American families and absences: Breaking the parent -child bond

This study explores states of parental and child absences (PCA) that emerge through bending, breaking, or "broken" parent-child bonds in American family life. The problem of breaking parent-child bonds is grounded in the degree of lacking that society attaches to parenting given or received by the individual. The problem of remaining child-less is that women and men have broken their bond with society to become parents. Across scenarios, gender bias overarches notions of femininity and masculinity anchored in bonding within the nuclear family. I relied on qualitative methods to find and follow 48 "insiders to absences" situated in historically disparate motherless, fatherless, or childless identity groups. There was a deliberate search for stigma in the analysis of individual and societal responses to differing circumstances of parent/child death, separation or conflict-driven estrangement from a living parent/child, and remaining child-less. The methodological and theoretical elements of this research promote the "insiders" experiences as an inherently valid and critical cornerstone of knowledge of families. Feminist epistemologies and methods of research informed the in-depth interviewing and interpretation of that data. Erving Goffman's (1959, 1963) theories were essential to formulating substantive interview questions and analyzing the data related to the respondents' management of identity and stigma in social interactions. A key finding is that all of the insiders claimed "differentness" due to the absence of a particular mother, father, daughter, or son; real or socially imagined. Some, but not all, insiders felt stigmatized by their shared differentness. Absences create new presences that enhance the insider's experience of family, self, and social place. These presences represent many types of related and unrelated kin. Further, physical absence rarely squared with lacking in emotional bonds with people who were absent or present in the insiders' families. Ambiguities riddled dimensions of PCA. The insiders employed strategies for handling ambiguity including coping with unwanted absences, embracing wanted absence, and resisting stigma. They "customized" their family-based identity regardless of their (dis)comfort with their situation of absence. Coping with ambiguity while resisting stigma suggest that adult Americans are (re)defining mother-less, father-less, and child-less identities in American society from the "bottom up."