A lot of my Intro Psych students struggle with the concept of cognitive dissonance. If circumstances, say, a pandemic, provide an example of cognitive dissonance, and a couple social psychologists, say, Elliot Aronson and Carol Tavris, present the explanation, how could I not use it? In their article in The Atlantic, Aronson and Tavris (2020) write: Dissonance is most painful when evidence strikes at the heart of how we see ourselves—when it threatens our belief that we are kind, ethical, competent, or smart. The minute we make any decision—I’ll buy this car; I will vote for this candidate; I think COVID-19 is serious; no, I’m sure it is a hoax—we will begin to justify the wisdom of our choice and find reasons to dismiss the alternative.    As a discussion (synchronous or asynchronous), present this scenario to your students. ******************* Cognitive dissonance and COVID-19 discussion: Part I Let’s start with the premise that I believe that I’m the kind of person who makes smart decisions. I want to see my extended family and my friends; I should go out. But, dang, that virus is out there. It could make me very sick. Heck, it could kill me; I should stay home. I have cognitive dissonance between two thoughts. Let’s say that I go out to visit family and friends. Now I have cognitive dissonance between a behavior and a thought: I’m visiting with people but that’s clashing with knowing that this behavior could be dangerous. Identify at least two things I could think or do that may reduce my dissonance.   ******************* Once students have offered their suggestions, such as saying “I’m young and healthy, it probably won’t affect me if I catch it,” prompt with this follow-up. ******************* Cognitive dissonance and COVID-19 discussion: Part II While it’s an easy way out of this particular cognitive dissonance, finding ways of justifying dangerous behavior is probably not the best solution. Aronson and Tavris (2020) write, Although it’s difficult, changing our minds is not impossible. The challenge is to find a way to live with uncertainty, make the most informed decisions we can, and modify them when the scientific evidence dictates—as our leading researchers are already doing. Admitting we were wrong requires some self-reflection—which involves living with the dissonance for a while rather than jumping immediately to a self-justification. Maybe what we say to ourselves instead is, “Yes, I usually make smart decisions, and I visited with people knowing that it may be dangerous to do so. While I can come up with a lengthy list of justifications, let me just sit with this for a while.”  To not fall prey to cognitive dissonance we have to be able to identify the two dissonant thoughts/behaviors, and we have to be willing to stop and ask ourselves why we are doing/thinking what we’re doing/thinking. Aronson and Tavris (2020) encourage us to ask ourselves, “Why am I believing this? Why am I behaving this way? Have I thought it through or am I simply taking a short cut, following the party line…?” Choose one of the solutions offered in this discussion for how to reduce dissonance. For example, "I'm young and healthy, so I'm less likely to get sick." Now, ask, "Why do I believe this?" "Because that's what friends keep saying"? Next, evaluate the evidence. "It's true that those who are young and healthy are less likely to die, but young, healthy people can get very sick, and yes, they can die. Even if they have mild or no symptoms, they can still pass it on to others who could get very sick or die." Cite your reputable source, e.g., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.   Reference Aronson, E., & Tavris, C. (2020, July). The role of cognitive dissonance in the pandemic. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/role-cognitive-dissonance-pandemic/614074/ ... View more

Are you interested in sleep paralysis? If so, check out this new article: Sleep Paralysis and the Monsters Inside Your Mind - Scientific American http://ow.ly/J9E230qYF1T #psychstudentrss ... View more

"Dissonance is most painful when evidence strikes at the heart of how we see ourselves—when it threatens our belief that we are kind, ethical, competent, or smart." Check out the great piece on cognitive dissonance from The Atlantic, by Worth author of the The Social Animal,  Elliot Aronson, plus Carol Tavris.  #psychstudentrss ... View more

