In terms of our clinical entity analogy, distributed parenting is an attempt to recover the patient: the community fighting for its survival. But, as with real diseases, the fight causes the community to generate toxins in its system. One toxic effect of distributed parenting as a reproductive form is to separate the two strands of the dancing double helix which is gender development in a healthy society. The female strand loops back on itself before the socially appropriate adult has been formed and starts the reproduction cycle prematurely. Despite not having the material and human resources to maintain her development until the socially appropriate moment for building a new family, the marginalized teenager can promote herself out of her going-nowhere adolescence into the sisterhood of mothers.
In sharp contrast, the male strand is prolonged indefinitely into a featureless future, a psychosocial time-line without a morphogenetic point equivalent to becoming a mother for the efflorescence and consolidation of adult manhood. To be tautologous, social manhood as a morphological form requires the specific morphologically formative process; no manmaking process, no men – just males. In distributed parenting societies the appropriate cultural elaboration of biological development required to ‘complete’ men fails to kick in, leaving males psycho-emotionally nomadic, with insufficiently complex points of attachment with which to integrate themselves into the primary social processes involving women and children. The consequence of the unravelling of the double helix of gender development is a generation of men and women who were not made for each other. [99] But again, private grief for individual men is public troubles for society at large. Without a basic cell in the community generating socially committed men as partners in the family-building process, the scheme social fabric itself begins to unravel, (thus eliciting ‘protect the vulnerable’ patch jobs from the public services, whose effect is to edge men out from family building even more). Call it family breakdown, family instability, or whatever, the conclusion is inescapable: as a social substructure the ox-bow scheme is buckling under the burden of reproduction, visible in distributed parenting.
But the effect is not localized.
While the precise claim of this research is that the distributed parenting diathesis is a constitutional disease of the reproductive system of the oxbow scheme, a more comprehensive diagnosis (diagnosis being ‘to visualize an individual patient in his totality’) would visualize distributed parenting as a disease of the whole society. This is because the separation into unrelated trajectories of the two gender development strands and the plethora of dysfunctional families which result from that separation lead to a process of ‘socioporosis’, a hollowing out of macro-societal structure by the ‘separate development’ of ingrowing communities with decreasing amounts in common with the wider society. Distributed parenting is a localized manifestation of a global dynamic. As the world system integrates economically it differentiates socially. This contradictory process generates these encysted micro-worlds with stronger and stronger barriers to overcome before their members can take part in the macro-world. These barriers, as we have seen, are often self-created as survival strategies, natural reactions which medically we should see as part of the sick community’s ‘attempt to recover the patient’ (Sydenham). Our findings would suggest that a key mechanism for this self-defeating evolution is a family system functionally detached from the wider society
• turning away from resourceless males and towards the social father to meet material survival needs,
• but turning in on itself in the search for solutions to adult-teenager developmental problems for which it lacks the cultural resources itself and for which it receives no help from the social father.
Physically reproduced in very short generations almost without increments of societally-appropriate learning [100], these families then replicate the problems of incomplete psychosocial development and incompatible gender development twenty years on, the underlying causes of the failed development/gender incompatibility not having been addressed.
In summary, the family as a sub-system in the North Dundee body social, supposedly functionally specialized in socialization, appears to have buckled under the deindustrialization stresses, and in many cases shattered completely, leaving the child-related pieces to be picked up by public bodies (III.4), and the psychological pieces (V.1) to a variety of comfort and compensation mechanisms (V.2-4). The question as to how the men will be picked up, and by whom, does not yet seem to have been asked.
‘Socioporosis’ derives from the internal fragmentation and consequent loss of strength and flexibility of redundant communities in their reproduction function. This loss of structural strength is particularly visible in two reactions to the load incurred in producing would-be today-adapted young people for social inclusion:
• the incapacity to resist inter-personal relational distortion (e.g. difficulties in communicating, violence and bullying, drunken intercourse);
• institution-related fracture (e.g. school failure, ‘job unreadiness’, suboptimal handling of public organizations).
