To progress successfully through all of their stages of development, children need to grow up in good communities. Good communities do not occur without viable, productive families. In Restoring Power to Parents and Places, author Richard Kordesh makes a compelling call for the productive family's renewal and provides creative steps for parents, professionals, and policymakers to take to strengthen communities around all children. Kordesh's experiences as a planner, professor, and father, have taught him that productive families are vitally important to the creation of good communities around children. He details historically, and with contemporary examples, the forces in our society that place stresses on families in all sectors. Restoring Power to Parents and Places presents a pointed critique of economic and political forces that have harmed families, but it also offers practical suggestions for action by parents, community leaders, community development and planning professionals, and governments at the local, state, and federal levels. Restoring Power to Parents and Places celebrates the productive potentials of a family's habitat, and it provides tools for empowering families-giving them more time and ability to raise their children.

RESTORING POWER to Parents and Places

By Richard S. Kordesh

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Richard S. Kordesh
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4620-4871-7

Contents

Preface....................................................................................................ixIntroduction...............................................................................................xiiiChapter 1 Hopeful Possibilities for Productive Families....................................................1Chapter 2 The Productive Family: Past and Present..........................................................17Chapter 3 Creating Productive Roles for Mothers and Fathers: How Does Power Matter?........................35Chapter 4 What Is Family-Generated Community Building?.....................................................48Chapter 5 Critical Foundations: Habitat, Education, and Food...............................................57Chapter 6 Building Community around Children...............................................................67Chapter 7 Integrating the Productive Family into Community Problem Solving.................................76Chapter 8 Putting Family-Generated Community Building into Practice........................................87Chapter 9 Obstacles and Openings...........................................................................101Chapter 10 The Populist Politics Needed to Sustain Family-Generated Community Building.....................113Bibliography...............................................................................................119About Richard S. Kordesh...................................................................................125Index......................................................................................................127

Chapter One

Hopeful Possibilities for Productive Families

Community building brings together citizens and organizations in a particular place to define and achieve outcomes for the good of individuals and the locality overall. These outcomes can include better health and education, the creation of wealth, safety, civility, and other desirable goods or services. Although the achievement of these outcomes is often attributed to the actions of formal institutions such as clinics, hospitals, schools, businesses, and local government or law enforcement, these institutions cannot accomplish these results on their own. If the community is to be truly viable, each of these good things must be coproduced by families in cooperation with neighbors, citizen groups, and formal organizations. Due to the necessity of local coproduction, community building depends on the presence and vitality of families.

Productive families provide many goods and services to communities. They deliver some benefits indirectly simply through the work of being families. Others they coproduce with community institutions. Families actually coproduce most of the good things that communities count on being delivered by schools, the police, libraries, mental health agencies, and even churches. When these goods and services are present in adequate levels, the adequacy is due to the joint production taking place.

The family is in a state of flux globally, with traditional forms in decline, others emerging. Overall, nonfamilial households are increasing faster than households with families. The development of modern businesses, schools, and government institutions threaten productive capacities of families. For many of them poverty is also a threat, worsened by the loss of self-sufficiency. That loss has been exacerbated by economic forces that have devastated small-scale family agriculture around the globe.

Some modern trends contribute to the family's decline but could also help more resilient, productive families arise. Even as traditional productive capacities have been harmed, others have begun to emerge. It is possible to identify trends that families can follow in order to become stronger now and in the future. Identifying those trends makes it more likely that steps for helping strong, caring, productive families will emerge and be carried out successfully.

What is meant by a productive family? A productive family generates goods and services that benefit its own members, its neighbors, and the community at large. A productive family creates social goods such as dependable citizens, as well as economic goods—for example, a family moving business. Some of these products are more physically or economically tangible than others. A productive family engages in this generative activity as part of its regular way of life. These goods can be for sale, for barter, used only by the family itself, or just given away. Some goods, like a well-kept yard that increases the property value of the house, are byproducts of taking care of the home or children. Others, like food dishes for a block party or surplus vegetables from a garden, are intentionally created for use by people outside of the home.

Sometimes it can help to understand a concept such as the productive family by considering its opposite, the consumer family. The consumer family is serviced by others. It buys things rather than producing them. It hires others to solve its problems rather than take care of them itself. It contracts with other people or businesses to take care of its property, such as the lawn, the garden, or the house. The consumer family is also dependent on professionals or their service systems for dealing with its health problems, mental health issues, or spiritual issues.

