American Family

Here's an interesting article from USAToday about the how the American middle-class family is viewed around the world.  I was particularly struck by the reaction from the Catholic country included in the study (Mexico) where the American family comes in for criticism as being overly individualized.  At the same time, however, people virtually everywhere are drawn to American patterns of consumption.  It seems to me, though, that you can't have the one (American patterns of consumption) without the other (family breakdown).

American families are envied, disdained

Posted 4/2/2006 10:00 PM

By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY

ATLANTA — Experts who study families around the globe say America's middle-class family is the one people in other countries both love and loathe.

Anthropologists and sociologists at a weekend conference here on family myths say people from other countries hold up the American middle-class family as the modern ideal. They see movies, television programs and advertising that suggest wealth and prosperity — and they want some.

But researchers such as Ann Marie Leshkowich, assistant professor of anthropology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., also say these families understand that not everything about modern U.S. families is ideal.

"There's a vision of independence and material prosperity, but the downside is that other kinds of social connections are being lost," she says. "American families may have money but don't have time and bonds together."

Leshkowich and other panelists at Emory University talked about visions of the modern family as viewed from other countries. Since the late 1990s, she has spent months at a time in Vietnam, where she says American families are criticized for being too materialistic and too focused on the individual rather than on extended family relationships.

"There is a sense that maybe the family is a residential center and people are going off during the day into his or her world," Leshkowich says. "They see family life as emotionally empty."

Similar views were noted by other researchers, who have spent time in Barbados, Egypt and Mexico. Others are working with colleagues studying families in Argentina and Nepal.

"There's a very clear criticism of American life, at least in Mexico, as being overly individualistic, as being selfish," says Jennifer Hirsch, associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University. "My experience of life in rural Mexico is that it's a society that takes much more pleasure from human connection."

But she says there also are aspects of America that Mexicans seek to emulate. "People want to shop like Americans," she says. "There is a great global envy for American patterns of consumption."

To find out just how pervasive is this idea of emulating American families, Emory University social demographer Kathryn Yount, along with Arland Thornton of the University of Michigan, have launched what may be a decade-long project in Argentina, China, Nepal and Egypt, as well as the USA.

"We're interested in seeing the impact of these ideas on family lives globally," she says.