Cap 7

7 Variance in the Meaning of Time by Family Cycle, Period, Social Context, and Ethnicity Joseph A. Tindale

THE TIMES OF OUR LIVES Research that provides a reader with a context for understanding its purpose and results is theory driven research. Without context there is only empiricism (Tindale, 1991a). Theory before design does not mean the two are mutually exclusive. Indeed, in research that is relevant to the user, they are integral to each other. The choice of methodology made by a researcher is (should be) governed by the theory that gives context to the research question asked. Thus, when asking questions about time, the method used needs to be the method best able to illuminate the question in the context in which it was asked. In short, the sense of time is being sought.

When individuals become family members through birth, adoption, marriage, or other means, they enter into a context within which the meaning of time is socially constructed. The construction of time is rich in the warp and weave of meaning. Its meaning has developed and been passed on through multiple generations; it is ongoing and there is a sense of anticipating the future. Running across the movement in time over Joseph A.Tindale • Department of Family Relations and Applied Nutrition, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada, N1G 2W1.

Time Use Research in the Social Sciences, edited by Wendy E. Pentland, Andrew S. Harvey, M. Powell Lawton, and Mary Ann McColl. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York, 1999.

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generations (age and cohort effects) are families drawing meaning from a myriad range of social fronts (period effects). One can ask: how is/has this family fared economically, how has it done on the health front, or what has been its ethnic evolution, and how does ethnic identity guide family thinking about things such as whether children should/can live at home until they are married? The contextualist (Pepper, 1942) constructions of meaning through and across time are both inherent in a "family tree."

Some of the first, and still some of the most important, research on the meaning of time in social relationships was done by Hareven (Chudacoff & Hareven, 1979; Hareven, 1981,1982). She gave shape to the life-course perspective in the sense of asking about family role transitions and when, or why, these transitions might be considered "on" or "off" time. More recently, researchers such as Kohli (1988,1991) have examined life-course time through the biographical contexts of work and retirement in the welfare state of the 1980s. The work of both these researchers is oriented more to changes in family structure and/or the organization of work and retirement.

When conceptualizing meaning in the family life cycle on more socialpsychological terms, the focus is on what sustains relationships when social circumstances disrupt the expected timing of family life-cycle transitions (Neugarten & Datan, 1973). Norris and Tindale (1994), for example, looked at the give and take of everyday intergenerational family relationships as exchange relations. In this perspective, these exchanges are tempered by a long-term, and global rather than situational, assessment of reciprocity. The long-term orientation is based on the attachment that characterizes family relationships.

The use of attachment in looking at development in later life (Norris & Tindale, 1994) emerged from researchers' dissatisfaction with the explanatory efficacy of more global measures of life satisfaction and well-being.

Recent studies suggest that attachment is better able to interpret the meanings inherent in parent-child interactions (Mancini & Blieszner, 1989).

When young children become "securely attached" (Bowlby, 1969) to their parents, the social adjustment constructed predicts adolescent adjustment.

Similarly, adolescent attachment to family and friends predicts midlife adjustment (Tesch, 1989).

As parents grow older, however, they typically feel less attachment to their children than they did when the children were young, living at home, and attending school (Norris, 1987). Of course, the notion of what is typical is critical. Is it typical to have your children return home to "refill the nest," suitcase in hand, grandchildren in tow? Is it typical to do this before you are 25 but not later on? Once home, can you stay indefinitely, or only for a

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negotiated or parentally prescribed length of time? Indeed, is typical a synonym for okay? These circumstances invoke questions of what are equitable exchanges and how reciprocity is negotiated.

A number of studies have produced results indicating that adult parent–child relations characterized by high levels of attachment also exhibit well-developed understandings of reciprocity (Cicirelli, 1989; Thompson & Walker, 1984). Norris and Tindale (1994) employed a global sense of reciprocity that can best be understood by using a family-centered life-span developmental perspective (Lewis, 1990; Norris, 1987) that is continuous and not stage-oriented in character. This differentiates Norris and Tindale’s (1994) understanding of reciprocity from its exchange theory roots (Dowd, 1980), where the context of the exchange, and the history of the relationship, may be ignored entirely.