Practically no families are wealthy enough to live solely as consumers. Obviously, few families are wholly self-sufficient and few families engage in consumption only. Moreover, consumption is a necessary part of any productive life. But the productive family for our purposes is one that engages in generative activity routinely in all domains of its life—economic, social, health, and spiritual—and engages in much of its consumption for the purpose of furthering its productive capacities through its family roles.

The Good Things Productive Families Do for Communities

Let us consider some of what families produce and how their generative activity yields secondary benefits for their members, as well as positive outcomes for the community.

A number of writers concerned about families have addressed the many benefits of the family meal. The family meal—the routine gathering of family members around the table to share food and spend time together conversing—provides a rich example of how different productive activities intersect in simple practices and then generate benefits for family members and the community.

Obviously, one benefit of a family meal is the food itself. The mother, father, or other members who prepare dishes to be shared at the table have engaged in the creation of meats, vegetables, pastas, or other dishes that provide pleasure and sources of energy to those at the table. Assuming that the food is made from nutritious ingredients and is properly cooked, dietary and health benefits are also generated by this activity.

But the physical goods and benefits only begin to describe the production that is taking place at a family meal. Various types of social production take place through the preparation, partaking of, and clearing of the meal as well. For example, relationships are forged or strengthened through the joint activities of preparing and serving a dinner. One person might peel carrots or potatoes, another might strain the pasta, and yet another might blend and monitor a sauce. The person in charge of the meal might delegate these tasks in such a way that lines of communication and collaboration are built. When disputes or miscommunications occur, further deliberations are needed to manage them. Therefore, preparation of the family meal can produce social goods like cooperation, communication, and problem-solving skills while strengthening family bonds.

People need to talk with one another while they are working together. Such conversation might address the cooking tasks at hand, or they might also be about catching up with one another's lives in school, work, or otherwise. Or, they might just be about having fun.

The recipes followed in preparing various dishes might be important to the family's cultural heritage. The table setting—from kitchen light to candles; table top to table cloth; Melmac to Grandma's china—might also reflect the family's ethnic or cultural background. Preparing and eating ethnic dishes can help reinforce the family's identity, build pride in its heritage, and evoke memories of elders who may have passed down the recipes. Thus, even the food and the arrangement of the table can generate social goods like cultural pride.

As depicted below, the family meal structures many interactions that yield social goods. Speaking and listening skills emerge as young and old converse. Cooperation is learned as a means to create a pleasant group experience. Patience is acquired by waiting for dishes to be passed from brother to sister to parent. Young people and older members internalize these goods, making it possible to share them through interactions outside of the home.

Serving the dinner, including setting the table, plating the food, and other tasks can involve a number of coordinating and collaborating steps as well. There might be discussion of timing, deciding who will sit where and why, taking into account the kinds of seating required by small children, people with disabilities, or perhaps frailties associated with old age. Passing food and condiments around requires talk and hand-to-hand cooperation. Defining appropriate portions, especially when hungry young boys are at the table, might also generate conversation.

When the meal is not hurried, those at the table are facing one another around a shared, usually pleasurable, task of eating good food. The meal might be the only structured opportunity for all members to see one another face-to-face for any decent length of time. It encourages eye contact. If a parent or member with some seniority is able to encourage and manage the conversation, everyone somehow gets to participate. Children can compliment the preparers for the tastiness of the dishes. Family members can raise positive achievements or problems related to school, the neighborhood, or work. When the meal is finished, clearing the table and cleaning up can carry through the collaborations to the post-dinner phase.

Furthermore, this social production of relationships within the family does not end there. Through regular participation in a family meal, children learn many skills that help them behave positively and appropriately outside the home. They learn to converse, to share, to cooperate, and to do their part when it comes to helping out.

Parents at the table can find out what the children are experiencing in school or whether there are problems in the neighborhood that they need to discuss. Members can remind one another of events that might be coming up that require their attendance.

Just being home generates social goods. Consider that the whole cycle of preparing, eating, and cleaning up requires that family members actually be present in the home for a period of time. When people are home, their presence yields indirect benefits in and around the space of their habitat.

Being home increases safety around the home. Empty homes are targets of choice for burglars. Empty lots, unwatched stretches of blocks, or unmonitored alleys are magnets for criminal activity. Through their eyes on the streets, families contribute more routinely to preventing crimes such as burglaries or assaults that might take place near the homes. A kind of safe zone is cast around a home when its members are present. This zone lowers the likelihood of crime for the neighbors as well.