In 2017, I wrote a blog post about the federal law that mandates that at every institution of higher education in the United States that receives federal funding that students spend a minimum of two hours outside of class working on the course for every hour in class—or equivalent for online/hybrid courses. For example, if at your institution a fully face-to-face course meets 3 hours a week, students should be spending an average of 6 hours each week working on that course for a total of 9 hours. If that same course is offered online, all 9 hours of work would happen outside the classroom. The challenge for faculty is calculating how much work is in their course. In that same blog post, I wrote about the Course Workload Estimator created by the Center for Teaching Excellence at Rice University. The Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University adapted the code and created a new and improved estimator: Workload Estimator 2.0/Enhanced Course Workload Estimator. Below is an assignment designed to get students to review the syllabus and think about the course from a broader perspective through the use of this Estimator. I encourage you to use the Estimator yourself to estimate the workload in your course before asking students to do it.   Assignment instructions Purpose When taking a road trip, it is a good idea to zoom out on the map to see where you are going and how you are going to get there. Having the big picture makes it less likely that you will encounter unexpected turns along the way. Zooming out allows you to better plan your trip. Where are you going to spend the night? What attractions are you going to stop at? The purpose of this assignment is to help you zoom out on our course, see what you’ll be doing this term, and create a road map for how you’re going to get to the end. Task Visit the Course Workload Estimator 2.0. Use your syllabus and textbook to determine what values to enter into the Estimator. [Note to instructor: Include any information that cannot be found in your syllabus here. For example, “For each discussion post, you are expected to write a minimum of 350 words.”] Take a screenshot of your completed Estimator, and paste it into a document. Directly above your screenshot, please write a paragraph describing when during the week you plan on working on this course. For example, if the estimate for how much time you will need to work on this course outside of class—independently—is 6 hours, you may decide that you will work on the class one hour a day Monday through Saturday. Criteria This assignment is worth 10 points. Eight points will be assigned for accurate completion of the Estimator—one point for each section. Two points will be assigned for a weekly work plan that matches the independent hours calculated by the Estimator. ... View more

On June 17, 2020, the psychological science community said goodbye to Anders Ericsson, who history will remember as the researcher who found that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. Sort of. Ericsson, Ralf Kampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer (1993) recruited 30 student violinists (“best,” “good,” and “music teachers”). I admit to wincing at the label “music teachers” for the least-skilled group. They wrote, “We call the students from the department of music education the ‘music teachers’ because teaching is the most likely future profession for this group.” [I had to remind myself that teaching is a skill unto itself, just not the skill they were after in this particularly study.] All 30 participants had at least 10 years of violin-playing experience, so there were no novices in the group. The students kept a diary for one week. The “best” and “good” violinists practiced an average of 24.3 hours that week. The “music teachers” practiced 9.3 hours. Where does the 10,000 hours of practice come from? Ericsson et al. asked the violinists to estimate “the average number of hours of practice alone with the violin per week for each year since they had started playing the violin.” By multiplying the number of hours per week by 52 weeks, they calculated an estimate of number of hours of practice for each year. And then they added up the yearly totals. By the age of 20, the “best” and “good” students had accumulated 10,000 hours of practice. Because they were concerned that the music academy they had been attending for the last two years would artificially inflate the number of hours of practice, they dialed back the age to 18. How many hours of practice had the violinists accumulated by age 18? The “best” students had 7,410 hours of practice. The “good students” had 5,301 hours of practice. The “music teachers” had a mere 3,420 hours of practice. For comparison, Ericsson et al. asked 10 middle-aged, accomplished, professional violinists to estimate the number of hours they practiced each week for each year they played the violin up to age 18. They estimated 7,336 hours, virtually identical to the “best” students. A follow-up study with pianists found similar results. By age 18, the “best” pianists had amassed an estimated 7,606 hours of practice. By age 20, the total was over 10,000 hours. Ericsson et al. emphasized that it’s not just quantity of practice, but quality of practice. “[W]e argue that the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve” (Ericsson et al., 1993, p. 400). Experts have deliberately worked to improve their skills. They have not simply done the same—potentially wrong—thing hour after hour. “Does practice make perfect? ‘Practice makes perfect’—only if the practice is perfect” (Bennett, 1923, p. 49). ******** If you would like to make this an online discussion, provide the above information to your students (edit at will). While the link below goes to the NYTimes.com, consider linking to his obituary through your library’s database in case your students have exceeded the maximum number of free NYTimes.com articles for the month. Initial post Read Dr. Anders Ericsson’s obituary in the New York Times. Part A. Quote Find a quote from the obituary that you found interesting and in 100+ words of reflection, explain why. Be sure to use quotation marks for your quote; the quotation is not part of the 100+ word count. Part B. 10,000 hours (100+ words)      Having read Ericsson’s obituary and the information provided above, would you say that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to make someone an expert? Why or why not? How you would define “expert.” For example, when would you say that someone is an expert? Do think it matters at what point in life the hours of practice happens? Why or why not? Part C. Question If you had had the opportunity to ask Anders Ericsson a question, what would it have been? In 50+ words, explain why chose that question. Responses Please respond to the initial discussion posts written by at least two of your classmates. Part A. In 50+ words, respond to the quote chosen with at least two of the following: A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."  Part B. In 50+ words, respond to the 10,000-hour reflection with at least two of the following: A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."  Part C. In 50+ words, provide your reaction to the question to Ericsson in the initial post. Use at least two of the following: A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."    References Bennett, H. (1923). Psychology and Self-Development. Ginn and Company. Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Romer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363 ... View more

