From Studyplace

These are notes I'm taking for Professor Varenne's class on the Dynamics of Family Interaction. I'm using it as an opportunity to play around with wikis and shared community knowledge. Please feel free to contribute to these notes or share your ideas about how it can be expanded, changed, improved.

Aaron Hung

Introduction: What about 'family'?

Class notes

Link to Professor Varenne's notes

• what about "family"?
• definitional questions:
  • define family “in your own terms”
  • define family in “our” cultural terms

• what do you think the class is going to be about?
  • relevant themes in family life; how it develops the development of the child
  • well-being of the child
  • what is the family
  • child development
  • definition
  • communication and interaction among family members
  • ties of blood, love, emotion, legal
  • family life and how it affects performance in school (as cause of events some place else)
  • dysfunctional families
  • predefining what a family is
  • need to know what a family is before we talk can talk about it

• anthropologists
  • inductive definitions vs. deductive definitions
  • most students do not go home after school
  • 'love' as a cultural marker
  • most American children live in some kind of household

• interaction
  • many researchers still believe that school performance is related on the type of language children are exposed to at home
  • 'rediscovery' of where to children acquire language; what happens if it is not as good as school?
  • NYTimes magazine, November 2006

• good family
  • importance of family moved from how to do home economics to psychological and emotional development
  • 'home and family life' run by psychologists
  • believed that through dynamics of family interaction, something psychological will occur
  • V: doubts reducing family to just an emotional issue
  • danger of treating “family” as an object
  • hard to figure out boundaries of a family

• issue of definitions
  • V: interested in the concreteness of actions
  • what are the processes that make the same things different?
  • Murdock: worked inductively
  • Parsons: one of the most powerful American sociologists; trained many famous anthropologists and sociologists; worked deductively
  • what are the functions of society that needed to be taken care of; all societies need families for reproduction; how do things stay in order
  • wanted to create a “theory of everything” to bring together economics, sociology and psychology
  • socialization of children: children are born not knowing about society; they will socialize to know about society
  • interested in the basic functions and division of labor within family
  • functions of the family:
    • socialization (parents)
    • stabilization of personality (spouse)
  • someone to bring home the bacon, someone to cook it