In this perspective, life span and life course are used interchangeably.

Sometimes life course is considered a sociological term, one referring to the role transitions of life. The work of Hareven (1981,1982) characterizes this approach. In other instances, life span is considered a psychological construct, and traditionally at least, a developmental outlook. Some of the work of Baltes and associates might characterize this avenue of inquiry (i.e., Baltes & Willis, 1977). Norris and Tindale (1994) invoke a socialpsychological approach that is informed by both sociological and psychological traditions. Life span and life course each capture individual social and biological maturation as well as an ongoing social context that is interactive with the individual.

Thus, it is reciprocity conditioned by a life-course breadth to attachment relations that underpins this interpretation of how family relationships adjust in different social circumstances. It is the attachment characteristic that promotes flexibility in the negotiation of reciprocity and facilitates continued closeness in relationships.

In what follows, conceptualizations about the construction of meaning about time through the life course of individuals and their families are applied to practice contexts. This is done first with some research examples drawn from the literature to demark a structural social context for family relations: 1. Work and family, and what exists in terms of work benefits that affect how families deal with family life-cycle changes in one period of time and place but not in another, is the beginning.

2. The next step is to illustrate how the relationship that women and men have with the workplace affects their construction of on-andoff time regarding parenting.

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Research from the author's social-psychological research is then used to illustrate how meaning constructed to explain changes in family relationships can vary according to where a family is in its life cycle.

3. Another dimension of work and family is explored by considering how the meaning of unemployment can differ among families who are at different points in their life cycle.

4. The ways in which families negotiate global reciprocity is shaped by where each generation is in the timing of its life cycle and that of the family as a whole.

WORK AND FAMILY: BALANCING TIME In 1993, President Clinton signed federal legislation requiring all federal, state, and municipal governments, as well as private firms with 50 or more staff, to grant their employees unpaid medical or family leave of up to 12 weeks per year. In Canada, there is no such legislation. Instead family leave, as the newspaper trumpeted, hinges on employer goodwill (Canadian Press, 1993b).

The near total absence, unpredictability, and uneven distribution of formal employer goodwill with regard to family leave greatly reduces the flexibility available to Canadians as they try optimally to allocate their time between the demands of work and family. Whether one is talking about medical and family leave from work, or a variety of related issues, the point is that flexibility in the timing of family and work responsibilities is necessary because circumstances, and the meaning families give to those circumstance in family life-cycle time (Neugarten & Datan, 1973) are not nearly as uniform or predictable as one might hope.

The work/family dialectic has always complicated the negotiation of work and family considered separately. This has become increasingly complicated as women have entered the work force in ever-increasing numbers since World War II. As Myles (1991, p. 82) notes, while one earner family described 65% of Canadian families in 1961, by 1986, only 12% of Canadian families could be characterized this way. Furthermore, between 1980 and 1990, the employment rate of women with children under the age of 3 climbed from 37% to 53%. This increase was part of a phenomenon in which the average hours of work per week by individuals fell at the same time as household time spent in the paid labor force rose dramatically.

Between World War II and the present time, members of the labor force have moved from the 48-hour week, once typically worked by individuals, to two-earner families, often working a combined total of 60–80 hours per

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week (Myles, 1991, p. 82). Myles cited these figures as part of an argument that we are facing a "supply crisis" in the availability of caregivers. This is quite true, but it is also indicative of a broader issue of increased overlap between work and family. In part, this is the result of the increase in twoearner families just described. To leave it at that, however, is to ignore the fact that families work and live in relation to their communities and their work setting. Neither employers nor communities have yet come close to recognizing how the work–family dynamic has changed. Without such recognition, we should not be surprised by the newspaper article citing the lack of such benefits in Canada or the same need being addressed in American legislation.

