“The CELF study is a monumental achievement, an inestimable contribution to the field of ethnography and to an understanding of the lives of dual-career, middle-class American families. This book, which brings together many of the study’s key findings, is sure to be an instant classic.”–Deborah Tannen, Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University

“The research done by CELF was truly extraordinary and creatively done. They obtained a wealth of data unparalleled in social science research. This collection will be enormously useful.”–Barbara Schneider, Hannah Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University

Elinor Ochs is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Applied Linguistics at UCLA and the author of Linguaggio e Cultura, co-author of Constructing Panic and Living Narrative, and co-editor of Handbook of Language Socialization. Her awards include the MacArhur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tamar Kremer-Sadlik is Social Sciences Director of Programs and Director of Research for the Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) at UCLA.

Fast-Forward Family

Home, Work, and Relationships in Middle-Class America

By Elinor Ochs, Tamar Kremer-Sadlik

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27397-9

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix,
Acknowledgments, xi,
Note to the Reader, xv,
Introduction Elinor Ochs and Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, 1,
1. Coming Home Elinor Ochs and Belinda Campos, 13,
2. At Home Anthony P. Graesch, 27,
3. Dinner Elinor Ochs and Margaret Beck, 48,
4. Mountains of Things Jeanne E. Arnold, 67,
5. Housework Wendy Klein, Carolina Izquierdo, and Thomas N. Bradbury, 94,
6. Chores Wendy Klein and Marjorie Harness Goodwin, 111,
7. Homework and Recreation Tamar Kremer-Sadlik and Kris Gutiérrez, 130,
8. Nurturing Marjorie Harness Goodwin and Charles Goodwin, 151,
9. Stress Rena Repetti, Darby Saxbe, and Shu-wen Wang, 174,
10. Health as a Family Matter Linda C. Garro, 192,
11. Time for Family Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, 217,
12. The Good Enough Family Elinor Ochs and Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, 232,
Appendix: The CELF Study, 253,
References, 267,
List of Contributors, 289,
Index, 293,

CHAPTER 1

Coming Home

ELINOR OCHS AND BELINDA CAMPOS

This chapter is the first of several in this volume to document parents and children coming home from work and school and their challenges and triumphs in forging connections as a family. The concept “coming home” is filled with sentimentality in American society, and adages that capture these feelings abound: home is where the heart is; home is where one belongs; homeward bound. Yet these adages are misleading in assuming that familiarity and belonging are rewards that naturally await homebound working adults and children. Rather, such rewards are the result of an interactional endeavor that begins the instant that family members arrive home. Seemingly trivial behaviors like greeting or noticing a returning family member turn out to be consequential for opening lines of communication and nourishing parent-child and couple relationships.

In his classic article on human interaction the sociologist Emanuel Schegloff argued that ostensibly mundane routines such as an exchange of greetings actually require a great deal of coordination and are best understood as complex interactional achievements. You might imagine that people who do not know each other well or who see each other rarely may have to pay attention to how they initiate and respond to each other’s social overtures when they meet. But what happens when parents and children and couples meet one another on a daily basis after returning home from work and school? Is it also an effort for them to greet and reengage one another after going their separate ways during the day? The message of this chapter is, yes, initiating face-to-face social interaction between family members at the end of the work- and school day demands a degree of cooperation that is not always forthcoming in different families or in the same family from one day to the next or on the same day between one family member and another. Working parents may be warmly welcomed home by some members of their family but treated as if they were invisible by others. When CELF working parents arrived home, they often encountered family members who were content to see them but distracted by their own concerns. Garnering attention and reconnecting as a family was not a matter of course; rather, at times it was quite an undertaking.

To get a sense of the vicissitudes of family reunions at the end of the day, we invite you to look at what transpired among members of the Gruvich family on two separate days after work and school. On one of these days Ray Gruvich had already arrived home from work and was sorting through the mail when his ten-year-old son, Tim, burst through the door calling out, “Hi Dad!” Ray asked, “How are you::: kiddo?,” and Tim replied, “Fine!” Ray was buoyant: “Excellent. Good.” They embraced. Next through the door was six-year-old Becky, followed by her mother, Beth. Ray approached them, greeting Becky with a long “Hello:::!,” a kiss, and the observation, “You found your jacket, huh?” While Becky clamored for more attention, Ray and Beth greeted and kissed each other. The family had successfully reunited at the end of the day.

