This paper examines the nature of family through a multidisciplinary lens, drawing on five works spanning primatology, ethnopediatrics, history, psychology, and literature. The sources reviewed include Harriet Smith's Parenting for Primates, Meredith Small's Our Babies, Ourselves, Stephanie Coontz's Marriage, a History, Monica McGoldrick's You Can Go Home Again, and Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. The paper explores how each discipline contributes a partial but valuable perspective on family dynamics, child-rearing, marriage, and intergenerational patterns, ultimately arguing that these works together offer a relatively complete — though still incomplete — picture of the modern family.
The paper demonstrates integrative synthesis across disciplines. Rather than simply summarizing each book in turn, the writer identifies common threads — such as the universality of child-rearing patterns, the role of environment, and intergenerational dysfunction — and uses those threads to connect works from entirely different fields. This cross-disciplinary dialogue is the paper's central academic contribution.
The paper opens with a framing introduction that names all five sources and establishes the multidisciplinary thesis. It then proceeds source by source, devoting one section to each work while maintaining comparative commentary throughout. A concluding section steps back to evaluate what the disciplines collectively reveal and where gaps remain. This "survey then synthesis" structure is well suited to literature-review style writing assignments at the undergraduate level.
The dynamics and multifaceted nature of the family provide the opportunity for a multidisciplinary approach to its study. Biology, anthropology, history, literature, and psychology can each offer at least a partial view that, when taken together, creates a more holistic vision of the family as it has changed and evolved through time. Each discipline has its own strengths and weaknesses with regard to identifying family dynamics and status. The reading material covered in this course — Parenting for Primates by Harriet Smith, Our Babies, Ourselves by Meredith Small, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy by Stephanie Coontz, Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill, and You Can Go Home Again by Monica McGoldrick — represents many of the disciplines mentioned above. From this collection of disciplines and author perspectives, a substantial body of insight can be drawn. This paper briefly addresses how the information from these sources can be integrated or is incongruent, and discusses what still needs to be learned in order to form a complete picture of the nature of families.
In Parenting for Primates, Harriet Smith makes bold connections between humans and our primate cousins with regard to the biological and psychological nature of parenting and family cohesion. The work is compelling, firstly because it makes such a bold statement about innate nurturing skills and then backs it up with knowledge drawn from the author's work as a clinical psychologist. It is notable in itself that the author is both a practicing clinical psychologist and a primate biologist; this combination of scientific knowledge creates a cohesive integration that readers can readily relate to. One very interesting point Smith makes — and supports with clinical anecdotes — is that all the positive things parents do in the primate world are similar: nurturing, responding quickly to distress, keeping children sheltered, and so forth. Her description of the basic formula is "constant body contact, breastfeeding, and consistent, rapid, responsiveness" (67). By contrast, Smith notes that maltreatment is idiosyncratic, and that human primates appear to be the worst culprits of it, both in quantity and variety (301–302). This observation could be explained by communication differences or by the many environmental pressures present in the human world but absent in the primate world, yet many years of scientific observation of both primates and humans lend credence to Smith's claim. Additionally, the literary work Long Day's Journey Into Night, as well as many other literary pieces dealing with human maltreatment of children, seems to effectively support Smith's point. Smith's work is focused mainly on the biological and psychological aspects of child-rearing and does not always address the family in general terms, though the core principles she identifies can be applied to a broader understanding of how these elements interact to shape family nature more generally.
In Our Babies, Ourselves, Meredith Small also focuses on the child-rearing aspect of family, as the title suggests, but she does so from a multicultural perspective — what she calls ethnopediatrics — combining anthropology, pediatrics, and child development to review extensive cross-cultural research on child-rearing practices. Small aims to use this information to draw conclusions about the outcomes of different culture-specific child-rearing styles in relation to infant success, health, and mortality.
Small describes the parenting styles of several cultures, including the Aché tribe of Paraguay, the !Kung San society of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, American industrialized society, and many others. She opens her work with a distinctive discussion of the evolution of babies and how understanding this biological evolution can give us a much better sense of how we ought to care for them. She describes the distinctly long period of dependence characteristic of human infants and argues that this dependence must be accommodated in a manner befitting the infant's biological development. The work then compares and contrasts cultural child-rearing practices, noting that a culture's context heavily influences these practices — sometimes with negative outcomes. One stark point Small makes is that Western babies cry more than babies in other cultures, and that this is a result of their immediate environment: "The baby is responding to an environment that has been culturally altered; and for which it has not been biologically adapted" (155). Small points out that the relative disconnect from infants present in Western industrialized nations — characterized primarily by reduced direct physical contact — offers parents greater freedom but comes at a cost to the infant. Biologically and anthropologically speaking, this is an important observation, though the work, like Smith's, deals mainly with child-rearing rather than with the family in general. Small recommends that Western industrialized nations may need to adopt cultural norms from other societies in order to improve infant health, well-being, and mortality outcomes. An extended work that applied the cultural comparison to older stages of childhood would be a welcome addition to the literature.
In Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, Stephanie Coontz offers a decidedly different perspective from the two previous works. Coontz takes a historical approach to marriage and concludes that it has evolved from a formal institution into something more closely resembling an intimate personal relationship. Her central argument is that marriage is an evolving social institution shaped by a few dominant themes that shift with each era and culture: "Almost every marital and sexual arrangement we have seen in recent years, however startling it may appear, has been tried somewhere before" (2).
Though Coontz's approach is decidedly linear — moving through time — one of her most important observations concerns the economics of marriage: "marriage was not fundamentally about love. It was too vital an economic and political institution to be entered into solely on the basis of something as irrational as love" (7). In contrast, the modern conception of marriage, according to Coontz, is a socially evolving partnership based increasingly on personal choice and loving commitment, though economic and political considerations still play a role. As she writes: "Over the past century, marriage has steadily become more fair, more fulfilling, and more effective in fostering the well-being of both adults and children than ever before in history. It has also become more optional and more fragile. The historical record suggests that these two seemingly contradictory changes are inextricably intertwined. Even more than love and marriage, fulfilling and fragile seem to 'go together like a horse and carriage'" (301).
The point Coontz is making is well supported: it helps explain increased divorce rates and the rise of child-rearing outside of wedlock not as symptoms of marriage's breakdown, but as the opposite — a reflection of marriage as genuine choice. With greater freedom of choice, as Coontz notes, people have a greater opportunity to make both good and bad decisions (301). This historical perspective on marriage and its relationship to family is informative and also directs attention toward alternative family structures that emerge from expanded partnership choices. The diversity of modern families — recognized or marginalized — deserves more direct treatment in a work focused on family broadly rather than marriage specifically.
The work You Can Go Home Again: Reconnecting With Your Family by Monica McGoldrick leans toward the historical-psychological discipline and addresses a wide range of issues about reinventing the family in adulthood as a process worth undertaking. The work stresses that personal choices should be guided by a mature, adult understanding of one's family of origin. Genealogical research is presented as a means of better understanding the self and cultivating self-awareness. To guide the reader, McGoldrick uses several famous family genograms — family trees spanning three generations — to demonstrate that many decisions are shaped by family history. McGoldrick goes so far as to argue that many repeated patterns of conflict in families, such as illegitimacy, alcoholism, sexual abuse, and suicide, have been hidden from modern descendants (140), and that examining these patterns can shed light on why similar issues may resurface in subsequent generations, potentially enabling individuals to form healthier family dynamics.
According to McGoldrick, recognizing these repeated patterns can help individuals understand and address them in the present, thereby combating their effects. The work is framed as a guide to dealing with unresolved grief. Though informative, it can also feel unsettling in that it identifies so many familial flaws and then urges the reader to act — quickly — lest these significant problems be repeated across further generations.
The final work discussed here is the theatrical piece Long Day's Journey Into Night, which contains a substantial amount of autobiographical material about its author, Eugene O'Neill. The work would serve as a well-founded illustration of McGoldrick's premise as well as of Smith's observations on child maltreatment, given that the repetitive nature of maltreatment and recurring adult conflicts is evident throughout the play. The work speaks especially to alcohol and drug dependence as forces that degrade the family and result in the neglect of children. The overall impression is that the author was permanently shaped by the events of his early life: though monumentally creative, he appears also to have been a deeply tormented individual. Edmund's mother is a narcotic addict, his brother is an alcoholic, and he himself is stricken with tuberculosis and faces confinement to a sanitarium — not an uncommon fate during that era. The long-held resentments evident in the relationships between father and son, and between Edmund and his mother over his institutionalization, carry a note of realism that resonates with many real-world dysfunctional families.
In Act Three, there is a drunken confession from Jamie, the older brother, that starkly represents sibling rivalry — a dimension of family life that never entirely leaves the individual, even in the most functional of families:
"Mama and Papa are right. I've been rotten bad influence.... Did it on purpose to make a bum of you. Or part of me did. A big part. That part that's been dead so long. That hates life. My putting you wise so you'd learn from my mistakes. Believed that myself at times, but it's a fake.... Never wanted you succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you. Mama's baby, Papa's pet!... And it was your being born that started Mama on dope. I know that's not your fault, but all the same, God damn you, I can't help hating your guts -- !... But don't get wrong idea, Kid. I love you more than I hate you.... Make up your mind you've got to tie a can to me -- get me out of your life -- think of me as dead -- tell people, 'I had a brother, but he's dead.'"
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