BECOMING A PARENT: COHORT CHANGES IN APPROPRIATE TIMING The increase in two-earner families is an important part of the work side of the work and family dynamic. On the family side, the dialectic was made more inherently contradictory by the increase in the Canadian crude birthrate (CBR) in the latter half of the 1980s. Between 1987 and 1990, the number of live births per 1,000 women of childbearing age increased from an historical low of 14.4 to 15.3. The average number of children born to a woman during her childbearing years increased from 1.65 in 1986 to 1.86 in 1990 (Canadian Press, 1992). Additionally, much of this increase in the CBR was contributed by older women. In the period between 1980 and 1990, the number of babies born to women aged 20–24 declined from 112,542 to 81,727, a drop of 28%. Among women aged 35–39, the number of babies born in this period increased from 14,617 to 31,064 (a more than twofold increase) (Canadian Press, 1993a).

These birth statistics indicate that the CBR went up in the 1980s and that older first-time mothers were responsible for much of the increase. In short, more women were becoming mothers. The interesting question, and one for which very recent statistics are difficult to unearth, is whether mothers are having more babies. Certainly, more women are becoming mothers, and folk wisdom suggests mothers are having more babies. At the same time, however, the rate of childlessness (both voluntary and involuntary) is estimated to be between 15% and 20% (Gee & Kimball, 1987), a near historical high in Canada. If women were indeed having more babies, coincident with a near historical peak in childlessness, then the distribution of babies among women in the latter half of the 1980s may well have been bimodal: childless on one pole and several children on the other.

It is also possible that the previously normal distribution was flattened,

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creating relatively equal groupings of childless through multiple birth families .

A flattened, normal distribution more likely represents the situation in the first half of the 1990s. Available figures make it clear that the increase in CBR between 1987 and 1990 was likely just a " boomlet." The CBR, which increased from 14.4 in 1987 to 15.3 in 1990, was back to 14.3 in 1991 and down to 14,0 in 1992 ("Canadian Social Trends", 1994, 1995). The likely cause of that short upsurge in CBR was baby-boom children who had delayed starting a family but, feeling pressure from their biological clocks, compressed the time they were prepared to give to childbearing and had the one or two children they wanted in the in a very time. These late firsttime mothers, coupled with typical levels of younger first-time mothers, combined to create the boomlet that peaked in 1990.

Whatever the long-term trend with respect to fertility, it is clear that during the past decade, a large cohort of women of childbearing age has contributed to an increase in the number of children being born. This is the case even though women, overall, were not having more children than they were a decade earlier. This occurred during a historical period when there was an increase in dual-earner families, a double whammy to the old work–family dialectic. Maternal–paternal responsibilities persisted while career responsibilities continued to expand.

How do families negotiate the intersection of work and family responsibilities? There is a vast and still-growing literature exploring the negotiation of gender roles in couples where both partners are in the workforce.

Much of this literature suggests that women compensate for overlap between work and family worlds by doing two full-time jobs, a maternal– spousal role and a worker role. Hochschild and Machung (1989) refer to this as "the second shift."

The increasingly typical two-earner couples who wanted to start families in the late 1980s rejected the traditional notion of having their cake and eating it too. They rejected the traditional norm of timing that said when women become mothers, they leave the workforce (at least until the children are grown). They rejected the idea that starting a family when they were in their late 30s was "off time." Instead, they declared they were "on time," and redefined "on time" in a more compressed time period than did their parents. At the same time they were rewriting the parental clock, they were demanding that the workplace accomodate parenting in terms of parental leave and other family benefits. Such arrangements are still rare, and although they are becoming more acceptable each year, most families have to struggle to balance work and family time. In the sense of contextualism and time, dual-earner families and the increasing CBR of

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the late 1980s were contextual social circumstances framing family relationships and their negotiation of "on" and "off" time.

