From a “news” story about the actress’ refusal to marry her boyfriend:
“Why is marriage the pinnacle for everyone? People get married for the wrong reasons. We need to start looking at different packages, whether it’s living together, or being with six partners or dedicating your life to taking care of flowers”, Femalefirst quoted the actress as saying.
Good for her! Via Family Scholars Blog.
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What, the fact that she gave a million dollars to tsunami relief wasn’t enough reason? :)
Also, the beauty pageant movie she did was pretty funny.
“Tougher sentencing for repeat offenders…oh, and world peace.”
Not to be a stickler, but in that film, Bullock’s character wanted stiffer penalties for _parole_violators_.
You may be right, but in the morning, I’ll be drunk.
Ah, but Thomas, you ARE a stickler.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. :)
She does seem pretty cool. She gave $1 million for tsunami relief, and had also given $1 million for another cause which I can’t recall right now. She apparently buys and refurbishes houses as a hobby/sideline.
I kinda feel like writing her and asking for tiling advice.
At the risk of sounding like an old fart – which I guess I’m getting to be at the age of 57 – let me suggest that marriage is not such a bad thing. Sandra Bullock is en
titled to her point of view but I don’t think any movie star is worth quoting when it comes to a subject just because she is well known. (If nothing else, consider the lousy movie choices she made. Her newest one makes me want to kick the television screen in when I see the previews!) At the risk of sounding like a Republican (I’m a lifelong Democrat and I don’t even want people to THINK I might be a Republican!), marriage has a place in our society. It really is good for the stability of society and the family. As far as I’m concerned that goes for same sex marriages. Who isn’t for stability and love? It’s not a question of need but if Sandra B. decides to have children, having two parents at home is a lot better for kids. Take it from me. Kids are harder to raise than you think. They are cute and cuddly when they are infants but they grow up fast and are a lot of work and cost a lot of money. Two heads are beter than one.
Really.
“Two heads are beter than one.”
Which would lead one to think that three are better than two; and four are better than three.
:-P
How is marriage better for society than a more communal, less patriarchal lifestyle?
Hey Q Grrl, I’m all for adequate parenting, but let’s face it, we kids have a hard enough job with just two parents. If I had three or four, there’d be nothing but spankings all day long. Don’t Make Me Come Over There!
I didn’t much like Bullock’s movies, but that’s a damned cool thing for her to say. Maybe she’s getting typecast into sucky roles.
How is marriage better for society than a more communal, less patriarchal lifestyle?
Marriage is more compatible with many aspects of human nature, resulting in a society which does not have to spend as much time/energy/resources socializing people into accepting one of its building blocks. It still requires socialization – but not as much as the constant re-education needed to get people to accept a modern communal style of living. (For example, compare the efforts required to establish and continue the kibbutzes in Israel. It’s not impossible, but it takes a lot less energy to perpetuate a society built around marriage than it does to perpetuate one built around other concepts.)
Communal – Patriarchal – reminds me of the worst parts of Feminism. All I’m saying is that being a single parent is very very very hard. Sandra Bullock – if she decides to have a child – can afford at least to have some help. That doesn’t mean the child would be better off. When I said two heads are better than one, I speak from experience. My husband spent a lot of time out of town on business when my son was little and that was awful. My family was two hours away. Luckily my Dad was retired and could help me out – like the time I kept throwing up while my son is running happily around the house. I couldn’t even get out of bed.
Communal – Patriarchal – reminds me of the worst parts of Feminism. All I’m saying is that being a single parent is very very very hard. Sandra Bullock – if she decides to have a child – can afford at least to have some help. That doesn’t mean the child would be better off. When I said two heads are better than one, I speak from experience. My husband spent a lot of time out of town on business when my son was little and that was awful. My family was two hours away. Luckily my Dad was retired and could help me out – like the time I kept throwing up while my son is running happily around the house. I couldn’t even get out of bed.
Hmmm. It sounds as if you’re surprised to encounter feminism on a feminist blog. That’s sort of odd.
Who said that Sandra Bullock wants to have children?
Marriage is more compatible with many aspects of human nature,
It’s particularly congenial to the parts of us that want to have sex with multiple partners. Marriage, after all, is fantastic for exploring those feelings and spouses feelings never get hurt at all. ;)
Bullock is dating Jesse James, the guy who runs West Coast Choppers, and who I know has been divorced at least twice. If she doesn’t want to marry him, I can’t say I blame her.
Amanda, that speaks better of Jesse than I would have guessed.
Larraine, as Q-grrl and Amanda pointed out, we’re not just talking about whether marriage is better than single parenthood. We’re talking about whether marriage ought to be the only paradigm. Some folks think that life-long pair bonding is more or less hard-wired in humans. Others don’t.
Family structures are often driven by economics. Whether hunter-gatherers, medieval nobles, or modern Americans, how people arrange their romantic relationships, living arrangements and childcare is driven in large part by what works economically. The atomic family unit is specific to historical periods and economic situations, as is the hunter-gatherer band and the clan system of the Scottish highlands.
So, in that sense, there’s something too simple about generalizing to human nature from any time’s or place’s family relationship. The fact is, humans have made so many changes to our environments, and have socialized each other so much, that it is very difficult to say what “human nature” is.
Marriage and the nuclear family isn’t the only form the family’s ever taken, and I don’t see any reason to assume that it’s the best form.
In my adult life, most of my living arrangements have involved groups of three or more adults. Probably the most comfortable arrangement was when I was living with a dozen adults in a shared house. I don’t think my experience is particularly uncommon, either.
Who says that just because you don’t get married that you and your partner won’t be raising your child together?
You know, cohabitation. Or shared custody.