"People with heightened conspiracy mentality appear to have adopted behaviors to prevent the spread of COVID-19 — at least until those behaviors were officially endorsed by the government." What are some of the psychological principles at work here? https://www.psypost.org/2020/06/conspiracy-mentality-linked-to-non-compliance-with-official-but-not-unofficial-coronavirus-prevention-measures-57186 #psychstudentrss ... View more

It’s valuable for students to learn a little bit about the researchers whose names plaster the insides of their textbooks. Each researcher comes from a background that matches that of at least some of our students. We want our students to think like this: “If they can become a respected psychological scientist, so can I.” This month (June 2020) we said goodbye to William Dement. Intro Psych instructors know his name because of his important sleep research. Obituaries are mini biographies that give us an opportunity to celebrate a person’s life. This discussion invites students to read Dement’s obituary and reflect on his contributions to psychological science. In the instructions below, I provide a link to the obituary on the New York Time website. Because the NYTimes limits the number of free articles available each month, however, it would be better if you provide a link to the obituary through your library’s database. If you’re not sure how to do that, contact your institution’s friendly librarian or your equally-friendly public librarian. While this is presented as an asynchronous online discussion, it may be easily adapted as a synchronous discussion or as a stand-alone assignment. The compliment/comment/connection/question framework is courtesy of Jenn Stewart-Mitchell. **** Initial post Dr. William Dement, sleep researcher, passed away on June 17, 2020. Read his obituary in the New York Times. Part A. Quote Find a quote from the obituary that you found interesting and in 100+ words of reflection, explain why. Be sure to use quotation marks for your quote; the quotation is not part of the 100+ word count. Part B. Research After reviewing Dement’s research as provided in both the obituary and your textbook, what do you think was his most important study? In 100+ words, describe the study, then explain why you chose it as his most important. Part C. Teaching In 50+ words, would you have wanted to take his class on sleep and dreams? Why or why not? Responses Please respond to the initial discussion posts written by at least two of your classmates. Part A. In 50+ words, respond to the quote chosen with at least two of the following: A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."  Part B. In 50+ words, respond to the research selected with at least two of the following: A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."  Part C. In 50+ words, provide your reaction to what was written in the initial post about taking his class. Use at least two of the following: A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."          ... View more

