Varieties of family life in N.Z.

Press, 11 August 1979, Page 17

Varieties of family life in N.Z.

Families In New Zealand Society. Edited by Peggy G. Koopman-Boyden. Methuen, 1979. 184 pp. Index. $12.95. (Reviewed by Jenny Phillips)

Many people claim to “know”- that young people do not look after their elderly relatives any more, but put them into “homes”; that parenthood creates a crisis in marriage; that the role of women in the family has changed dramatically; that Maori society has always been patriachal; that marriages break down far more these days; and that the family is dying. “Families in New Zealand Society” sets out to explode all these myths by looking at the facts. It is an academic book, written by academics, but with one or two exceptions among its contributions, it is easily read by the layperson. Peggy Koopman-Boyden, a senior lecturer in sociology at the University of Canterbury, has done a skilled editing job and provided a book

which is a valuable addition to the sparse literature on the New Zealand family. David Swain finds that parenthood is not as much a time of crisis as previously suggested. In a nicely written chapter on the elderly, Koopman-Boyden shows that most elderly people are being looked after by a small collection of middle-aged people who were born in the low birth period of the 19205. Most are daughters. She points out that young suburban mothers today caring for their children in lonely suburbs will be landed with the equally lonely job of caring for their aged parents in 20 years time — unless of course they are out at work. Ms Koopman-Boyden points out that society has to decide “who will push the wheelchair when the daughter goes to work.” In spite of a popular view to the contrary, most of our elderly are living within reasonable distance of their families. They seldom live with

them and prefer not to, expecting rather “psychological support.” Rosemary Novitz, in a chapter on Women’s Liberation, notes that New Zealand women are sufficiently disenchanted with their lot to have joined women’s movement activities in large numbers. But attitudes, as so often happens, lag behind behaviour. The majority of women still operate within the traditional constraints of the full-time housewife ideal and (if I may use a housewifely phrase) often “add work and stir.”

As for the “norm” — the two-parent nuclear family — David Swain suggests that, as it is doubtful whether the majority live this way, it cannot really be described as the “norm” any longer. Taking a look at the Maori family before the late nineteenth century (when many changes took place), Margaret Orbell shows that matrilocal (living with the wife’s family) residence in marriage and the tracing of descent through women was quite common. This is a rather different picture from that usually painted, but Ms Orbell explained to my satisfaction how this happened. Ms Koopman-Boyden has been diligent in producing a text suitable for lay readers. But a sentence like this one: “It is probable that most exogamous marriages were matrilocal, just as it seems that most endogamous marriages were patrilocal,” should never have been allowed. At the very least the terms should be explained at their first use. Readers of the recently-released survey by the Society for Research on Women on migrant women will find Cluny MacPherson’s Samoan case study an interesting additional exercise. Jacky Lord argues that easy divorce is a good thing, and that legislation to protect the family should more logically be directed at those factors which predispose marriages to break down. Three marriage guidance counsellors contribute the final chapter in the book. Marriage crisis and juvenile delinquency, they say, are often caused by a crisis in the way the marriage partners see their roles. Counselling is directed towards what roles the partners chose to accept and what they expect from one another. Ms Koopman-Boyden, in an epilogue,. comments that New Zealand is not witnessing the death of the family so much as an erosion of the sentimental myths surrounding it. The nuclear family will continue to be the major form of the family. But once the nuclear family is recognised as not being the utopian retreat it was once imagined to be, there will be more support for the many other forms of family, ’’There is no one New Zealand family/ 1 she says,