Thus, the simple practice of preparing and sharing a family meal creates numerous social goods:

Family memories are shared.

Stories are related.

Relationships are solidified.

Cooperative practices are learned.

Faith is reinforced.

Safety is increased.

There are many other examples of how institutionalizing certain productive activities in the family home yields a variety of direct and indirect, social and economic benefits for members and their communities. These include:

• Locating a family business in the home or making the home a place for work can encourage many, interrelated forms of economic and social production. Not only does working at home require the productive use and maintenance of space, it ensures the parents' presence. Some types of home-based work allow flex-time—working periodically in the day or evening—which also allows for home maintenance, cooking, coaching a child's baseball team, or coordinating with a spouse around the monitoring of homework. • Growing a vegetable garden or fruit trees on the family property can set up a variety of shared tasks that build productive relationships among members. Tending the garden—fertilizing, composting, weeding, watering, pruning, and harvesting— encourages an attentiveness to the quality of the family habitat—the soil, water, birds, rabbits, worms, and other features—that would more likely be overlooked without it. The focus on landscaping, the quality of environment, and the production of food yields community benefits as well—sustainable use of resources, beautification of spaces, stable property values, and sometimes shared bounty from the garden itself. • Situating a variety of schooling activities in the home, for young children, school-aged children, or even older youth, is another way for the home and habitat to foster family production. Some families practice homeschooling. Others negotiate co-schooling arrangements with their school districts in which parents teach one or two formal classes at home. Some parents set up their own homes as preschool childcare centers and include age-appropriate educational activities as part of their offerings. Many parents create spaces in their homes that are set up for educational endeavors—rooms with computers, erasable boards, desks, tables, mini-libraries, and other educational amenities. In such spaces, parents are engaged in far more than so-called "family involvement" as an adjunct to formal schooling. They are coproducing education at least parallel with, if not in direct collaboration with, the formal teachers. This coproduction makes the family an institution that produces educational outcomes, social development, quality space in and around the home, and even helps the formal school district to achieve its prescribed targets for educational quality. Families throughout the world practice these kinds of educational, business, and socially productive activities in a variety of forms and to various degrees. When one adds up all of the benefits that devolve to communities from them, one can begin to appreciate the enormous vacuum that forms in a place when many families cannot be productive. This hole in the community has grown larger as the productive capacities of families have diminished over time (see chapter 6 for a fuller discussion of these examples).

Trends That Can Strengthen Productive Families

It is in the interests of families to be productive: it lessens their dependence on corporations and public systems; it enables them to control to a degree their quality of life; it allows them to weather uncertainties and unexpected job losses caused by unpredictable employment markets; and it allows them to matter more in—and therefore to exercise more power in—the life of the community. There are trends shaping societies whose benefits can be captured in order to strengthen productive families. Some of these trends have and could continue to diminish family life if not harnessed appropriately.

Even as they have shrunk as a mainstream entity, in other respects productive families are reemerging in somewhat new forms. In particular, gender equality, technology, and the sustainable development movement have aided in the productive family's reemergence.

The global trend toward equality for women can diversify the kinds of contributions that women and men make toward productive family life.

The traditional roles of wives, mothers, and daughters carried many creative responsibilities—cooking, sewing, nursing babies, caring for children in the home, managing the home, beautifying the home, and other tasks. These tasks are as important as ever; in many cultures men and women still assume that they are primarily tasks for females.

However, with the relentless drive toward women's equality, these activities are gradually, even if in many contexts grudgingly, being taken up in shared fashion by husbands, fathers, brothers, and other men in the household. Greater opportunities for employment outside the home, as well as business and professional activities linked to the home, enable women to improve their economic contribution to the family and its habitat. Women can function as co-decision makers in arranging financing for the home and in determining major investments, they generate income for the family, they can teach their children about the skills and habits that it takes to hold a job or build a career, and they can draw on their broadening education to enrich their children's learning.

Women's liberation has often been derided as a threat to family life because it can foster careerism, pull mothers away from homes, or encourage a kind of "hyper-individualism" that steers young women away from considering marriage and family formation. Certainly, such outcomes have occurred. But it is not necessary that they must occur, given that the diversification of women's capacities adds to what they can bring to family life, especially in its productive dimensions.

(Continues...)

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