RESPONSE TO UNEMPLOYMENT IN DIFFERENT FAMILY LIFE-CYCLE PERIODS In some circumstances, the work–family interaction is very direct. In recessionary times, such as those experienced in central Canada for most of the past 5 years, a jarring work–family interface occurs when one member of a couple becomes unemployed. Research done with unemployed tire workers compared their sources and meanings of social support according to where they were in their family life cycle (Tindale, 1989).

One hundred and twenty unemployed workers, who had a continuing relationship with a partner and had one or more children, were interviewed following the closure of a tire plant near Toronto.

Results indicated that being laid off in a plant shutdown was most important to middle-aged workers (p = .005) 36–49 years of age. They were old enough to lack confidence about their ability to quickly find new work, young enough to have dependent children; their families had established community ties that would make them reluctant to move great distances to find work. Younger workers (ages 20–35) had fewer ties and more reason to believe they could find work. Older workers (ages 55–64) were likely to have fewer financial liabilities and be more able to think of themselves as retiring early.

Consistent with how important the layoff was to them, when asked how they felt about losing their jobs, middle-aged workers reported being worried about the layoff (p = .04). Older workers also worried not so much about regaining employment but about the terms of the company severance package; they worried whether they would qualify for early retirement benefits or even whether their pensions were fully vested. The younger workers were often more shocked and angry than worried.

When these unemployed persons sought social support from their families, their place in the family life cycle was identified in terms of whether their children were important sources of support. Spouses were most frequently the number-one source of support for the youngest workers. Middle-aged workers, and especially the older workers, were more likely to point to their children (p = .002). For both older and middleaged workers, the attachment they felt toward their spouses and children was reflected in who they turned to for support.

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Taken together, then, one can see that maturation in people's movement through the family life cycle is reflected in how they respond to work trauma and who is available to provide social support. That maturation is a dimension of time and the work–family dialectic these workers experienced in being laid off. Coming home for support was differentiated by their sense of where they were in the family life cycle.

Especially in recessionary times, but also now, as the work force ages, the risks of unemployment are especially acute for older workers. The need for flexibility in the work-retirement continuum to facilitate job retention, retraining, and the ability of dual-earner families to plan retirement and family expenses has become the bargaining issue of the 1990s (Tindale,1991b).

In the unemployment illustration, the data dealt with members of the parental generation who were experiencing difficulty. What are the implications for the timing of family transitions when it is the children who are experiencing hardship? In particular, what happens to parent–child relations when parents need to continue or again support young-adult and semiautonomous children who have run aground on the shoals of economic and marital misfortune?

GETTING ON AND GETTING ALONG In the early to mid-l980s, it gradually dawned on Norris and Tindale (1994) that when their families, as well as the families of many of their friends, were starting to have children and purchase homes for the first time, all of them had been helped by their parents to establish independent households. They wondered how often this occurred and with what social-psychological consequences. In surveying the literature, they found researchers had neglected the ways families change and adapt across the life course. There was scant material on how the married couple weathers these changes, nor was there much on the kind and amount of support exchanged over the intergenerational life span between parents and their families.

The focus of the book they wrote as a result of these observations was on older parents and their young-adult children. To get to that point in the family life cycle, however, they traced family life-cycle transitions, beginning with the decision to become a couple. Early on, one of the areas where flexibility in interpreting the meaning of "off time" occurred was with the transition to parenthood.

Some people who want to become parents cannot do so because of infertility or perinatal loss. They may never be able to experience parent-

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hood through adoption or stepfamilies. The marital adjustment for the involuntarily childless carries with it complications parents never have to face. These people are experiencing the transition to nonparenthood in a society with a strong normative expectation that all couples will raise children (Matthews & Martin Matthews, 1986; Sandelowski, HolditchDavis, & Harris, 1990). Perhaps an even more difficult and little understood transition occurs when parents experience loss through stillbirth or perinatal loss. The couple may well feel like what they are: bereaved parents. Well-meaning family, friends, and researchers, however, rarely acknowledge that the transition to parenthood has occurred (Leroy, 1988).

