Community

Paola Bastianoni, Associate Professor of Dynamic Psychology, University of Ferrara

Deconstructing the prejudices that pathologize all diversity requires adopting a pluralist perspective that considers difference as an essential value to be protected and guaranteed

The reality of family configurations that children and adults encounter daily is multifaceted and complex. From a strictly structural perspective, a rich array of variations can be identified that describe how people today choose to realize their dream of having a family or, more often, adapt to the most functional and accessible ways for them to fulfill their affection as a couple and their parenting. A quick review of the variables that, through their different combinations, determine the different family configurations allows us to describe some of the transformation processes that families experience over the course of their lives. Based on the way these different variables combine over the lifespan of people who choose a family plan, we can describe some examples that trace some possible family configurations and the possible structural transformations over time: an adoptive family, multiethnic and with different religious beliefs, can transform, after a marital separation, into a blended family; a heterosexual family with biological children, after marital separation, can become a single-parent family for a certain period, which can further transform over time into a new family unit characterized by a homosexual couple following the acceptance of their homosexual orientation by one of the two parents; the nuclear family with a heterosexual couple and biological children can, over time, expand its family boundaries and become a foster family; the nuclear family, whether with heterosexual or homosexual parents, can over time extend cohabitation to include their elderly and no longer self-sufficient parents to become an extended multi-nuclear family, where the care functions, both towards the children and towards the elderly parents, are carried out by the intermediate generation. Imagining and describing the multiple family configurations and their possible transformations over time is extremely useful and allows us to compare, through a simple descriptive exercise, the plurality and diversity of today’s family configurations, which are not as immediate when we habitually think and talk about family. In everyday conversation, ordinary language reverts to a habitual singularity, harbinger of prejudices and stereotypes, which drastically reduces the internalization of a model of family plurality and diversity, consistent with understanding and understanding the social transformations that have enriched and diversified the social object of family over time. Yet it is precisely through everyday conversations that children learn to recognize, internalize, and utilize the different constructs with which they interpret the world. Children’s perspective on reality is never separated from the daily interactive processes with adults, with whom they co-construct meanings and internalize constructs that are always closely intertwined with affective dimensions and emotional experiences. Today, it is increasingly necessary to question the social processes and meanings underlying children’s and adults’ symbolization of the family construct, and how this symbolization can drive processes of inclusion/belonging and/or processes of pathologization/discrimination/exclusion, often the recipients of which are children themselves, who belong to new family structures that are difficult to accept. In everyday life, we witness the persistence of profound prejudices against certain family configurations—primarily families with homosexual parents—which slow and impede the recognition of equal rights for all children and all parents. Countering the prejudices that impede the recognition of family diversity and, consequently, contribute to maintaining significant discrimination in terms of rights and resources, means first and foremost:

• recognizing the identity of what exists, thus not denying but rather acknowledging the multifaceted nature of today’s families;
• renouncing the use of categories/constructs that are no longer capable of helping us understand what exists;
• adopting a socio-constructionist and process-based cultural orientation;
• countering the normative/exclusionary culture (culture of deviance);
• achieving the affirmation/promotion of a culture of difference.