With the number of coronavirus infections rising in a number of locations, it’s particularly disturbing to see how many of those new cases are in young adults (see for example Florida, Texas, and South Carolina). It looks like many young adults do not see COVID-19 as a serious illness. Because this is a new illness, we don’t know what the long-term effects may be in survivors. At least some young adults are not considering the role they may play in giving it to someone else – someone that the virus may kill. And, yes, some of those young adults will end up hospitalized, taking up a bed that could be used by someone else. Since your Intro Psych class may be filled with a lot of young adults, the social psych chapter may be a good place to tackle some of what may be driving these risky coronavirus-related behaviors. While this is presented as an asynchronous online discussion, it may be easily adapted as a synchronous discussion or as a stand-alone assignment. The compliment/comment/connection/question framework is courtesy of Jenn Stewart-Mitchell. ******** Initial post Part A. Read “Don’t personalize, collectivise!” Find a quote from the article that you found interesting and in 100+ words of reflection, explain why. Be sure to use quotation marks for your quote; the quotation is not part of the 100+ word count. Part B. In 50+ words, reflect on the kinds of messages you are getting regarding the coronavirus. Would you say that the messages you are hearing about social distancing and wearing masks are more about what’s best for you as an individual or what’s best for everyone as a collective? Where are you hearing these messages? Part C. Regardless of what you personally think, imagine that you would like the young adults around you to wear masks and engage in social distancing. Identify three collectivist messages you could give them that would encourage either wearing masks or social distancing. Responses Please respond to the initial discussion posts written by at least two of your classmates. Part A. In 50+ words, respond to the quote chosen with at least two of the following: A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."  Part B. In 50+ words, respond to the types of messages heard with at least two of the following: A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."  Part C. In 100+ words, would you say that each of the messages given is more collectivist or individualistic? Explain for each. Do you think any of these messages would influence the behavior of any of the young adults in your life? Would who delivered the messages have an impact? Explain. ... View more

Johns Hopkins University is offering a free online course through Coursera titled Psychological First Aid. They estimate that the course takes six hours to finish. Course description: Learn to provide psychological first aid to people in an emergency by employing the RAPID model: Reflective listening, Assessment of needs, Prioritization, Intervention, and Disposition. Utilizing the RAPID model (Reflective listening, Assessment of needs, Prioritization, Intervention, and Disposition), this specialized course provides perspectives on injuries and trauma that are beyond those physical in nature. The RAPID model is readily applicable to public health settings, the workplace, the military, faith-based organizations, mass disaster venues, and even the demands of more commonplace critical events, e.g., dealing with the psychological aftermath of accidents, robberies, suicide, homicide, or community violence. In addition, the RAPID model has been found effective in promoting personal and community resilience. Upon completion of the course, participants receive a certificate. If you choose to offer this course for extra credit or as part of a slate of required assignments students can select from, students can submit the certificate as proof of completion. If you’d like to expand this into a larger assignment, ask students to reflect on the three most important things they learned: “What were the three most important things you learned from this psychological first aid course? Why was each important?” Alternatively, if you don’t want students to necessarily complete the course, you can ask students to share an experience from their own life, an experience from a friend or family member’s life, or even an experience from a TV show or movie where having someone present who was knowledgeable about psychological first aid would have been beneficial and why. ... View more