Marriage and the nuclear family isn’t the only form the family’s ever taken, and I don’t see any reason to assume that it’s the best form.
We don’t need to assume it.
Although there are many viable ways to organize family life, it is fairly clear from historical practice that cultures oriented around two-person marriage (whether the surrounding family was nuclear or extended) seem to have better outcomes for children than those oriented around multiples. We can’t speak in absolutes, of course, and it is eminently likely that for some people, other arrangements work better. But societies aren’t composed of some people, they’re composed of everybody.
I’m jumping to a conclusion about your childlessness here, but I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong: as a 34 year old with no children, surely you recognize that the things you find comfortable and convenient in organizing your life are not material to how people with offspring organize theirs. Yes, living as an adult in a household full of other adults is a fantastic way to live as a single guy. For a reproducing couple with three kids, not so much.
I’m not arguing with this, but I’m curious about how you’d measure “outcomes for children.” Do you mean in terms of survival? Because if so, I’m not convinced that’s an issue in contemporary America, which is where Sandra Bullock lives. And if you mean in terms of emotional health, I’d be very skeptical of attempts to compare that across time and space.
I was thinking of American Indian tribes in which children were raised by the entire clan, collectively, and in which all adults of the preceding generation were referred to as parents and all children of the same generation were brothers and sisters. It seemed to work fine for several thousand years.
Yes, I mean in terms of survival. It’s not much of a problem for me or Sandra Bullock; for you, I don’t know. For mothers in Chicago’s South Side, it’s an operant factor.
Brian, which tribes are you referring to? And, given that there is no written history of any American peoples, I’d like to know how you know that this communal system worked for thousands of years.
Fortunately, not everyone in society has to live the same way.
By the way, I’m an adult who lives with a 15-month-old girl and her parents (among other folks). The arrangement means that there are more adults around to watch the toddler; less isolation from adult company, compared to what some (not all) other parents experience; and it means that her parents can afford to go to college. If you read the literature on communal housing arrangements, intentional households, and intentional communities, you’d run into plenty of articles written by parents who find it an excellent arrangement for raising children.
There’s no argument I find more condesending – or less persuasive – than the “if you were a parent you’d agree with me” nonsense. I know plenty of parents, and guess what – other than some very basic stuff (i.e., all of them want their kids to be healthy and happy), they don’t actually agree on everything. If all the parents you know agree on everything and live in the same lifestyle, that doesn’t suggest that all parents agree; that suggests that you don’t know a wide variety of people.
By the way, I’m an adult who lives with a 15-month-old girl and her parents (among other folks). The arrangement means that there are more adults around to watch the toddler; less isolation from adult company, compared to what some (not all) other parents experience; and it means that her parents can afford to go to college.
It also means their child is at a greatly increased risk for a large number of bad things.
But if it works for them, great. And if it works for other parents, that’s great, too. But most adults would not find that arrangement a net plus under our current circumstances of life.
I don’t mean at all to downplay infant mortality in Chicago, a city that has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the U.S., but in historical terms, the rates are very low indeed. In 1910, the overall American infant mortality rate was 124 per 1000 births. In Chicago in 2000, it was 10.5 per 1000 births. (And as I said, Chicago’s rate is unusually high. It surely was in 1910, too: if we were comparing apples to apples, the contrast would be even more striking.) I found an article in the British Journal Population Studies that put infant mortality among early-18th century Chinese nobility at 400 per 1000. Another article in Population Studies suggests that about 30% of children born in 18th-century German villages died before they were 5. The massive decline in infant and child mortality throughout the developed world, even on the South Side of Chicago, has been one of the most notable aspects of a real revolution in health care that has occurred in the last century and a half. I doubt there was any place in the world in 1900 that had an infant mortality rate as low as 10.5 per 1000 births.
The child mortality situation in the modern developed world is totally unprecidented: it is radically different from anything that existed anywhere before germ theory, immunization, antibiotics, etc. It seems deeply silly to use historical child mortality statistics to argue about the best family arrangements today, since there’s no reason to think that the causes of contemporary childhood mortality are the same as those a hundred years ago, much less a thousand. And you actually don’t get bonus points for substituting self-righteousness for logic.
I dug around a bit: I was remembering, not entirely correctly, an argument in Engel’s Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, that there was evidence that family structures among American Indians had been as I described at some point in the past.
Engels was drawing largely on the work of Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan was an anthropologist who studied kinship structures among American Indians. One of his discoveries was that there were definite patterns to the language used to describe kinship, that didn’t actually match up with the concrete forms of the family. This led him to an evolutionary theory of family structure. The sort of family structure I described, Morgan called Hawaiian kinship.
Anyway, while I was fuzzy on the details, I think there’s plenty of evidence for my basic point, that family structures have varied greatly from what’s considered normative in the contemporary U.S.
The real point is, if it’s assumed that the normative model of the family is the only viable model, and laws and institutions encourage that form and discourage other forms, then trying to live by a different model will be very hard. There’s a circle there, and some of us want the circle broken.
I am, as you said, a 34 year old, childless man, and I don’t want to get married and have children. That doesn’t mean that I want to be alone most of the time, or have no part in contributing to the care of children. But in practice, my options are limited. Options were even more limited for my sister, who was under great pressure to marry and have children from the time she graduated high school.
Robert:
At risk for … what?
I have a fifteen-month-old. He walks around, climbs on everything, and needs constant supervision to keep him out of trouble. The more adults that I know around, the better off I think he is. When there’s only one adult around, a moment’s distraction puts him on top of the couch back, or on the windowsill. Many adults means more eyes to watch.
Or … did you mean something else?
At risk for any number of things.
Like what?