A NEW THEORY OF FAMILY AS A PROCESS

Two order-keeping systems are deeply challenged today.  One is nations, which have been breached by the Internet and transnational corporations, including nonprofits.  The other is the human family which persists because of its power to morph, adapting to new conditions.  To try to freeze its form in place is to kill it.

This post is a completely new start on the whole subject of families that is based on a new understanding of a what a person is.  A human being is a community of single cells united in a body by their intermeshing which enables specialization that maintains the well-being of that whole body by keeping it within homeostasis as it grows and develops.  With success, a unique consciousness called an identity will emerge from this body.   So now, drawing on that model, a family is a community of individuals united into a group by their intermeshing, enabling uniqueness that maintains the well-being of those included by keeping it within homeostasis as it grows and develops, with particular care to the sheltering and supporting of the young.  If this works properly, loyalty and skill development create a culture of success.  Can you agree with that?

It has nothing to do with skin color, ethnicity, gender, age, sexual choice, inheritance (except that which guides the cells), biological descent, or legal category so long as the purpose of sheltering and supporting the young is achieved.  (The damaged and the old are not considered here.) There could be one, two, three, four adults -- one child or a roomful -- but there must be enough to provide food, safety, shelter, cultural shaping, and constant interaction.  This is my own mix of memory, observation and reading.  No fancy authorities.  

Okay, now that a human being is recognized as a process and a family is defined as a group of people who are attached and actively protective, we must realize that a family will need different skills and circumstances for different stages of development as the children grow.  Not quite so obviously as some other creatures who actually change shape or shed their skins or grow wings or enter into quite different life-support systems, human beings still go through distinct stages. 

When the child or children are infants, they must be cradled: that means fed, cleaned, embraced, rocked, sung to, and responded to so they know if they have a need, they can cry out for it, and someone will come.  In order for adults and other older children to go at once, they must be attached to the baby by familiarity which means imprinting in the memory system of their sensorium.  If this is done erratically, not enough, by a lot of strangers, angrily or resentfully or too clumsily, the infant will not learn to trust life.  Needs of the caretakers are secondary needs of the child, and therefore vital.  At this stage the caretaker also needs from others warmth, responsiveness, the information and skill to recognize trouble or discomfort signs, what to do about them, when to seek professional help.  These stipulations are not complete, but suggestive.  (I am putting aside the issues of the person whose body has been devoted to creating the infant and which may still be in recovery.)

The toddler learns to talk and write by interacting with other people and manipulating many things.  Constant vigilance is necessary to prevent accidents, but life cannot consist of nononono.  There must be “What does a duck say?” and “Come to me,” with stretched out hands and “you can do it!”  Now the caretaker needs a fund of ideas, patience, and other adults so as to maintain a healthy life of his or her own.  Other adults and children need to be involved.  Infants and toddlers cannot live by themselves.

Primary school is the span for learning to read, count, learn colors and rhythm, and social skills.  Sometimes the caretaker is now sharing with a professionally training teacher.  Brains at this stage are still forming categories but beginning to drop the unused ones out as irrelevant.  A child at this stage still needs adults and though children may try desperately to take care of malfunctioning adults themselves, they are only pups and can only apply whatever physical comforting skills they learned previously.  A primary school child is as smart as a dog and could survive alone to some degree, as street kids do.  They want to please, to be attached.

The years from 8 or so to maybe 12 -- the onset of menarche in girls -- are years of physical growth and increasing skills.  Technically it is called the adrenarche. This may be one of the most crucial periods of life for establishing identity and yet it is barely described in most resources.  The brains are hungry, still physically growing in terms of shaping neurons, and giving rise to self-consciousness -- awareness of one’s self as an identity among others.  I remember it as a time of astonishment and hallucinations, never having enough time or explanation, searching books and environments, and yet believing that I could take hold of any situation and resolve it.  By the end of this time I was riding the bus across town, wearing gloves.  It was 1950.  Most kids, especially boys, are running in packs at this time.   In some cultures females are committed to a “husband” at this age.

Adrenarche is ended by the adrenal glands signaling the sexual organs to start their development.  Secondary sex characteristics develop and one’s own style of sexual drive comes “online” along a spectrum of possibilities in terms of identity, intensity, objects of desire, ability to sublimate, and vulnerability.  The task of the caretaker now is to somehow steer a course between experiment and caution, to treat the person with respect and encouragement but to keep them within the bounds of survival homeostasis and to teach them how to do things by working alongside adults which normally they will want to do.  Most cultures separate male and female at this point. 

The formal legal age of adulthood is a problem, varying from 14 to after 21.  Every culture develops its own solutions.  At one time adulthood was short and “brutal.”  Still is in lots of places, but where families can persist as a growing, enmeshed, emotionally attached group, they continue on through life until the descent into peril and death when it is the older ones who need the caretaking.  What Erikson called “the cogwheeling of the generations” proceeds.  "Teenagers," as we call them, are able to survive on their own or better in groups, but carry additional burdens because of babies and sexual jealousies.  Without older and wiser members, a "family" of teens can work and has worked historically, but not without serious losses.  Income will always be a problem.  Soldiers are usually recruited from this age group.

We acquire and discard family members as we go, changing living arrangements, taste in food, styles and abilities.  Needs vary through time.  Sometimes the demands are very high, more than it seems as though we can bear.  To be intimately connected is to be exposed to grief and loss at many levels. 

Family is a time art, like music or dance.  Laws and institutions must constantly revise themselves, redefine themselves, re-empower themselves by fitting their theories to the realities.  They cannot worship the past, they cannot try to impose us back into rigid old categories, they cannot use violence, fines and incarceration to force genetic and legal families to stay together, because those measures won’t.  Like water the people will slide away through the cracks and holes to find a new and better container for their lives.  They can’t be forced to be good if they don’t have the resources they need -- not even a home -- or don’t know any other way -- or are locked into the mental jail of addiction or madness.  You can invent the most effective meds in the world -- if people can’t take them because of chaos, it’s the same as not having them.  They are outside the boundaries of life-sustaining homeostasis.

We do not own each other -- we earn each other in the course of each new day.