Because of the pandemic the Association for Psychological Science (APS) canceled their 2020 convention. In its place, they invited all of their poster presenters to upload their posters to the “APS Virtual Poster Showcase” which runs June 1, 2020 through September 1, 2020. If you’re teaching Intro Psych this summer, ask your students to register. Registration is free. This is an amazing opportunity for students to see current psychological research (hundreds of posters!) and, if they’d like, ask the researchers about their studies. While I have framed this activity as an online discussion forum, this can be adapted for discussion in a synchronous class or as a stand-alone assignment. Here are some discussion forum questions that would be appropriate for the Intro Psych development chapter. Amend the topic for other chapters. ***** There are several ways psychological scientists share their research. They will, for example, publish their research in peer-reviewed journals—journals where others who are doing similar research will review articles that have been submitted for publication, and offer critiques that will make the article better. Psychological scientists also present their research at conferences. In some cases, they’ll stand in front of an audience (just like your I do when I teach face-to-face) and talk about their research. In other cases, they’ll print a summary of their research on a big poster (something like 3 feet x 4 feet) and then post that on a bulletin board in a big hall with 50 to 100 other researchers and their posters. A poster session will typically last an hour. Conference attendees can visit the hall, read the posters, and ask each researcher questions about their studies. While we won’t be able to go to a psychology conference during this class, one conference’s research posters are coming to us. The Association for Psychological Science (APS) has asked the psychological scientists who had their posters accepted for presentation at this year’s APS conference to make their posters available online. Visit this webpage, and register for free for the Association for Psychological Science’s Virtual Poster Showcase. Once you’re registered, visit the posters. In the left navigation menu, click on “Virtual Posters,” and select “Cross-Cutting Theme Posters—Risk and Resilience During Emerging Adulthood.” Choose a poster title, and read the abstract—a short summary of the research. In your initial post, please address the following:   What is the title of the poster you’ve chosen? Who are the researchers? What college or university are they from? In 50+ words, why did you choose this particular poster? After viewing or downloading the poster, quote a sentence or two from the poster that stands out to you. In 50+ words, explain why you chose this quote. Lastly, after having read this research poster, in 50+ words, please share what else you would like to know about this topic. Please respond to the initial posts of two classmates. In each of your responses, use at least one of these types of comments to reply to the initial post’s answer to #3 and to #4. For example, in response to their quote, you may choose a compliment, and in response to what else they’d like to know about the topic with a question of your own. A compliment, e.g., "I like how... because...," I like that... because..." A comment, e.g., "I agree that... because...," "I disagree that... because..." A connection, e.g., "I have also thought that...," "That reminds me of..." A question, e.g., "I wonder why...," "I wonder how..."        ... View more

From the AARP to politicians to the health care industry to the popular media, there is a lot of concern over the challenges that the U.S. faces taking care of an aging population and the toll it might take on individual Americans to care for their aging parents.  These concerns are amplified by the fact that, unlike many other developed countries, the U.S. does not have a strong safety net to help with elder care.  An added complication is the new reality that many Americans taking care of aging parents are also raising their own children at the same time—a phenomenon often referred to as being in the sandwich generation.     As with many issues in a family studies course, this one has recently shifted from the professional realm to the personal realm for me when my own parents started having significant health problems right as my kids entered some very trying years of adolescence.  So, count me as a member of the sandwich generation.  That personal perspective helped to fine-tune my professional expertise on family processes and how what goes on within our intimate family lives offers us a way to think about the larger society and our place in it.  That is one of the core perspectives of Families Now, reminding us to think about our families as something that develops in fits and starts over long periods of time within contexts—large and small—that shape us from the outside in.  For example, multiple chapters (e.g., 6, 13, 15) in Families Now offer concrete ways to place our own experiences in such a context:  More people are caught in the “sandwich” in families because of a demographic crunch in society, one created by longer life expectancy (more aging parents to care for indefinitely), a declining birth rate (fewer kids to share responsibilities for any one aging parent), and delayed age at birth (more years in which there are kids at home while parents need care).   The historical economic and political marginalization of families of color in our society meant that, over time, they built stronger family and community networks of extended kin and non-kin to help people deal with the challenges of caring for aging parents (and raising children), so that social resources developed to deal with a dearth of other kinds of resources. The challenges of caring for aging parents has ripple effects across families and communities, as relationships between adult siblings can fracture in conflict and the strain on adult children can trickle down into their interactions with their own children. To build on this discussion, have your students estimate their chances of spending significant time in the sandwich generation based on their parents’ ages and different ages at which they want to become parents (if they do).  You can even have them factor in their siblings’ situations to figure out how much of that time will be shared.  Upon comparing different potential future experiences of the sandwich generation, you can lead a discussion of the ways that the government or community-based groups could help people—including, possibly, their future selves—with the challenges of caring for aging parents.   ... View more

