Single, No Children: Who's Your Family?

Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., in a blog article, discussed her outline of a chapter about family in the lives of people who are single and have no children to be included in the second edition of an academic volume, the Handbook of Family Communication. http://www.psychologytoday.com/print/39554

The article caught my attention since I have been told by a therapist I am a social retard and have lived all of my adult life alone. Ms. DePaulo recently posted an update, Who Is Your Family If You Are Single with No Kids? Part 2. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201108/who-is-your-family-if-you-are-single-no-kids-part-2

What constitutes a family these days?

Once upon a time, "family" seemed to be comprised of sturdy and immovable parts. Scholars had a name for the family they most often studied and wrote about: "Standard North American Family." Now, hardly anything about family seems standard or obligatory. According to a number of academic and bureaucratic (e.g., the Census Bureau) definitions, families do not need to include children (couples count); they do not need to include more than one adult and they do not need to include two people in a sexual relationship (single-parent families count); when they do include two adults, those adults do not need to be married (cohabiting couples count) and they do not need to include a man and a woman (same-sex couples count). To count as family, the members do not even need to live under the same roof (there are commuter marriages and "living apart together" arrangements, there are divorced families that extend across households, and immigrant families that reach across nations).

Setting aside families of origin, perhaps what distinguishes the families of singles with no children from other families is that typically just one person stands at the center. Other family forms begin with a couple, a parent-child dyad, or a nuclear family unit. Perhaps that difference is partly to blame for the popular misconception (DePaulo, 2006) that single people with no children "don't have anyone": They don't have a spouse or spouse-equivalent, and in later life, they will have no grown children. They don't have someone with the same sense of obligation to care for them as do people in the other family forms. Left unanalyzed, that conceptualization can foster fear among singles, and fuel the myths that many accept as truth. A fake person, Bridget Jones, probably said it best. Stereotypically, singles will end up "dying alone and found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian" (Fielding, 1996).

My mother is widowed and deeply disappointed because she perceives her children have pushed her into a nursing home, where she feels abandoned. Her days are long, lonely and boring, except for the nursing home politics that so upset her.

As for me, DePaulo speculates:

For decades, Western societies have been changing in ways that are bringing single adults and adults with no children to the forefront. Yet there is little consideration of what family means to singles with no children. When participants in national surveys (such as the Pew surveys) are asked whether various sets of people count as family, the kinds of living arrangements relevant to singles with no children are not even represented.

That is likely to change. Scholars such as Barry Wellman who have studied changes in social networks over time and around the globe argue that "in some societies, there may be a turn away from the household to the individual as the basic personal networking unit" (Wellman, 2007). The phenomenon is called "networked individualism." Although singles living solo are especially likely to fit that description, others qualify too. To quote Wellman (2007) again, "The emerging picture is of 'networked individuals' operating somewhat autonomously out of 'networked households' (Wellman, 2001; Kennedy and Wellman, 2007)." Even in contemporary nuclear families, experiences are not shared as much as they once were. Instead, individual family members sit in front of their own computers surfing their own favorite sites, watching their own preferred shows, and communicating with their own friends. There are individual cell phones rather than a family phone, and individual cars in families who can afford them. For married couples, the evidence is not just anecdotal. A study comparing couples in the year 2000 to those from 20 years previously showed that the couples from 2000 were less likely than the ones from 1980 to work on projects around the house together, go out together, visit friends together, or even to eat together (Amato, Booth, Johnson, & Rogers, 2007).

In the opening years of the 21st century, we are still accustomed to asking people about their families. Maybe in the decades to come, it will not be just the phone companies who instead ask, "Who's in your network?"

I must say I never expected to be in the circumstance I find myself in. I talk to those who serve me food more than my siblings. My mother is my family.