This primarily entails the renunciation/denouncement of those prejudices that have guided and continue to guide social practices and policies rooted in a normative/exclusionary approach, centered on the naturalization of the nuclear family, considered the only possible form of family, and, consequently, on the pathologization of other forms that deviate from it. This singularity of reference has consolidated what has been defined as the “culture of deviance,” used until the 1980s as the sole interpretative model for the study and evaluation of family processes. A culture that, by relegating families other than the nuclear one to the realm of deviance or marginality, has ended up tracing the undue correlation between different family forms and pathology (Fruggeri, 2007) through the disavowal/denial of the historical/symbolic/ideological/cultural nature of the processes of social construction and meaning that unite every social construct. The implicit assumption that the family is ontologically defined and organized by nature according to the criteria by which we recognize the nuclear family implies that family, to the exclusion of all others, should be considered only that configuration characterized by the set of continuities between the parental couple and the married couple, between family roles and gender roles, between the nuclear family and the family, between family culture and the culture of the social community to which it belongs, and between biological parenthood and socio-emotional parenthood. Based on this assumption, those who theorize and adhere to such a highly normative/normative perspective argue that when we encounter family organizations characterized by some of these discontinuities, we are faced with deviations from the normality/naturalness of the family that necessarily imply deviance/pathology. Thus, all current family configurations that deviate from the nuclear family structure are dismissed as abnormal. The greater the deviation, the greater the process of exclusion, even to the denial of the very right to exist, as occurs with homosexual families. Despite this massive process of exclusionary stigmatization, current family compositions open up scenarios that necessarily mobilize and require a cultural, social, and legal transformation of the concept of the nuclear family organized along traditional lines. This transformation allows for the affirmation of equality in rights and a fair redistribution of services, goods, and opportunities for all family members. Transforming the traditional concept of family requires the sharing of new constructs that allow us to understand and organize the current multiplicity, making it visible and acceptable. The articulation of plurality and difference (Fruggeri, 1998, 2007; Rapaport, 1989) must be considered as an essential methodological principle for the study of family dynamics and processes, which, if adopted, favors a reading of the different family organizations through a perspective aimed both at denouncing prejudices and at affirming the de-pathologization of diversity rather than relegating it to the area of ​​deviance, and, finally, at identifying the strengths and resources of families with a structure different from the nuclear one (Fruggeri, 2005; Ganong and Coleman, 2004), underlining their specificity. The premise of this perspective lies in the fact that what impacts individuals’ developmental outcomes is not so much the structure of their family, but rather the quality of the dynamics and processes that occur within it. This shifts the focus of evaluating family functioning from the level of structural/morphological characteristics to the interactive and relational processes within the structures themselves. Renouncing this prejudicial or stigmatizing paradigm therefore requires a willingness, commitment, and rigor to adopt a pluralistic approach, attentive to grasping the specificity of the multiple realities that are defined precisely by the multiple discontinuities that characterize today’s reality, where the parental couple may not coincide with the marital one, spatial boundaries with affective ones, gender roles with family roles, parenthood does not necessarily coincide with procreation, and cultural belonging can be multiple. These discontinuities, far from constituting elements of deviance or pathology, instead represent what specifies and characterizes the dynamics and processes of contemporary families. Indeed, they constitute the conditions in which families, in their singularity, fulfill their functions of providing care and protection, teaching a sense of boundaries, fostering both the experience of belonging and autonomy, negotiating conflicts and disagreements, and developing the ability to share emotional states. The way these functions are fulfilled in a family where the parental and marital couple coincide will differ from how the same functions are fulfilled by two separated parents, a widowed parent, or a single mother. However, the difference does not concern the quality of the dynamics or the substance of the processes, but rather the procedures and ways in which they are implemented (Bastianoni and Pedrocco Biancardi, 2014). Scientific research has now amply documented how what impacts individuals’ developmental outcomes is not so much the structure of the family to which they belong, but the quality of the dynamics and processes that occur within it. We could even more precisely state that developmental outcomes are connected to the way families fulfill their functions of combining cohesion with individuality, stability with change, care with containment, and release with the sharing of emotional states, regardless of the form they take (Fruggeri, 2007). Psychological research has highlighted how children who grow up in families with cohabiting, separated, remarried, single, or homosexual parents run no more developmental risks than children who grow up in families with married, heterosexual parents1. Different family structures correspond to different ways of organizing primary relationships, each with its own specific characteristics, but all potentially capable of adequately fulfilling family functions. With respect to these functions, no family structure is inherently more secure or more at risk than others: neither united nor separated parents; neither heterosexual nor homosexual parents; neither two parents, nor even one with one parent or more than one parent. The question