Standard N orth A merican Family

Abstract

The Standard North American Family (SNAF) refers to the dominant family schema in North America. It consists of a heterosexual legally married couple and any children who co‐reside in the same household. The father is a breadwinner and the mother may work for pay but is mainly responsible for care and household labor.

Disenfranchised: How Lower Income Mothers Navigated the Social Safety Net during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Participants also struggled when not all members of their household were eligible for assistance. Many lower-income households have family configurations that deviate from the standard North American family (Grady 2016; MacDonald, Hayes, and Houston 2018), as people double up or pool resources to get by, yet these families are often deliberately unacknowledged by social services (Meyer and Floyd 2020) and deliberately targeted through coercive policies that aim to uphold two-parent, cis-gendered, heteronormative family systems (Roberts 1997). Like several families in our study, Clarissa had informal custody of her grandson, in her case because his father, her son, was incarcerated.…”

Kinship Practices Among Alternative Family Forms in Western Industrialized Societies

“…The first paper reviewed the history of kinship studies in anthropology and especially sociology, where the study of kinship had at one time been a prominent context for understanding the workings of the Western family system (Furstenberg, 2020). This companion article shifts the focus to the recent research explorations of kinship in alternative family forms, those that depart from the standard nuclear family structure that has been the prevailing model for the past several centuries (Goode, 1963) – defined as a heterosexual legally married couple with any coresiding children in the same household (Grady, 2016; Smith, 1993). Our research suggests that this model continues to have a considerable normative hold in Western societies despite significant diversification of family forms during the past half century.…”

Communication with Kin in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…We contribute to the family and kinship literature in two ways. First, we describe the extent to which individuals reach out to family members beyond their household in times of crisis and to whom they reach out, reassessing prior statements that individuals draw little support outside of their nuclear family and building on recent research documenting the importance of extended kin (Furstenberg 2020; Grady 2016; Mazzucchelli, Bosoni, and Medina 2020). Second, we categorize the extent to which communication with extended kin varies by groups that have been identified in the literature as differing in their deployment of kinship resources, namely, by gender, social class, immigrant status, age group, and race.…”