Helicopter parent is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot these days, rarely as a compliment.  It refers to the idea that modern parents hover over their children, vigilantly paying attention and ready to swoop in to take control at the first sign of trouble.  I see them all the time, not just in my research on families but in my own life as a parent who likes to see himself as not helicopter parenting, but, really, does any helicopter parent think they are helicoptering?  The point is that many American parents have become—or are thought to have become—overly involved in managing their children’s lives.   As a sociologist who studies child development with a focus on parenting, I unpack, contextualize, and complicate widely discussed ideas like helicopter parenting in Families Now.  In fact, I would argue that using parenting—and all the messy interactions and conflicted feelings it entails—as a window into the state of the family and the country is precisely what makes Families Now unique and necessary.  I think that helicopter parenting—any kind of parenting, really—is so much more than what goes on between parent and child.  For example, sections of Chapters 11, 12, and 13 of Families Now delve into the modern phenomenon of overly involved parents to connect such a personal experience to three macro-level forces:  The growing economic uncertainty of life in a globalized world, which motivates anxious parents to increasingly attempt to exert control over the children’s lives to ensure (in their minds) that they will be OK. The widening socioeconomic and racial/ethnic inequality that results in helicopter-type parenting working very well for families who already have power and status—helping their already advantaged children gain more advantages in schools and elsewhere—while being far harder to achieve and less likely to have the same impact for other families.  The convergence of the cultural evolution in the perceived starting point of adulthood and the insecurity of the modern labor market that increases the length of time that young people are dependent on their parents, which means that helicopter parenting is happening far past childhood and well into the 20s and 30s (and maybe even beyond!).   To continue this discussion, pose two scenarios to your students: 1) a sports team suspends a high-performing 13-year old for speaking disrespectfully to officials, and 2) a 22-year old does well on tests in a college math course but is given a low grade because of poor attendance.  Now, break the students into smaller discussion groups and pose the following questions: What are concrete examples of parental reactions to these situations that you would characterize as helicopter parenting? Can you articulate where the “line” is between helicopter and non-helicopter reactions? Does changing the identity of the young person in question from male to female, black to white, or low-income to high-income change how you think that parents would react or how “successful” their reactions would be in terms of serving their children’s interests? Bring the class together to determine where the consensus and disagreements arise, also providing opportunities for willing students to reflect on where their own parents fall in the spectrum of helicopter (or non-helicopter) parenting. ... View more

When people find out about the family research that I conduct as a social scientist, they often look at me quizzically and ask “that’s nice, but how useful is it?”  To them, advancing understanding of how families work seems less than important if that research is not directly leading to explicit plans of actions to help or change families in some way.  I do not agree with that sentiment, but I get where it is coming from to some extent.  There is the need to point out and explain social problems and the need to remedy such problems, and it certainly seems efficient if those two things are part of the same enterprise even if they do not have to be.  Yet, efforts to change families—even those that are grounded in sound research—often do not have any impact.  Partly, that is because families—like people—are hard to change.   One thing that is clear to me after many years in this line of work is that improving this less than ideal record of impact requires that we come together to construct beyond multifaceted approaches to problems facing families.  One theme of Families Now is that the core element of a multifaceted approach is that it links macro and micro levels of understanding of some problem or challenge. With such a macro-micro linkage, we can connect family policies to family interventions.  The former concern broad-scale efforts to shift the population of families in some intended direction, such as the federal welfare reform legislation discussed in Chapter 4 that was intended to increase employment rates in the population of low-income mothers and reduce the number of families on public assistance in the process.  The latter are targeted efforts to shift dynamics within families in some intended direction, such as community-based programs discussed in Chapter 15 to help improve the climate of relationships in families with children with chronic illnesses by providing emotional supports to those children’s siblings.  Surveying so many different policies and interventions collectively across the chapters in Families Now suggests to me—and I hope to your students—that family policy and intervention need to partner up.  Consider the discussion of some major government-funded programs in Families Now: An effort to increase the quality and health of marriages among low-income couples by improving their communication and interactions had disappointing results, and one criticism of this program was that it focused too much on what was going on between spouses and not enough on the outside external pressures (e.g., economic instability) on them.  An effort to improve the academic and health outcomes of young people from low-income families by moving them in large numbers to more affluent communities with greater economic opportunities did not consistently yield its intended benefits, and one criticism of this program was that it focused too much on the residential distribution of families across communities and not enough on the interpersonal dynamics (such as peer relations) that young people faced upon moving. In one case, a lot of money went towards something too micro, and, in another, it went towards something too macro.  Is there some meeting point? To delve deeper into these issues, pose the following challenge to your students.  The goal is to reduce the rate of child maltreatment (i.e., abuse or neglect) in families, and your state creates a blue-ribbon family to propose actions to achieve this goal.  Separate the students into groups representing different blue ribbon panels, and ask each group to sketch out one general plan to address this problem.  After the groups present their proposed plans to the class, lead a discussion of how much they lean towards the policy and intervention side and how they could balance these two approaches. ... View more