Other people become parents "off time" for other reasons. The people who created the swell in the CBR Canada experienced during the last half of the 1980s redefined "off and on time" to suit where they found themselves on the work–family continuum. Other couples do not start families until their late 30s for reasons over which they have less control. This includes those who tried for 10 years or more before being able to conceive and give birth, and those people who become parents through adoption or creating stepfamilies (Norris & Tindale, 1994). While some of these parents are the focus of attention around birthrates, little attention has been paid to them in terms of how their transition to parenthood differs from the norm.

The nonmedical family literature that does exist on nonstandard parenting (Sussman, 1988) tends to be oriented toward unplanned teen pregnancies, where the assumption continues that the only problem associated with conception is the ease with which it occurs (Norris & Tindale, 1994)!

When these babies grow up and leave the nest, parents are faced with discretionary time and money flexibility issues they have not had the opportunity to contemplate for 20 years (Matras, 1990)! These couples must also come to terms with having entered a new phase in the family life cycle. Individual-need issues and issues associated with their relationship are likely to surface. Where do they go from here, and how do they get there? The result of negotiating changing roles and being flexible about new time and financial circumstances is reflected in one grandfather’s comments: [Life’s] great. I am sort of retired but I have some investments in a little property and I putter around and we have enough money to live reasonably. My wife works three days a week and it pays for our holidays and special things and I think it keeps her interested. She talks of quitting and it would be lovely to not have her work interfering in our going away at times. But on the other hand I think her working three days a week she can enjoy the other four more (Norris & Tari, 1985).

Not only is the couple negotiating changing circumstances, but also it is an example of a dual-earner family gradually moving toward retirement

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years. Just as likely, however, it may be moving simultaneously toward another transition " refilling the nest" (Boyd & Pryor, 1989).

In recent years, children who have matured into young adulthood have been part of a large cohort that has had to compete for jobs in less than buoyant economic times. The young adults of the 1980s were more likely to have remained in the parental home than were their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s (Glick & Lin, 1986). Coincidently, increases in the rates of marriage dissolution and unwed mothers who keep their babies, have also increased the likelihood that children parents thought were gone are suddenly back on their doorstep! Children who return home have been variously referred to as " unlaunched children" (Aqualino & Supple, 1991), and "incompletely launched" (Schnaiberg & Goldenberg, 1989). The favorite of Norris and myself, however, is the "boomerang kids" (Joe, 1991).

Since writing the book, Norris and Tindale (1994) have extended their considerations of how parents and their adult children negotiate continued support by making comparisons between a sample of Anglo and Italian Canadians (Norris, Tindale, Kuiack, Berman & Humphrey, 1994).

Both parents and children were interviewed about their experiences.

These data support the point made in the book (Norris & Tindale, 1994) to the effect that attachment is transethnic, while its expression may, and often does, vary. The result is that ethnic groups differ in their perceptions of "on" and "off " time with respect to their children's transition to adulthood.

The differences can be illustrated quite easily on the issue of returning home or staying home (coresidency), and perceptions of global reciprocity.

With respect to coresidency Anglo children are more likely than those of Italian descent to feel guilt about moving back or continuing to live at home. For the Anglos, it is the act of coresidency and its implications for privacy that cause discomfort. The Italians in the sample were more comfortable with support in general and any particular form of it (i.e., coresidency was not so likely to cause strain). Verbatim data make the point: Anglo daughter: Since I came back, it’s been the most stressful or straining. There’s a small feeling of invasion because they finally got rid of all the kids. I felt guilty moving back.

Italian daughter: If I moved out, my mom would cry. (Norris, et al., 1994) The same point can be illustrated with respect to global reciprocity. This is the sense that in families characterized by attachment relations, equity is very much something accomplished over the full time of family relationships and more or less assumed in the interim. Where global reciprocity prevails, the extent to which it is assumed or is tied to the passage of time

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varies by strength of attachment relations. As we found in our research, it may also vary by ethnicity. Consider these remarks by Anglo respondents.

