From the perspective of 'familialism', the family is viewed as a special social group in which family members are willing to help each other and have the responsibility to take care of their needy members. This article is located in the theoretical background which strongly denies the ‘familialist’ ...
From the perspective of 'familialism', the family is viewed as a special social group in which family members are willing to help each other and have the responsibility to take care of their needy members. This article is located in the theoretical background which strongly denies the ‘familialist’ presupposition on family. First, families are constituted by the agent's family practice which is the individual's transformative performance interacting with the social condition. The responsibility of elderly parents caring is rather a negotiated commitment than an individual's normative behavior. The second theoretical perspective of this article is the ethics of Care, which is critical on the independent, self-sufficient self of the western individualism. The ethics of Care views human being as a 'relational self'. It re-conceptualizes the concept of autonomy as 'relational autonomy' which focuses on the interaction between the social condition and the individual's autonomy. The ‘ethics of care’ perspective tries to locate the social structure, in which caring and autonomy can co-exist.
This article divides the negotiation and practice for the parents care into three dimensions; 1) whether or not there is coercion and interference on their decision making, 2) critical reflection on their motivation and choice, and 3) their caring competency like how they do self-realize, what kind of self-knowledge and self-definition they have and what value they give to the elderly people and the caring experience. These three dimensions correspond to each analytic theme; 1) the existence of the social norm, 2) the married adult children's justification of his (or her) moral identity using the mainstream moral theories, and 3) how the caring partner's competency in the present social condition affects the quality of caring relations. This article evaluates the quality of the caring relations, which varies depending on the characteristics of relational autonomy constructed by these three levels, based on the ethical criteria of the four steps of caring process.
I analyzed how people accept and respond to the social normative expectation using qualitative research methods that give the voice to the agent's life and his interpretation. Among the qualitative methods, life story method includes data on not only the agent's various choices and styles of behavior, but also his/her relation, value, identity incorporating the past on the present time. The narrative analysis on the life story reveals the narrator's identity, the horizon of the interpretation, the sociocultural context and the political intention interfering with this interpretation, and the narrative conventions of each period.
Based on the dichotomy between the macro and the micro, the previous research on the family care analyzed the social norm and family institution, the interaction among the kinship and the individual's caring consciousness and attitude separately. On the contrary, I analyzed how these various dimensions are intertwined in the narrative life story of the family members. I collected life story data from three family members (parents, their married adult children and his/her spouse) for each family. I interviewed total eight families including four eldest son's families, one second son's family, and three daughter’s families. This paper explains the gap between what people are expected to do and what they really do. It also explains ambiguous transferring of various interexchange to care, and the other side of the caring beyond the objective and subjective burden. Even in the seemingly similar typical caring situation, characteristics of caring relations and its qualities are different from each other according to the various contextual and family relations.
The result of this research shows that caring responsibilities are negotiated around the family institutional norm incorporating the history of the individual family relation with the social historical time. The caring adult children's capabilities of critical reflection are exercised differently according to the degrees of coercion and interference on the decision making by the institutional norm. They justified their moral identities differently using mainstream moral theories. That affected the meaning of care to themselves and the self-recognition of their own caring capability which are transferred to the quality of giving care. This dissertation categorized eight families broadly into three types: the external coercion, the internal coercion, and the internal reflection type. Firstly, I’d like to summarize the characteristics of three types including family care negotiation and practice.
The parents caring of my research cases do not exist as the universal ideal norm. The filial piety norm says that the eldest son has to take care of his parents. Yet the norm is applied to my case families only through the negotiated practices in all the family relations and various circumstances. The negotiation process is lead by the recognition on the authority of that genealogical position and the expectation of economical support and inheritance. Added to this, the patriarchal authoritarian, oppressive experience and its injuries play the leading role in the negotiation. In the changing gender relations and generational power relations, there are some implicit negotiations on care in favor of instrumental exchanges and the economic combination of two households. But this doesn't function as the emotional base which invokes the motivation of caring. Only in the case that there are no negative history of family relation and no negative experience of caring burden, it is possible to negotiate the responsibility with the identity as the eldest son and his wife without the other external factors.
For the eldest son's family, their negotiation has been going on with their patrilineal parents not only in the form of economic, instrumental and emotional exchange but also in identity formation. Their present negotiation does not focus on whether they will continue the caring relations or not. They have been in the cumulative commitment to the caring relations as a result of living together. The caring situation is served as the instrument for the other negotiations like getting inheritance or sharing care burden. They think they care for their parents not because they want to do it but because they have to do it. On the other hand, for the other married adult children’s family, the negotiation starts when their parents need care. As a result, their decision making process develops around the moral reflection. But their moral agency is provoked by the rational reasoning on the situation of not accomplishing the institutional model. They point out many reasons why they bear the burden: because the eldest son doesn't take responsibility actively, because his situation makes care impossible, because there is no people willing to take care of, because they see the negative relations between the parents and the eldest son’s family. The elderly parents in this case suffer from the fact that they are taken care of by ‘non-eldest son’, because they are locked in the stereotype of the institutional norm.
