Human evolution takes place at the level of culture rather than of ‘nature’. Mind is what matters. Rather than organisms, it is cultural properties and social behaviours which get selected for by environmental change. When socio-economic niches alter, if the social groups occupying them can relinquish their current socio-cultural behaviours and learn new ones, they can make the transition to successful inhabitation of the ‘new’ niche. The process differs from biological evolution in that variants of very few other species have much power to adapt to a different environment. The non-adapted organisms die out and occupation of the niche passes to better adapted mutations, if there are any, and to other species. Arguing analogically from biological to cultural evolution we conclude this review with our attention still focused on the link between system structure and environmental structure [93]: dying, surviving or thriving, the question remains one of ‘fit’. The analysis thus far of the fit between the North Dundee reproduction system and the wider social environment prompts some disturbing conclusions.
We have seen that the redundancy and dyseducation associated with deindustrialization impact on the capacity to reproduce itself of that part of the society which is now least well integrated into the economic system in a way that threatens to perpetuate, even exacerbate, that lack of integration. The evolutionary outcome of the interaction between the internal dynamics of these communities and the state structures for parenting support, as they both try to react to the impact of deindustrialization, is ‘distributed parenting’. While in some ways the oxbow scheme family system tries to reproduce itself as though deindustrialization had not happened, it fails to do this because the men, in becoming so much more marginal in the economy, get excluded from the families in which formerly they would have been the fathers.
The special learning which their historical experience has brought to formerly working-class women in Dundee is leading them to make a negative evaluation of what males have to offer in a post-employment world. The worst-case scenario for the male in this world is to be unvalued as a child, unwanted as a partner, and unavailable as a father. What we have uncovered is exclusion within exclusion, a self-perpetuating cycle of ‘family breakdown’, which in turn is an identifiable consequence of redundancy moving down from the economic level through the institutional to the interpersonal. Lost industries mean lost jobs mean lost roles – including the societal bedrock roles of protector and provider, husband and father. Lost boys become displaced men. Men’s rising rates of depression and self-harm (Platt 2000) come as no surprise when seen in this context. They have been scrapped.
The situation is aggravated where social exclusion entails developmental deprivation, as for those boys growing up in what were called by one medical observer ‘female families’: families where there are actually no adult males available to the learning boy from whom to take self-constructing guidance. Children are increasingly recognized to be active agents in their own development. But nevertheless their learning has still a large part of imitation. For this to happen boys’ adult gender role models have not only to be positive, they have to be there. We have seen that being there is becoming increasingly difficult for them.
In consequence, as the environment disconfirms the expectation of sufficient waged work for the unqualified to build families with (there is family-supporting work for some but not for all), some collective learning takes place, leading one part of the reproductive system to shift its base away from the excluded bread-winners towards the family-building resources that are available, those offered by the social father.
Only one part, because in fact these resources are delivered on terms which privilege a new quasi-family form over the no-longer normative two-gender-based family form [94]: the female family. We should see the female family as an environmentally-induced adaptation to a postindustrial, post-employment family-building environment. The female family metamorphosis is as much evoked by the resource structure of this environment as the eye is evoked by light. It is crystallized out of the open possibilities in the social field of reproduction by the structure of rewards and constraints; it is not a random, internally-originated construction authored by those who happen to be trying to live family at the moment. North Dundee females are not responsible for the female family. It is a contextually created system, therefore a societal achievement. We all made it.
The female family is evoked by the ox-bow scheme environment in much the same way as thyroid hyperplasia is evoked by iodine-deficient water (Ryle 1948: 75-6). And in much the same way as some thyroid hyperplasias become goitres, a proportion of female families can be seen to be leading to structural alterations which could be classified as ‘disease’. ‘Distributed parenting’ as a clinical entity in the reproduction system of this society is generating a more general systemic pathology. This is because, functionally speaking, the typical female family is overloaded. It is societally required to do more than it has the social and cultural capital to do.
One reason for the shortfall is that many female families are headed by one-time teenage mothers, who find themselves thrust into the parenting role before they have acquired much life experience, before they have built up an adequate domestic infrastructure, often before they have completed their education. We found that their parenting was often a team act with their own mothers, to whom they deferred on child-rearing matters, and who in their turn had often been young mothers themselves. In terms of wider general knowledge about childhood, it was sometimes not a strong team, considering the scale of the challenge it faced.
For, in addition to having too many functions to perform, some of these functions are contradictory, notably in the matter of managing dependence vs. fostering independence in children. Going full tilt for maximally independent children at the earliest possible age (the Dundee working class tradition) confronts parents in this family system with a real problem when they have to live full-time with their adolescents (the first generation this has happened to – until the late 1970s mid-teenagers went to work straight from school): they can find no good reason to justify why suddenly all the autonomy and free choice has to be limited. This is why so many of the health risks of North Dundee are associated with adolescents prematurely taking on adult patterns of consumption (smoking, alcohol, drugs) and behaviour (sexuality, violence, deviance).
