SYLLABUS experience, as it turns out, provides a unique perspective for digging into the day’s topic: “Sheltering in Place: Rethinking Family Life in a Pandemic.” The class, led over Zoom by Jennie Germann Molz, professor of sociology, has gathered articles about how the pandemic has impacted the mobility of families, and students are ready to discuss how those pieces relate to their lives. “Families have had to stay put, a new arrangement that people have had to get used to,” Germann Molz begins. One student says that the risk involved in the pandemic has resulted in an increase in helicopter parenting: “There is so much uncertainty and so much risk involved, and parents are cognizant of that and worried.” Parents are definitely “watching over children’s schoolwork,” notes another. The students go on to discuss issues such as the mental health aspects of the pandemic, including the dangers of confinement and being stuck in one place.
Family Life in Turbulent Times with Jennie Germann Molz, professor of sociology BY SANDRA GITTLEN
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t’s nearing the end of April and students in the Sociology 399 course, Family Life in
Turbulent Times, have been in lockdown various times over the past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. That
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While today’s session is focused on the pandemic, the course covers a range of theories, methods and case studies, including comparative studies of how U.S. families cope with economic insecurity. Assigned readings also include an ethnographic account of African American roots tourism in Brazil and a long-term study of the impact of migration on a Filipino family. For their final projects, students are
exploring topics such as parenting practices among transnational migrants and expatriate families, alternative family structures in communal living and how parents have handled remote learning with their school-age children. Germann Molz developed the idea for this new advanced seminar as she was researching her recently published book, “The World is Our Classroom: Extreme Parenting and the Rise of Worldschooling.” “I learned that families were using mobility as a strategy for coping with uncertainty and preparing their children for a changing world,” she says. “I wanted to design a seminar that would allow students to grapple with similar questions about how families navigate social and economic instability, how it feels to parent in a risky world and what a good family life looks like under the conditions of late modernity.” Germann Molz wants students to understand that although family lives are disrupted by events such as the pandemic or natural or economic disasters, people weather this turbulence in different ways depending on their social location. “What appear to be personal problems within our private family lives are actually entangled with broader histories, structures and social patterns,” she notes. Victoria Tara ’21, a political science and sociology major, took the course to
