Definition: 1. a Property of kinship. b  Emphasizes blood relationships with limited role and status differentiation among kin. c Kin occupy a less advantageous place in communities. d Line of descent is incorporated into the descent group when the next generation survives their parents’ relationship.

2. Conditioned by ecological factors; at mercy of economic uncertainties; stigmatized place in community; frequent crises, such as family breakup, illness, death, and single motherhood.

3. Characterized by low symbolic level of organization within or beyond family.

4. Flexibility to be useful at any socioeconomic level.

Contrast: SYMBOLIC FAMILY ESTATE is defined in terms of descent, generation, sex, and affinity. DOMESTIC or HOUSEHOLD  level of kinship emerge in the course of living together and exists through emotional attachments without stable relationships beyond the household.

Narrative:  LEARNING in schools is problematic for children from a Western American Family (WAF). WAFs represent inconsistent and incongruous exposure of family members to choices appropriate for schooling, such as delayed gratification, suppression of “impulses,” respect for authority, role and status distinctions. Farber, Harvey, and Lewis (1967), with a team of researchers, reported evidence of links between WAF and learning when they analyzed families and their communities as well as other data from an experimental preschool program. They reported that children from a family with a WAF kinship line were less likely to learn than children with a symbolic family estates (SFE), who gained increases in IQ scores irrespective of the preschool they attended in the experiment. Children from families without a SFE did not gain or lost IQ scores. IQ scores, at their core, are derived from results of using vocabulary increasingly unlikely used by an age group to solve problems. Rises in IQ scores means children learned and used vocabulary in preschool beyond their age peers to solve problems age peers did not solve. At the same time, their research did not indicate that children from WAF made different choices while learning as distinct from other social interactions. Field Teaching, a prelude to formalizing a learners’ view (ALV), applied a virtual symbolic family estate to increase choices for and during learning for children and adults in and out of schools yielding informal gains in learning similar to those reported for learners with a SFE by Farber and his research team. More experimental research is needed to identify the range of effects SFEs and WAFs have on the process of learning as distinct from the more general process of schooling.

From a learners’ view (ALV), children from WAFs may not have someone in their family household familiar with and time for ways to work with formal organizations in order to support learning in schools.

References

1. Farber, B. (1971). Kinship and Class: A Midwestern Study. NY: Basic Books.
2. Harvey, D. (1993). Potter Edition: Poverty, Family, and Kinship in a Heartland Community. NY: Aldine de Gruyter.
3. Mindel, C. (1974). Kinship, Reference Groups, and The Symbolic Family Estate. International Journal of Sociology of the Family, pp. 91-?.

Related Reading

1. Child Advocacy
2. Field Teaching
3. Symbolic Family Estates (SFE)
4. Virtual Symbolic Family Estate
5. Western American Families

Related Resources

1. Herrnstein, R. & Murray, C. (1994). The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. NY: The Free Press