothers are primarily cited as responsible for improper or overconsumption. Of course men have family lives and are involved in everyday consumption and family care but in many families they play a secondary role in these activities (Buckingham 2011). Families are negotiating these patterns of gendered continuity and rapid social change concurrently in their everyday practices.

Relationships between the family and the state are constantly evolving too. Industrialisation, the development of public health and hygiene infrastructures, and the rise of mass education in Western nations all impacted on how the family was located in relation to other social institutions (Ahlander and Bahr 1995; Jagger and Wright 1999; Lasch 1995). Contests arose over the role of the family as a socialising agent, and the perceived encroachment of state agencies into family lives. But the role of families in securing the well-being of nations was clear: healthy families meant strong nations. A ‘direct association between the health of the nation and the health of its families’ (Jagger and Wright 1999, 23) was created by the British State in the 19^th century and in other Western nations too (Reiger 1985; Gillies 2011). Families were thus seen to have a central role in developing and delivering citizens.

In more recent decades, the role of the state has been complicated by the emphasis on individual responsibility in social discourses. Choices, rather than structural constraints, are identified as critical in how well people, and families, do (Gillies 2011; Pugh 2009). Health, education, diet, caregiving and a range of other elements are more often framed as the responsibility of individuals and by implication, families, than as the responsibility of states. This particular mobilisation of individual responsibility has coincided with significant changes in how states define their responsibilities to their citizens. States in developed nations have been withdrawing from active roles of care and support, creating instead paradigms where individuals ‘choose’ to interact with state supports and agencies for needed services. Discourses of mutual obligation are created around the provision of services; again reinforcing the responsibility individuals have to make competent consumption choices about their own well-being. In Australia, for example, new conditions have been created for welfare payments in some indigenous communities where children's school attendance is required for benefits to be paid. Work projects to receive income support are commonplace in developed economies and welfare regimes often enshrine tasks and obligations for those who need assistance. As states withdraw from support for care, the provision of education and other forms of social support, there is a ‘renewed emphasis on families as a source of support’ (Jagger and Wright 1999, 25). The withdrawal of social support structures means those individuals most closely concerned with the well-being and maintenance of children move to ameliorate the gaps in state provision. Families work to ensure that the lessening of state support does not negatively affect these most vulnerable citizens. Jagger and Wright have described this movement in the UK as ‘setting the family “to work” in the 1980s and 1990s’ (1999, 28, see also Edwards et al 2012; Gillies 2011; Peel 2003). In this landscape of individual responsibility and choice, families, like individuals, can seemingly choose how they make their way; children's well-being can be secured by ‘good’ parental choices

So, the rise of ‘individual responsibility’ does not diminish the role of families but instead intensifies it. Families are still key social institutions (McKie et al 2005) and family life is always ‘a public concern’ (Gillies 2011, 2). ‘Families are positioned to provide for the satisfaction of [both] material and emotional needs’ (Silva 2010, 55); they are vital cogs in states securing the care and sustenance of citizens. In contrast to the emphasis on family choice as the key element of successful family care and provisioning, we accept the terms and conditions of achieving such satisfaction of needs are necessarily embedded in wider social and political structures and opportunities. This further recognition of how parental choices are constrained is rarely acknowledged in public discourses about ‘poor’ consumption in families. The moral obligations of parents are clearly articulated and usually accepted (Ribbens McCarthy et al 2003), but analyses of how resources and opportunities enable and define child-rearing projects (Brannen and Nilsen 2005; Gillies 2005; Vincent and Ball 2007) are less common. Inequalities in childhoods as they are shaped by parental access to resources for care are not comprehensively accounted for (Gillies 2005; Lareau 2003; Peel 2003; Pugh 2009; Vincent and Ball 2007).