Anglo daughter: In some ways, it's still, you know, a continuation I think of the parent-child sort of scenario where you ask them to do everything for you. But on the other hand, I don't have a lot of qualms abut doing it because I know that they can and will, you know, get the same sort of assistance from us.

Or, as another Anglo daughter said, " It doesn’t need to be tit for tat."

The respondents of Italian descent, however, did not remark that they were sure they would be paid back in full over time. Instead, for the Italians, it was assumed. " What the Anglos reflected upon, the Italians took for granted" (Norris et al., 1994, p. 9).

Thus, parents do have more time and money about which they can flexibly make decisions when children leave home. It is a time when their relationship with each other changes, if only because the children are gone.

Even so, children do go home again, figuratively or in fact, and when they do it, is because they need their parents (Norris & Tindale, 1994; Norris, et al., 1994). Older parents, then, can easily find themselves renegotiating their relationships on a number of fronts:

• • • •

One earner is prematurely " retired" [read unemployed].

One earner is retired and the other is still working.

The kids are gone, and there is time and money to " burn."

The kids are back, and both the time and money is being burned in ways neither parent anticipated.

CONCLUSIONS ABOUT FAMILY LIFE-CYCLE FLEXIBILITY Whatever combination of "on time" and "off time" phenomena is occurring in any particular family, the shifts in societal context that Canadians have witnessed in the post-World War II period from single- to dualearner families, and the fluctuations in birthrates, suggest that what we mean collectively by "on time" keeps changing. In the same fashion, individual and family understandings of the passage of time are also subject to tumult and change. Unemployment and young-adult children who continue to need parental support, are two examples from our research that illustrate differing perceptions of family time.

Among those experiencing unemployment, positioning along the family life cycle made a difference in how laid-off family members made choices about seeking social support from family and friends. Those who

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were younger, and those who were middle-aged, turned to spouses and other family-of-origin members for support, in part because they did not have children old enough to provide verbal support to parents. The older workers evidenced a preference for getting support from their children in those difficult times. Rather than indicating a lack of attachment for spouses, the data suggested that because of the maturity of their families, these unemployed persons had time to expand the pool of persons with whom they shared strong attachment relations and so experienced more options than the younger workers when seeking social support.

In the research discussed, where parents found their young-adult children continued to need help, ethnicity made a difference in how attachment relations were expressed. In the illustrations provided, Italian Canadians took for granted this continued need for support. The Anglo Canadians also had a sense of global reciprocity but felt the need to explicitly invoke this understanding between the parent and child, and among siblings, to ensure that the understanding was mutual and inequity would likely be avoided.

Therefore, if families are to adapt, they must be flexible over time in the progression of their family life cycle. The attachment that normally develops between parents and children has to keep maturing and be used as a resource to sustain these relationships through ever-changing planned and unanticipated social circumstances. In so doing, the meaning that families and their individual members give to time is continually subject to change in response to the work–family dialectic.

An older worker and his or her family may be able to view unemployment as an opportunity to use time differently, as early retirement and not necessarily a burden. A younger family still struggling to save for a down payment on a home is more likely to view unemployment as something that has to be redressed immediately, because considering themselves retired is hopelessly "off time."

In a similar manner, when parents are faced with " boomerang" young-adult children, their response means that, at the very least, they need to reasses what "on and off time" means for them in terms of where they are as a middle-aged couple anticipating retirement, and where they are as parents with children who are at best only semiautonomous. The global reciprocity (Norris & Tindale, 1994) that tends to characterize stable family relations based on affection makes it more likely that while "on and off time" are continually being renegotiated, the process does not normally represent a crisis for the family.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I wish to acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Award No. 492-86-

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0021) for some of the findings reported in this chapter and Joan Norris for her constructive commentary.

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