As happens also in the organic realm, the two disorders interact in an amplificatory way. This makes for a complex patient. Iatrogenic disaster awaits the purely symptomatic intervention.
The aim of this report as a piece of writing-incorporating-thinking has been to discover the complex diagnosis that should properly be available, in North Dundee and possibly elsewhere, for family disorders associated with advanced marginality of post-industrial communities. It was not expected that a new socio-clinical entity would be an outcome of a pilot for in-depth research. But a rethink was prompted by the fact that extant analyses do not seem to have got to grips with the dynamics underlying the symptomatic labels with which problems were being framed for intervention, labels which were all too often being made to act up as diagnoses. Here, as in the days of cupping and bleeding, the available remedies seemed to be constructing the disease. So, while one should not claim too much from a pilot, in this case one should not ignore the significance of the evidence we have. Even such a small sample as ours shows that the problem of young mothers is a complex one. Sometimes it is good all round that a teenage girl has a baby; sometimes it is good for the mother but not so good for the baby; sometimes it is good for mother in the short term but bad for her in the long term; sometimes it is good for the mother, for her family and for the community, but not good for the wider society. And there will be other sometimes. So some sub-categories in an accurately classified category of ‘teenage pregnancy’ may be a problem; but teenage pregnancy is not always a problem, and to foreground it as though it were the problem just closes off other avenues of scientific speculation. Perhaps one of the reasons why our teenage pregnancy rates are so high is that we have become transfixed by our high rates of teenage pregnancy.
A high rate of teenage pregnancy in a community should be seen as a proxy variable, a symptom of a social condition. Social conditions require social remedies. The therapeutic problem for the social physician up to this point has lain in the incomplete identification of the patient’s condition deriving from the failure to classify the disease. What is now required is for social medicine to re-examine the patient with distributed parenting as an available diagnosis. We can then move forward on the matter of developing social remedies. Such social symptoms as teenage pregnancy should then subside.
However, there is an alternative which, though there is no space to explore it in depth, it would be sociologically neglectful not to speculate about. It might perhaps be the case that, far from being a pathological symptom of the copelessly poor, distributed parenting is the indicated socialization system for all women who cannot afford not to work, even married women. For this is indeed a child socialization system well adapted to the deteriorating labour markets of post-industrial societies [101].
The main difference between the scheme mum and the professional woman is in who gets to pick up the pieces they can’t carry: the scheme mum depends on, and therefore must defer to, those who will do it out of love, loyalty, duty or otherwise for nothing, whereas the professional woman maintains more control over the process through the power of her money. But neither woman is able or willing to invest more than a certain proportion of her own life in bringing up her child(ren); the parenting calculus has changed. The ever-escalating costs are not matched by benefits. Doing family ‘properly’, 1950s-style, seems to be getting progressively beyond the will and/or resources of more and more individual parents.
So, if distributed parenting is indeed the coming socialization system, perhaps we should now be composing our farewells to the classic nuclear family and expect to see increasing rates of ‘asocial conceptions’, older as well as young, rich as well as poor. Adding these asocial conceptions to our marital breakdown rates prompts the thought that in the future we may have to learn to welcome their fruits as in effect the children of society as a whole, not the private responsibility of the biological parents. Society must learn to be solicitous for all its children, and invest in their flourishing; otherwise, as we now see in southern Europe, the new parenting calculus means there won’t be any. We would then import adults as fully finished components for our work systems, thereby saving, at current estimates, c.£50k. per person in investment costs.
This is speculative, but not in principle unscientific. Acknowledging that the high-investment nuclear family (as the ‘normal’ family) was organically related to high-wage 1950s industrialism would be in accord with the scientific principle that, within a system, when a pattern alters, the changes affect the pattern as a whole102. Never is one feature altered without altering everything else.
On this reading, deindustrialization may be a form of societal extinction. So, farewell factories and families both?