To focus specifically on teenage pregnancies, one reason why they occur disproportionately in this population is because the parental generation fail to manage the shifting trade-off between freedom and control through the adolescent years. They are thus deprived of any significant influence over their children’s sexual apprenticeship. We have seen that the difficulties all families have in this area are compounded for those families a) where autonomy from adult tutelage has been accelerated, b) where the daughter has lost her grip on the educational ladder, and c) where her nuclear family has broken up. The distributed parenting model would have us see asocial conceptions to teenagers as a late developmental mutation in the families of adolescents rather than as a premature formation of a new family. The fact that so few of these conceptions do in fact lead to the formation of new nuclear families but so many to the extension of established families is not unimportant in this regard. The key site for therapeutic intervention, therefore, is not the relationship between the two young people (there often isn’t one), but the system of the girl and her parents.
Getting back to general principles – with an overloaded structure, what takes the heat out is differentiation: break the load up into separable fractions, separately do-able. ‘Distributed parenting’ is the name we gave to the tendency of families in our population either a) to parcel out to others and/or b) to be relieved by public service organizations of some of the parenting tasks they were unable to do. In these differentiated families, it seemed to be mainly the functions related to the socialization of children that the outside ‘agencies’ (extended family, public services, peer groups, media) tended to take up, leaving the hard-pressed mums to concentrate their energies on basic survival, on keeping the household together on limited resources. Here again, this is probably community learned behaviour, earlier generations of mothers having been forced to look to the basics when sheer survival was itself a huge challenge.
However, while distributed parenting is a rational response to overload for highly stretched parents, for today’s children it appears to be dysfunctional. Parental withdrawal from strategic socialization undermines a main social function of the family in modern society, that of being a ‘personality factory’ (Talcott Parsons), producing young workers able to compete for the rewards of an individualistic consumer society. In evidence, we have seen how often children from the most deprived families were depicted as psychologically ill prepared for taking control of their lives, being especially ill equipped in the areas of inter-personal communication, working strategically to achieve objectives within the context of formal organizations, exploiting educational opportunities while they still had them, and building intrinsically satisfying relationships with the opposite sex. Shortfalls in these areas compromise their capacity to take on today’s adult roles, and hence negatively impact on their self-esteem. Ill-prepared teenage girls demonstrate their acknowledgement of likely failure in the competition for upward social mobility with high rates of pregnancy; adolescent boys, in addition to being involved in this, are vulnerable to addictions, mental health problems, unemployment and involvement with the justice system. Both young men and young women, blocked from potential exit from areas rendered marginal by the global economy, contribute to the reproduction of a community now deprived of a productive purpose, entailing continuingly large dependency expenditures.
But distributed parenting is dysfunctional for adolescents outside the home as well as in it. Accomplishing the tasks of today’s adolescence requires young people to have access both to a large pool of adults and to a wide cross-section of near age-peers; failing this they will be short on opportunities for experimenting with relationships and behaviours, experimentation which allows the young adult-to-be to select those that fit the emerging identity and to drop those that don’t. For taken-for-granted access to a pool of multiple adults and multiple peers in which to prove one’s competence and to extend one’s roles, school attendance is essential.
‘As school becomes increasingly important, there is the struggle to avoid a sense of inferiority and mediocrity, to be able to exercise one’s industry and competence, to make the initiative come to something that fits into a broader society. And on the heels of this another crisis is soon generated: concentration or diffuseness, the adolescent’s struggle, continued in altered form through life, between a sense of one’s own identity and the wish to be engaged, to belong, to play many roles.’ (Bruner 1962: 46-7)
Today’s protracted adolescence presupposes being in school. Mixed-sex secondary schools and adolescence have emerged together as an interdependent cultural dyad, each fostering the continuing development of the other, and each supporting the capacity of the other to perform its socio-developmental function, both for society and for young people as individuals. School is the complementary ecological niche to the family, the two together providing a kaleidoscopic tension of identifications interior to the young individual which fosters both a capacity to choose and the capacity to grow to be able to live out the consequences of choosing (both capacities very visible in the three determined young women in our sample who were not mothers). No school, no pool – just the restricted micro-pond of home and pals – and truncated development.
The watersheds in psychological development function as they do by causing tension [95]. As discontinuities accumulate the old accommodation to circumstances becomes disrupted, unsustainable. The expectation of a growth of powers makes us wish to choose at the same time as the pains of growth force choices on us. Where successful resolution of the tension is the precondition of a developmental transition leading to the acquisition of a higher capacity, the individual who has escaped the tension by a regressive or pathological (e.g. psychotic) choice moves on to the next stage of their life with the task of the previous stage unachieved and the psychological virtue appropriate to that stage unacquired. For a natural psychological reaction to the incapacitating anxiety of an unbearable tension is to try to escape. But if ‘personality’ is the outcome of outcomes desired from the modern nuclear family according to Parsons, and ‘identity’ is the acquisition of a successful adolescence according to Erikson, where does that leave ‘unsuccessful adolescents’, escapees from the nuclear family who have not been able to achieve their full potential in the encounter of self with circumstances?
There are two different answers. Answer no. 1 refers to the females, answer no. 2 to the males.
