Family, Self-Regulation, and Autonomy in the Contemporary United States (response article)

Marilyn Charles has a special gift in communicating with empathy and insight toward the humanity of the people and issues she discusses. I have witnessed this at conferences, and it is evident in this symposium piece. The subjects of dependency and autonomy have so many important elements it is unavoidable that in a short journal article some things will be omitted, underplayed, or not more fully explored. I wish to talk about two such things.

First is dependency. Dr. Charles writes about how central sensitive, responsive parenting is to eventual self-regulation, especially in helping the child successfully deal with distress. When she writes about dependency in infants she seems to be talking about an infant with two biological parents. What I will address below is the increasing diversity of other family structures, and how they may impact the child’s ability to deal with stress and become self-regulated.

According to the Pew Research Center, there is no longer one dominant family form in the U.S. (“Parenting in America,” 2005). In 1960, 88% of American children were living with two parents; by 2016, it was 69% (United States Census Bureau, “The Majority of Children Live With Two Parents, Census Bureau Reports,” 2016). Seventy-three percent of children were living with parents in their first marriage in 1960, and in 2015 it was 46% (“Parenting in America”). This statistic does not take into account those children living with cohabiting parents, each of whom has never been married. That less than half of American children reside with their biological parents, both of whom were never married before, is a major historical and psychological change in our domestic arrangements. The prospects for developing solid self-regulation and psychological security are certainly impacted by these dramatic shifts in the family.

Another major change is the percent of children born to un-

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married women. In 2015, it was 40.3% (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Unmarried Childbearing”). In the 2000s, 24% of all births were to cohabiting mothers, and 16% to non-cohabiting mothers. About half of these cohabiting couples with children had split up by the time their child was five years old (Hope Yen, The Washington Post, “More couples who become parents are living together but not marrying, data show,” 2014). With this increase in children born outside of wedlock, the percent of children in single parent families has almost tripled: 8% of children lived with only their mother in 1960, but by 2016, it was 23% (“The Majority of Children Live With Two Parents, Census Bureau Reports”). A child living within a single parent family may do so for one of four reasons: an unmarried mother gives birth and the mother is not living with the father; an unmarried woman cohabits with the father at the time of birth, but later the couple lives separately; a parent dies; or married parents with children later divorce.

Divorce started rising in the 1960s and reached a peak by 1980; since then, the rate has stabilized and even declined, but still, as the Census Bureau reports, “the prevalence of divorce in the United States remains higher than in most European countries” (Kreider and Ellis, 2011, 5).

These significant changes in the living arrangements of American children certainly impact children. The aforementioned Pew Study reports that “one study found that over a three-year period, about three-in-ten (31%) children younger than 6 had experienced a major change in their family or household structure, in the form of parental divorce, separation, marriage, cohabitation or death” (“Parenting in America”). In the United States, these significant family changes are not uncommon. The “frequent marriage, frequent divorce, more short-term cohabiting relationships,” sociologist David Cherlin writes, make “American families different.” These “factors create a great turbulence in American family life, a family flux, a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else.” He also notes that there is a higher risk of family dissolution with two married American parents than for children living with two cohabiting parents in Sweden (Cherlin, Marriage-Go-Round, 2009, 5, 4).

Being a child in a single parent household and/or a child of divorce has consequences for how easy it is to develop stable self-regulation. In 2015, Paul Amato and colleagues concluded that the increase in single-parent homes possibly had strong effects on be-

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havior including that “the increase in single parenthood affected trends in other child outcomes, such as delinquency, behavior disorders, accidents, or mental health problems” (Amato, Patterson, and Beattie, Social Science Research, “Single-Parent Households and Children’s Educational Achievement: A State-Level Analysis,” 2015, Vol. 53). Sociologist Kay Hymowitz writes that regardless of race, sex, and previous marital status, “children of single mothers…are more prone to drug and alcohol abuse, to crime…are less likely to graduate from college; they are more likely to have children at a young age, and more likely to do so when they are unmarried” (Marriage and Caste in America, 2006, 4).

The turbulence accompanying many divorces may also impact how reliable and parental mothers and fathers are, thus affecting children’s emotional stability. “Divorce often leads to a partial or complete collapse in an adult’s ability to parent for months and sometimes years after the breakup… Caught up in rebuilding their own lives, mothers and fathers” can be blind to “the needs of their children” (Judith Wallerstein, Julia Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, 2000, xiv, 26). After the dissolution of a marriage, not infrequently the former spouses remain furious with their former partner, which the children may witness. “In the early post-divorce years,” E. Marvis Hetherington and John Kelly write, “the self which regulates behavior…breaks down,” as “stable social roles (wife, mother, husband, father) and stable relationships (parent-child, husband-wife, friendships)” fall apart. Two “other hazards await children in the post-nuclear family. The first is ‘parentification,’ when…children become the caretakers…. The second is continued conflict between the divorced parents” (For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered, 2002, 44, 134).

The parents often have trouble regulating themselves, and may be less capable of helping children with their distress. Recently divorced men may develop drinking problems, while women may suffer from post-divorce depression (Paul Amato and Cassandra Dorius, “Fathers, Children, and Divorce,” The Role of the Father in Child Development, 5^th edition, 2010, 182-183). A decade “after the breakup only one-half of the mothers and one-quarter of the fathers were able to provide the kind of nurturing care that had distinguished their parenting before the divorce” (Wallerstein, et al., 2000, xiv, 26). Over time, many parents and children may bounce back, but scars remain. Children’s capacities to trust and have self-control are often diminished, and these problems can be

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exacerbated by the challenges their divorced parents have in remaining parental.

Dr. Charles also discusses the struggle of adolescents and young adults to psychologically separate from their parents and develop personal autonomy. Outside of developing an identity somewhat separate from parents, it is not clear exactly what she means by autonomy. She does say: “the move to adulthood was complicated by the need not just to stand as an adult in relation to one’s parents and those of their generation but also, at times, the need to throw off the yoke of the previous generation’s claims of what makes for a viable or exemplary adulthood, or how the path towards success might best be navigated.”  Charles also says, “The ability to establish oneself as an autonomous being, separate and apart from but also in relation to one’s parents is an important step.” And “that mature adulthood requires the capacity to be a separate subject in relation to other separate beings with whom one is interconnected, and that both can only be considered to the extent that an autonomous status has been achieved.”

Most of her discussion of autonomy focuses on establishing a separate identity in relation to parents and family. While Dr. Charles does mention that we function in a capitalist society where acquisition is valued, she does not much discuss how autonomy plays itself out in the larger world. By this I mean there is not much consideration about the workplace, living independently of one’s parents, or establishing a family of one’s own. I come away feeling that Marilyn Charles does not much explore the ways autonomy manifests itself separate from the family. It is in making one’s way in the world as an adult that autonomy would play itself out. Her discussion of autonomy then seems to stop before the career of autonomy gets more actively started.

While many of my remarks here have pointed to limitations in this contribution, I do hope that they can be helpful to Dr. Charles should she want to expand the efforts begun here.

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