Families in Not‐So‐Free Fall: A Response to Comments

As scholars engaged in the sociological study of families, we generally rely on the method of comparison as we explore how such critical variables as social class, race and ethnicity, marital status, age, and geographical location shape the manner in which individuals manage the everyday problems of making a living and constructing intimate life. Perhaps inevitably, in drawing these comparisons, we treat our subjects as if they are permanent residents of the category in which we find them at the moment of examination even though we know full well that membership in many of these categories (though clearly not all of them) is transitory. The Social Economy of Single Motherhood: Raising Children in Rural America (Nelson, 2005), the broader project from which "Single Mothers 'Do' Family" emerged, is no exception. In a study designed to examine how single mothers gather the resources necessary to sustain themselves and their children, I treated a particularly transient group as representatives of the "official" marital status in which they were located for the purpose of data collection and analysis. In "Single Mothers 'Do' Family," however, I highlight instability by turning the spotlight to moments of transition in status to explore how these single mothers define themselves as the "mother-in-charge" and draw boundaries of both exclusion and inclusion in the process of constructing and reconstructing their new families. As refracted through the lenses of the very different interests and perspectives of the four commentators, four new sets of related questions emerged about the consequences of just this instability and these transitions. These questions appropriately probe issues related to multigenerational families, "missing" men, the structure of "recombinant" families, and the perspective of actors other than single mothers themselves. Though most of these questions were-quite clearly-not the focus of my analysis, I speculate happily about them. Other scholars will, I hope, explore the full range and depth of these questions as well as others raised in the comments. In these explorations the "doing" perspective outlined in "Single Mothers 1Do' Family"-a perspective that examines the processes that emerge as people enact family life within both structural and ideological constraints-can illuminate the patterns that quantitative studies reveal. MULTIGENERATIONAL FAMILIES IN PERSPECTIVE The commentators raise challenging questions about the frequency and cause of multigenerational families and about the experience of the "middle" generation within them. The Turn to Maternal Grandparents Bianchi's (2006, p. 813) query, "why are ties along the maternal line so strong, especially in times of crisis," flirts with biological and evolutionary theory and raises the issue of the incompatibility of those perspectives with my own in "Single Mothers 'Do' Family." Because the social constructionist perspective from which the "doing" concept emerges is always conscious of the role of actors in creating social life, it acknowledges the possibility of variation. Of course, it simultaneously acknowledges limits to that variation: Although theoretically we can "do" any kind of family we imagine, in actuality our accomplishments and even our imaginations are constrained both by material conditions and by the need to be accountable. Hence, rather than infinite variety, we find patterns of family life and variations of those patterns both within and across social groups. These patterned variations challenge more determinist perspectives. With respect to the patterned variation in the degree to which individuals turn to the maternal Une at moments of crisis, we find a sharp difference between the United States and other countries (Harper, 2004). In the United States, 11% of single mothers live with their parents (Acs & Nelson, 2001) and 13% of the children of single mothers also reside with a grandparent, 10% in the grandparent's home and another 3% in their own mother's home (Fields, 2004). …