Across the various socioeconomic and racial/ethnic groups within our diverse population, there are more similarities in how people think about families and engage in family life than there are differences.  That does not mean that there are no differences.  On average, one group may look slightly or even significantly different from another, and, rather than obscure that variability, we should dive into it to figure out what it means.  As anybody who has taught a family class (or, watched the news really) knows, however, the identification of difference often leads to assumptions of deficit.  In other words, there is a tendency—even among the well-meaning—to think about a single standard of family behavior and judge families who do not adhere to that standard as deviant.  That widespread tendency makes having important conversations that much more difficult, which makes progress that much harder to come by.    One thing that my training has given me is a constant voice in my head asking “what about history?” and “what about inequality?”  That perspective forces me to try to understand something happening right now in some family or group of families and go backwards in time to capture the historical trend getting us to this point and go up in terms of levels of society to capture the stratification of our society and how it trickles down into our family lives.  This perspective is woven through all chapters in Families Now, and I think it is especially helpful in understanding many instances of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic differences in family life—thinking historically rather than simply contemporaneously, thinking macro instead of solely micro.  As a result, we can “cancel” deficit model and instead think of such differences in terms of the ways that the families adapt to their own unique sets of needs and challenges within their specific environments. To share some examples from Chapters 8, 11, and 12 from Families Now: Social scientists now tend to discuss the significantly higher likelihood that low-income parents will have children when unmarried (vs. married) in terms of economics rather than morals.  They highlight how historical changes in the economy (e.g., rising inequality, declining job stability) have led economically vulnerable parents—much more than their economically stable counterparts—to view marriage as an insecure and unpredictable setting for having children. Qualitative studies have problematized the narrative around the relatively low rate of breastfeeding among African-American women over the last half-century, shifting the discussion from questions about good and bad maternal choices to highlight how they actively resist the too-narrow definitions of what it means to be a good mother that are imposed on them by the larger society. U.S. schools increasingly expect parents to be visibly involved in school activities, so the lower-than-average engagement of Latino/a parents was often interpreted by school personnel (and researchers) that they cared less about their children’s education than other parents.  More culturally informed research has revealed that such interpretations ignore the barriers that schools erect to Latino/a parents’ involvement but also the many ways that they support their children’s education that school personnel (and researchers) do not see.   To keep going with this discussion, present to your class the specific example, discussed in Chapters 2 and 8, in which the rate of fertility and extended family structures among Mexican immigrants in the U.S. is higher compared to the general U.S. population. Ask the students to explain this difference—why would Mexican immigrants have more children and more often live with other kin than, say, White non-immigrants in the U.S.? Remind students that the rates of fertility and extended family structures among Mexican immigrants in the U.S. is also higher than Mexicans in Mexico—what does that say about the use of any cultural explanations for the family behaviors of Mexican immigrants? If using both comparison points allows non-cultural explanations to emerge, what are those other kinds of explanations?  Does the idea of adaptation to the environment factor into these explanations? ... View more