Mirabelli – the history of the family structure

Well, I can appreciate that you want Early Childhood Educators to look at a situation and say “this is important and you need to know it”. I think one of the best pieces of advice I can give to somebody who is starting out in the profession is to look beyond what seems obvious. In many cases, and I can tell you a story. A wonderful friend of ours, James Garbarino from Cornell University, was in a grocery store with his kids and he was at a checkout counter and observing other parents paying for their groceries. And at one checkout counter, the child started asking for gum and the mother said firmly “no” and that was the end of it. At the other checkout counter, the same situation was being played out and the child started to cry and the mother responded by saying “if you don’t stop crying I’ll give you a reason to cry and then the child started to play out a tantrum.  

And Garbarino, being a researcher looked at this and said “you know this is a good parent but this woman here really needs our help. We need to have parenting courses”. And again, being a good researcher, he decided to do a study and he followed these women home, and I don’t know how he did it but he did, and the only variable between Mother A and Mother B had nothing to do with her parenting skills. Mother B hadn’t had contact with another adult in the previous 24 hours.  And so, if the automatic reaction based on the data in front is ‘this person is a good parent, this one needs our help, let’s create a program’ we would have solved the problem to the extent that we would have created a social situation where that mother would have contact with another parents, but it would have had nothing to do with the content of the course.  

She might have picked up a few new things, so the point here is quite often  we look at families today and we compare them to our own families–the families we grew up in—and say they’re different, therefore we make a judgment that says they’re not adequate. And that’s an unfair judgment because if you were to look at not the 25-year history of families, but the 3,000-year history of families, what you would discover is, it’s like an elastic band. It stretches and contracts, not as a matter of fashion, but as a matter of responding to the economy and the culture that surrounds them. So if there’s a need for large families, guess what, we have large families. If that’s what survival depends on.  If there’s a need for smaller families because that’s what survival depends on, that’s what we do.  

So there are many situations a family finds themselves in that’s part of that continuum of the stretching elastic band. So if we make a judgment simply based on the past 25 years, we’re doing a disservice to Canadian families and what we’re missing in all of that is how dynamic and how responsive they are and how inventive and how creative they are in terms of forming associations and bonds of intimacy that really support them.