that needs to be asked is not whether families other than the nuclear family are capable of fulfilling these functions, but how they do so. Adopting a pluralist perspective directs attention not to an a priori negative assessment of the unique ways in which individuals fulfill family tasks and functions, but to the specificity and quality of the ways chosen to organize family relationships, in relation to the structural condition in which the family finds itself for the most diverse reasons. Social consensus on the need to adopt a pluralist perspective often appears merely convenient and, in reality, clashes with attitudes that implicitly perpetuate the stereotypical model of the unique nuclear family. This is due, for example, to the constant assimilation of families composed of children and a widowed parent to the nuclear family, albeit incomplete, even though the discontinuity between the parental axis and the marital axis that characterizes them would make them much closer to families with separated parents. Conversely, in common sense, separated families are considered different from those of singles or widowers living with their children, yet in many respects these three family forms have much more in common than they do with traditional nuclear families composed of a parental couple and children. Indeed, they must manage the triangular dynamic that always characterizes parenthood, not relying on the automatic mechanisms that arise from the fact that the parental couple is also a cohabiting marital couple (Fruggeri and Everri, 2005). Similar considerations can be made for blended families in which at least one member of the marital couple has children from a previous union. If this is the definition, blended families are not only those in which a second union follows a divorce, but also those in which the widowed spouse/parent remarries or a single mother joins a partner who is not the biological father of the children. Even in the case of blended families, there is much discussion about post-separation family recomposition, and blended families following widowhood or maternal singlehood are included among traditional nuclear families, obscuring the specific issues that arise in those families following blended families. Blended families cannot be reductively identified with the family reorganization process linked to a separation or the repair process of previous marital failures. Family recomposition is an additional process that grafts the marital function onto an already existing parental function. In this sense, post-separation, post-widowhood, and post-maternal singleness blended families present their own unique characteristics (Fruggeri, 2005a), but they share the fact that the marital function is grafted onto the parental one, and not vice versa, as occurs in nuclear families. All three of these family forms also find themselves integrating new roles and new family figures (parents, children, grandparents acquired through the new union). If we focus on the discontinuity between biological and socio-emotional parenting, we encounter similar processes. Some types of family organization characterized by this discontinuity are easily associated with the nuclear family (adoptive families, for example), ignoring a uniqueness that, if properly recognized, analyzed, and valued, could protect them from the numerous parental failures they often experience. Adoptive families, in fact, have a traditional nuclear structure, but from a process perspective, the discrepancy between biological and socio-emotional parenting implies the development of a family identity that cannot be defined within the spatial confines of the nuclear family but needs to integrate the adopted child’s origins as part of itself (Bastianoni and Taurino, 2005). Sexual orientation is also a criterion that intersects with all the previous ones, and therefore we can have families with a same-sex couple that share issues related to managing multiple parenting, or the integration of a biological parenting style different from the socio-emotional one, or the need to construct, through daily interaction, new family roles that are not reflected in acquired models. Finally, families with a same-sex couple share with families of minority ethnic origins the task of addressing social discrimination. Yet, a family with a same-sex couple can be a nuclear family and therefore, compared to other families with a same-sex couple that are reconstituted, benefit from the advantages that cohabitation can offer in managing daily family dynamics (Fruggeri, 2008). Based on the analysis conducted thus far, we can say that there are multiple criteria based on which differentiations between contemporary families can be traced: parenting structure and family structure; ethnicity; sexual orientation; and geographic origin. The complex picture outlined emerges from an analytical perspective that shifts focus from the structure or form of families to the processes that take place within them, outlining a landscape in which the intersecting criteria for differentiating families will multiply, making the picture increasingly complex and blurring the schematic distinction between the nuclear family and all others. A complexity emerges that can only be grasped by paying attention to the dynamics that are triggered within families by relationships with multiple variables, in different contexts, and defined through a variety of criteria. Recognizing this complexity requires, first and foremost, a willingness to embrace new and multiple identities that, as such, are defined not only as deviations from what they should be or as unnameable abjects. In conclusion, it is important to reiterate the need to adopt a perspective for studying families that, rather than excluding, includes; rather than replacing, adds; rather than discriminating, encompasses; rather than reducing, expands. A perspective capable of accounting for “different family normalities” can only represent for everyone, even those belonging to traditional families, a milestone of great civilization and culture, a victory for the respect of the rights and dignity of each individual. This necessarily refers to the right to be seen, recognized, and respected, but today requires a legal recognition plan that can no longer be ignored.

Notes

¹ For further information, we recommend: Bastianoni and Baiamonte, 2015.

Bibliography

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