Lest we think that this twenty-first-century family comes straight out of a 1950s TV series, let’s observe how the Gruvich family welcomed each other on another day that week. On this day Ray’s parents had picked up the children from school and brought them to their house. When Ray arrived at his parents’ home after work, Tim and Becky were glued to the TV set watching a cartoon. While the reunion between Ray and his children began well, with Tim embracing his father and reporting on homework progress, Becky remained transfixed by the television and did not acknowledge her father. Even when Ray opened his arms for a hug and called, “Becky,” she merely flashed him a nanosecond’s glance. Ray then exclaimed, “Ah!,” wryly noting his daughter’s minimal acknowledgment of his presence. This lament prodded Becky to say, “Hi,” but she did so while watching the cartoon. At this point Ray dropped his arms in exasperation, sighing, “Well, hi to you too,” to deaf ears. And then an argument ensued. Ray asked Becky about her homework; she mumbled something, continuing to be entranced by the television; Ray pulled away the bottle of soda she had in her hand; reaching for the bottle, Becky protested, “No::! that’s mi::ne!” Holding on to the bottle, Ray insisted, “Talk to me,” until Becky resentfully responded to a stream of questions reminiscent of an interrogation: “Did you finish your homework?” “Who checked your homework?” “Is that your trash?” “When are you going to throw it away?” “I’ll be back to check, okay?” Shortly after this rebuff, Ray’s wife, Beth, arrived and greeted the children but overlooked him. As she passed him to help her mother-in-law in the kitchen, Ray twice called out “Hey!” to catch her attention, then entreated, “Say hi first, then you can go help.” Beth retraced her tracks to affectionately greet her husband.

The Gruvich family illustrates the challenges that working parents in the CELF households in Los Angeles encountered when reconnecting with the rest of the family after a day apart. Parents and children knew little about what happened in each other’s lives during the day, including plans that affected the rest of the family. The first moments after returning home were imbued with parental anticipation of affection and information that was not always forthcoming.

This daily pattern of being apart for at least six hours a day during the work- and school week contrasts with family life in a number of other societies, where school-aged children are isolated from family members for shorter periods. For example, many rural Samoan children attend school on the edge of the village close to their homes. While some parents work in the capital, other adult family members remain in the village. The path to some of the family plantations runs past the schoolhouse, allowing family members on their way to or from cultivation to overhear children’s recitations or relay information if necessary. Children return home at midday and immediately become immersed in a thicket of family tasks. In such communities family members encounter each other intermittently throughout the day and are integrated through cooperative activities. If a child or spouse is out of sight, his or her whereabouts are easily gleaned from others who monitor the comings and goings of extended family members and neighbors.

For better or for worse, working parents and children in the United States do not typically reside in family compounds or small communities. In Los Angeles, CELF parents and children generally commuted to work and school. While grandparents play a vital role in American family life, middle-class parents typically live apart from their own parents in nuclear households. Most of these parents are unable to benefit from the kind of childcare commonplace in Samoan communities (see Introduction). In only a few CELF households, like that of the Gruvich family, did grandparents routinely take care of their grandchildren at certain times during the week. Children’s schools are often not close to workplaces, and school policies may discourage parents from entering the classroom or otherwise contacting children at school except in emergencies. Beyond notice of illness or other calamities, parents in the United States usually receive little or no information about their children until late in the day. These long hours of separation make the vital process of reuniting more difficult; family members who spend the majority of their time in separate worlds may habituate to this arrangement and find it challenging to share their life-worlds spent apart in the relatively few hours that they are together in the home. The challenges imposed by the separate worlds of work and family mean that end-of-the-day reunions provide one of the few, and thus significant, opportunities of the day to show regard and affirm family bonds.

As important as it is for family members to reconnect at the end of the day, the transition to being a family after a day apart is not always easy. As working parents know in their bones, children and adults can be exhausted as a result of the day’s exertions, and their moment of reunion may be strained. During the week parents returning from work may be preoccupied with household- or workplace-related tasks; children usually have homework to complete; everyone may be hungry and grouchy. As in the Gruvich family, American children may sometimes give parents the silent treatment when seeing them in the late afternoon or evening. Television and other media may also contribute to such comportment. The homecoming transition is potentially tense when weary parents and emotionally needy young children reengage one another.

Given its importance, we wondered how the CELF families in our study managed to reconnect at the end of the day. To what extent did they generally enjoy positive reunions? To what extent was the delicate process of reuniting as a family hampered by a family member being distracted?

To address these questions and others, a team of psychologists and anthropologists analyzed the video recordings of families getting together after work and school. In our study, we focused on the thirty families headed by a mother and father—twenty-one with two children and nine with three children—to understand how the parents experienced reuniting with their children and partners. We focused on what happens in the first two minutes after mothers and fathers walk through the door from work. We asked the following questions: What kind of reception do working parents receive from their children and spouses? When working fathers arrive home, do they receive the same kind of welcome from their families as working mothers receive when they arrive home, or are fathers and mothers treated differently? Across the thirty dual-earner CELF families there was the potential for 120 reunions at home. But family members often reunited outside the home, at school or elsewhere. As recording conditions made it difficult for these reunions to be captured consistently on video, they were not included in this study. In addition, some parents did not reunite with the rest of their families at the end of the day because their jobs (e.g., as pilot, firefighter, sheriff) required them to work during that time. Our analysis includes a total of 44 reunions that took place at home. These reunions capture the first encounters with family members immediately after nineteen working fathers and ten working mothers returned home.

