Holiday adapts as traditional labels fade
February holiday becomes less traditional as ideas about home and hearth change
When it comes to her appreciation for the first long weekend of the calendar year, Pam Rocker is like most Albertans.
“We’ll go for brunch, a long walk, maybe the theatre,” says the local LGBTQ activist. “It’s nice to have that three-day break in February for family time.”
Still, she’s more than mindful that when she and partner Heather Hansler take their Family Day walk in an inner-city park, they do so in a world, at least on the surface, dominated by heterosexual couples and their offspring.
“You don’t see yourself reflected in the community,” she says. “I think it’ll be a couple more generations before we can see more people like us — and more generations for us not to notice people like us.”
Whether or not the greater society officially recognizes family bonds that fall outside the traditional concept of man, woman and 2.5 children, the number crunchers are already well aware that at least the concept of the nuclear family has, as one Time magazine writer recently put it, been nuked for good.
From divorced parents to blended families to singleparent households and samesex families, couples forgoing parenthood and people living alone, the whole notion of what it means to be a family in the 21st century is a much different conversation than it was a half century, or even a decade, ago.
When in the late 1980s the then Alberta premier Don Getty led the charge to create an official Family Day on the third Monday of February, though, he likely had the more traditional family structure in mind.
“Hug your mother. Mothers are special. If you’ve got the extra time, give your dad a hug as well,” Getty, a married father of four, famously said in 1989 when his Tory government voted into law the first Family Day in the province. While many in the political opposition and the news media — a Herald editorial back then dubbed it “a fiasco” — decried it as a waste of public money, the new holiday quickly became a popular one for the taxpaying public.
Other provinces, seeing the virtues in giving its voters a midwinter break in homage to the vaunted if intangible “family values” rallying cry, soon followed suit. It has since been adopted by British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario. (P.E.I. and Manitoba already had a February holiday, respective Islander and Louis Riel days, while in 2015 Nova Scotia introduced a February Heritage Day.)
While venues like the Calgary Zoo and Telus Spark see an uptick in adults and kids each Family Day, the annual tribute to the family unit prompts some of us to reflect on the whole notion of family in 21st-century western life.
Calgary still pushes above its weight in annual births — the modest population bump of 4,256 souls in our most recent census was largely thanks to births — and, unlike the rest of the country, has the highest growth rate in the zero-to-four age group.
Still, says Rebecca Sullivan, we’re clinging to the notion of the nuclear family as the norm, long past its best before date.
“We are seeing more and more diverse family arrangements today. The old ways of looking at the family unit don’t reflect people’s reality,” says Sullivan, a professor of women’s studies at the University of Calgary.
Just how we got here, she points out, was a case of social engineering with its roots in mid-20th-century social, economic and political uncertainty.
“It was a very clear national policy in the United States to disrupt the multi-generational family,” she says of the post-Second World War push to the nuclear model that was paired with suburban development. “By the 1960s, it was normalized — it was freaking brilliant.”
Simpatico with the dominant Christian faith belief that marriage is only that of a man and woman, the nuclear family notion as the dominant domestic structure chugged along right into the 21st century, even after the divorce rate increased to 40 per cent; an increasing number of married heterosexual couples chose not to have children; in 2005, Bill C38 granted same-sex couples the legal right to marry; a new wave of immigrants resurrected the multi-generational household; and the elderly increased the ranks of single people, now outnumbering twoparent households, along with new forms of community living.
“This idea of the nuclear family is dismantling,” says Pallavi Banerjee. “You need look no farther than the most recent census, which shows this simply doesn’t correspond with reality.”
Banerjee, a University of Calgary assistant professor in sociology with a research focus on the family, believes that this clinging to the nuclear model “has to do with a composition of gender and race.”
“It’s white middle class, with a provider who is usually a man,” she says. “But so many other families are pushing against this norm, including families of choice and urban tribes.”
Allowing a family structure that is no longer the overwhelming majority dominate our collective consciousness is a disservice, says Sullivan.
“There are some developments that came out of the nuclear family movement that were good, like better child protections,” she says. “We have come so far, but we need our government policies to reflect the diversity of families.”
When we say family in the 21st century, though, there are still shared markers upon which most reasonable people can agree.
Family refers to those who (whether or not we share the same roof ) bring meaning, love and acceptance to our lives — whether they are, as Rocker says, “logical” or “biological” family members.
“Some of us have lost our own families by coming out,” says Rocker, who says the language around the much-revered word needs to catch up to society’s increasingly complex and diverse family combinations.
“When you’re gay, it’s treated by many as not quite real — but my family is very real.”
We are seeing more and more diverse family arrangements today. The old ways of looking at the family unit don’t reflect people’s reality.