Teasing Out the Lessons of the 1960s: Family Diversity and Family Privilege

Abstract

The tumult of the 1960s brought new strains of cultural relativism. I survey the continuing impact of some of these strains on family studies, focusing especially on the study of family diversity as an offshoot of the relativistic project. A dominant discourse still drives much of our work, however, and I illustrate it with some recent examples. The diversity agenda is hampered too often by unintended erasures of large categories of people in nondominant family arrangements. As a corrective to this tendency, I propose an agenda to study family privilege and entitlement, that is, to treat it as a “social problem” much as we treat poverty or juvenile delinquency. I illustrate with my own narrative of how I learned privilege and entitlement growing up male in a White, Jewish, upper‐middle‐class family. I end with some recommendations about how we might bring this agenda into our research and writing.

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