WHY WE GREET

Before getting to the results of our study, we want to consider how people all over the world encounter one another after having been apart for a period of time. The sociologist Erving Goffman noted that every person has a “face”—a valued image of the self that he or she wants to project and maintain in particular social situations. Relating this idea to working families, we can say that when family members come into contact at the end of the day, each has a face (i.e., an image of herself or himself as mother or father, daughter or son, sister or brother, or partner in a couple) that they want other family members to uphold.

Birds do it; even bees do it. Not falling in love but greeting. Among the many interaction rituals of face appreciation, greetings have an important place. When we enter into one another’s social sphere after a certain stretch of time apart, we support the face of the other by greeting him or her. The presence of a greeting distinguishes persons as valued. As Alessandro Duranti has written, “In many societies children and servants are not greeted. The absence of greetings then marks these individuals not only as nonproper conversationalists or strangers but also as not worth the attention implied by the use of greetings.”

If one person greets there is a strong expectation that the person greeted will return the greeting. If a person does not return a greeting, its absence is noticeable. When we reciprocate greetings (I greet you, You greet me) we signal to each other that we find the other worthy of recognition. Each person demonstrates positive sentiments (e.g., respect, affection) toward the other and sets the emotional tone of downstream interaction. In the first set of greetings in the Gruvich family, for example, Ray appeared absolutely delighted when his son, Tim, called out, “Hi Dad!,” as he burst through the front entrance. Ray nearly cooed his greetings to both his children and his wife, and they responded in kind, displaying their affection for one another. Alternatively, when one person issues a greeting and it is not reciprocated, an asymmetry in deference and face support results. The person greeted becomes a focus of attention and appreciation but the person who greets does not. On the evening when his daughter ignored him after he arrived from work and called out to her with his arms held wide open for a hug, Ray appeared upset. An important message is that no matter how intimate we are with another person, most of us (including members of our own families) in most circumstances have the desire to be acknowledged with a greeting.

Even the simplest greeting has the potential to elicit a reciprocal greeting if not more conviviality. As such, greeting rituals help human beings to come together as a social unit. Social engagement may terminate with the greeting response: “Hi Dad”; “Hi Susie.” Alternatively, the greeting may open the door to more sustained communication (“Hi Dad.” “How are you::: kiddo?” “Fine!” “Excellent. Good”). This property renders the greeting a powerful medium for coming together as a family after a long day apart. Taking only a few seconds to produce, a greeting is an efficient ritual gateway to connecting to family members.

ARRIVING HOME

It struck us that the parent who returns home earlier (or first) might be having a different homecoming experience from that of the parent who returns home later (or second). The first parent to return home, for example, does not have the opportunity to be welcomed home by his or her partner (because he or she has not yet returned), while the second parent can enjoy this possibility. At the same time, the first parent to return home is also often the parent who has picked up the children after their school and extracurricular activities. The first parent home, therefore, may be more likely to encounter children who are more eager to greet positively and share news about their day.

The second parent returning home has to reckon with family members absorbed in a stream of ongoing activities. The children have homework, which usually involves supervision by the first parent. The first parent also has usually been preparing dinner and monitoring other household tasks. In some families the children may be absorbed by TV watching or other media activities. These conditions affect how the second parent is welcomed by his or her children and partner.

It probably will come as no surprise to those documenting the lives of working women that the thirty working mothers in the CELF study had first contact with the children on 76 percent of the weekdays observed, whereas their spouses had first contact with the children on 20 percent of them and a babysitter or grandparent had first contact on 4 percent of them. Typically, the second parent arrived home to the partner and children roughly two hours later. Of the two weekdays that we video recorded during the workweek, mothers arrived home earlier 60 percent of the time, twice as often as did their spouses.

That CELF mothers more often had first contact with their children and arrived home earlier than did their spouses makes sense when looking at the working hours of these mothers and fathers. CELF fathers worked about two hours a day longer than the mothers in the study. These parental differences in picking up children and returning home are compatible with other findings that contemporary working mothers assume the lion’s share of childcare responsibilities. But overlooked in other studies is the possible effect that these arrangements may have on the integration of fathers into family life when they arrive home after mothers and children have been together. Let us now turn to how CELF mothers and fathers were integrated into the family when they returned home after work.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Fast-Forward Family by Elinor Ochs, Tamar Kremer-Sadlik. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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