Читать книгу Families & Change - Группа авторов - Страница 27

Heather M. Helms, Kaicee B. Postler, and David H. Demo

For many American families, daily life involves negotiating a maze of activities that includes cooking; cleaning; running errands; paying bills; dropping off and picking up children; commuting to and from work; tending to pets; scheduling appointments; attending events (community, religious, and school related); returning phone calls, e-mails, and texts; caring for aging family members; and remembering birthdays—often while parents fulfill the duties of full- or part-time jobs. These routinized experiences define the rhythm of family life, and family members can experience them at times as rewarding and at other times as hassles. Whether family members perceive a particular event to be a hassle, a pleasure, or both can depend on any number of factors. For example, women and men define and react to hassles differently; socioeconomic resources, cultural context, and work schedules make it easier for some families and harder for others to deal with daily hassles; and differences in personality characteristics and coping resources influence how individual family members experience and respond to everyday hassles.

In this chapter, we discuss the everyday hassles that researchers have examined in studies of daily stress and family life. We first define the kinds of events that constitute such hassles and then describe the methods researchers use to study them, including the means by which researchers explore invisible dimensions of family life. We then examine how everyday hassles are associated with family functioning, paying particular attention to the variability in family members’ experiences. We present Karney and Bradbury’s (1995) vulnerability-stress-adaptation (VSA) model as a helpful way to frame the research on daily hassles and family relationships, focusing on the diversity that exists both across and within families in each of the three domains proposed in the model. Because elements of context such as socioeconomic factors, workplace policies, and macrosocietal patterns (e.g., institutionalized discrimination based on race, gender, and sexual orientation) potentially introduce differential opportunities and constraints for family members that are likely to affect the links between each element of the model, we adapt Karney and Bradbury’s model by nesting it within the ecological niches that families inhabit. In so doing, we underscore how contextual factors moderate the associations between vulnerability, stress, and adaptation. Furthermore, given the gendered meanings attached to many routinized family activities and the often divergent experiences of women and men in families, our approach is necessarily feminist. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of how existing social policies in the United States fail to mesh with the daily reality of most American families and thus contribute to family members’ experiences of everyday hassles. We close with implications and suggestions for family policy interventions.