In Consuming Families, the active role of families in mediating and modelling good consumption practices is a central interest. But, for us, this role must always be understood in relation to the social and economic conditions particular families face. In exploring how different families, and different family members, negotiate and enact consumption, we seek to illuminate both the agentic and structural elements of family practices. In the repetitions of everyday life, families respond to, contest and mediate existing social opportunities and obstacles. Social and economic conditions constrain families; within these existing constraints, families define priorities and make accommodations that reflect their own values and aspirations (Pugh 2009; Tubbs et al 2005). In this sense, each family is drawing on ‘common cultures’ (Thomson et al 2011) of good parenting, but is governed by the material and cultural resources available in constituting its own family life. For us, this sense of agency and constraint in families centres consumption in family life. Family consuming practices create and sustain family lives in contemporary societies. It is the daily practices of consumption—planning, purchasing, preparing, and using—that express and achieve family life, identity, belonging and care. This positioning of consuming practices at the centre of family life is captured in the phrase ‘consuming families’. In their daily practices, families consume time, goods, social conditions and discourses as they do family. In the course of everyday living then, they are consuming families by definition. The term ‘consuming families’ was used by Jan Phillips (2008) to describe the consuming practices within families and by family members that create family life. She argues grocery shopping, cooking, eating and a multiplicity of other practices, make family life, ‘as adults and children together constitute themselves as “consuming families”’ (Phillips 2008, 93). While contemporary stories of family change have often been concerned with the ways in which market forces are winnowing out the affect and connection of family life (Hochschild 2003), Phillips' term reminds us that consumption sits constructively at the centre of family life (and always has). It invites us to understand the creative and constitutive aspects of consumption in family life. This is our project in Consuming Families: to consider how and what families are consuming everyday and to see how families are both made and tested by their consuming practices. Our decision to focus on contentious issues, the places where family consuming practices are cited as problematic: media, food, sexualisation, alcohol, reflects our interest in the widespread contemporary willingness to see the family in decline (arguably not a new or true story—see Jagger and Wright 1999; Smart 2007; Stacey 1998). It also reflects our desire to contest the current focus on the negative rather than creative aspects of family consumption (Buckingham 2011; Martens et al 2004). Our use of the term ‘consuming’ positions family activities, family ‘doing’ (Morgan 2011a) as central but also acknowledges the intensity of consuming pressures in contemporary family life. Families are consumed as well as consuming. We acknowledge these tensions while seeking to move beyond blame and individualised responsibility. We aim to illuminate the resilience and creativity in family consumption practices, as they are shaped by social and economic conditions, by family and individual preferences, and most importantly by interdependency, commitment and love.

Each of the chapters in this volume addresses a contentious social issue at the nexus of consumption and the making of family life in the 21^st century. We examine the intersection of family time and children's consumption, family food practices in the shadow of the panic over childhood obesity, teen drinking in the context of public anxieties about youth binge drinking, consumption of sexual commodities in the shadow of the panic about the sexualisation of girls and how new media inflects contemporary family life in the context of fear about destructive media influences on young people. We now outline our approach to the concepts of family and consumption and our central argument about the ‘embeddedness’ of contemporary consumption practices in family life. Consumption practices in families are primarily ‘relational’ (Buckingham 2011) and are used to sustain and create family life. Families use consumption to care for each other, to connect with each and to belong within their wider communities and social contexts. Gender and intergenerational relationships are shaped by different ideals and habits of consumption. We highlight the deep contradictions of consumption particularly in affluent Western societies and the tensions these contradictions create for families. We consider the role of the market in simultaneously creating problems in family life and then seemingly offering solutions to families seeking to manage work, care and intimacy in a rapidly changing social landscape. We argue that the everyday (food, cleanliness, the routine ‘embodied practices of intimacy’, Gabb 2008, 81), the productive and pleasurable (treats, holidays, parties) and the contentious (children's independence in consumption, the prescriptions of state and society, changing family forms and traditions) are all aspects of family consuming. They all need to be understood as making family in the 21^st century.

RECOGNISING THE CONSUMING FAMILY

When we talk about consuming families, a series of conceptual and social disjunctions are mobilised. Pre-industrial families were understood as productive units where sustenance, care and economic production intermingled. Family members were all involved together in the maintenance of family life. The development of industrial capitalism and related urbanisation, changing patterns of production, and new gendered divisions of care related to new forms of employment, repositioned families. Formerly sites of production, families now were primarily sites of consumption in Western societies and economies, although many have challenged the explanatory power of such sweeping accounts (Ahlander and Bahr 1995; Smart 2007; Zelizer 2005). These changes in family lives engendered a sense of family life as distinct from the economic and public spheres. Family life, so it goes, should be free from the taint of commerce. The rules of exchange, commodity and competition that govern markets should not govern family life, where commitments, ethics of care and selflessness should apply (Taylor 2004; Zelizer 2005). Part of the contemporary unease about consumption in family life then is rooted in our sense that the family should be a haven from the market that threatens the relationality, interdependence and intimacy invoked by the concept of family.

But the distinction of family life and the market is idealised and inaccurate: both historically and in contemporary societies (Zelizer 2005). Consumption should be more fully understood as a necessary part of human existence and experience (Humphrey 2009) rather than as antithetical to human well-being. Families have to engage with markets to achieve and deliver care. Janelle Taylor (2004) has observed mother...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Advances in Sociology
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Family Life and Consumption in the 21st Century
• 2 Consuming Goods and Ideals in Family Life
• 3 Text Me: The “Mediation” of Everyday Family Life
• 4 The “Big” Issues of Childhood: Family Responsibility for Children's Weight
• 5 Youth Drinking and Family Alcohol Cultures
• 6 Seeing It and Doing It: Young People, Families and Sex
• Conclusion: A New Purchase on Family Life
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index