The contents of daily caring practice are as follows: the caring role of daughters-in law is reduced to the formality and domestic labour. Accordingly, most of caring concerns, activities, personal caring is up to the son. This son seeks to share the caring burden with the other sons and express the resentment when sharing is not accomplished. This tendency is reinforced in the non-eldest son's family. Sons don’t expect their wives to play the normative role. Daughters can care for their parents in need under the positive attitude and active support of her husband. They, even if their husbands are not the eldest son, consolidate by themselves the responsibility of taking care of parent in-laws. All the case families suffer from the competing and conflicting needs of care giving women, the nuclear family and the elderly parents. In the eldest son's family, this conflict is narrated as a legitimate excuse for the bad quality of care, where as in the non-eldest son' families, it is narrated as an on-going moral dilemma.
Under these characteristics of the parent caring, the type of external coercion is the case in which caring is coerced regardless of one's own intention. Three eldest son's families belong to this type. They criticize their life subjugated to the institutional norm as immoral, pressured and locking their capability of critical reflection into the institutional logic such as reciprocity and its fairness which tends to be substituted with the caring motivation. This rational reason tends to be reverted to the emotional arms such as rage, derision and indifference etc. Therefore, they efface their own self concerning to care, deny the caring responsibility and suggest an alternative of institutionalization.
In the type of internal coercion, there is a moral luck not realizing the negative restriction to genealogical position. One eldest son's family belongs to this type. This family negotiates caring responsibility without explicit external compulsion and recognizes the latent responsibility at the time of issuing care. But this family substitutes their own wants and desires with the rule of parent care and doesn't have the opportunity of critical reflection on their choice and decision making. As a result, there cannot be any narrative emancipation. Giving the meaning to the fixed responsibility, they continue to care in the asymmetric satisfaction of needs and lose the opportunity to balance their multiple needs. As family culture changes, their meaning of caring life become relative and their own emotions get nullified.
The type of internal reflection negotiates their responsibility with an opportunity of moral reflection given by the (eldest) son's refusal, after enjoying the privileged institutional irresponsibility. It includes most of non-eldest son's family. They don't sacrifice their own selves to the institutional norm or they don’t let their own selves dominated by the institutional norm. They find the caring motivation in the internal reflection. But their internal reflections are based not on the attachment and intimacy to the cared-for but on the objective circumstance and negative family relations of other family members. Most of them feel the moral obligation based on the rational reasoning of moral knowledge. Only very few people grow their caring relation reaching to the moral understanding of each other's life and emotional rationality. But their rational reason also demands the fairness of sharing the caring burden. So their willingness and sustainability are very weak and unstable. In the lack of alternative experience and imagination except family care, stabilization of care on the part of the elderly parent leads to the accumulation of caring burden on the part of their caring adult children. As a result, their identities as caring subject become weak and they lose confidence in their own capability. They deny the value of coexistence with their elderly parents in the end.
This dissertation evaluates the quality of caring relations compared with the criteria of the ideal caring processes. For the external coercion, there is little attentiveness to the needs of the cared-for and real caring relations don’t exist. All of the people in the external coercion are alienated. In the case of internal coercion, the care giver's need of taking responsibility is more important than the attentiveness to the needs of the cared-for. The lack of communication among family members prevents them from responding to the needs of the cared-for. For the internal reflection, even if there is attentiveness, responsibility and active care taking, the elderly generation's fossilized self locked in the traditional family caring model blocks up the delivery of their non-eldest son's family's care. Due to the life experienced under the patriarch, they lack intimacy and communicative ability and finally they give up getting responsive.
This article tears down the stereotype that only the family can take care of the family members well, showing the variety of internal base and quality of care depending on the difference in relational autonomy. It also demonstrates the limit of family care under the present social condition. On the contrary, the current system of the elderly care only takes care of the poor, severely disabled, or living alone elderly people. It is built on the assumption that caring is taken only by living together with family members, that family's economic power means the intention to provide support, and that the basic inability of everyday life is inferred as the only needs of the elderly and their family.
Recognizing care as the public responsibility is not to weaken the family value but to encourage the genuine care. All the family cases assure the impossibility of care for the lying sick in bed. I thought that is because they have no experience and imagination of caring with the social service in the household. "It is unavoidable" and "It's the current of the times" are frequently the key narrative conventions which show the social condition around them. I do claim that an autonomous caregiver is more likely to give ideal care than a nonautonomous one. Autonomous caregiving is more likely to be based on the intimacy. If people sacrifice themselves to take care of the elderly parents, their willingness will decrease in the long run and the value of care and family itself will become weaken in the end. There is the paradox that the familialism forcing family to do care by the moral politics leads to the defamilialism. Ultimately, according to the ethic of Care, we should recognize the interdependency of human being and reorganize the social order around the Care beyond the ethics of Justice or Labor. In consequence, the moral boundary should be shifted from the individual and the family to the society and the politics.
From the perspective of 'familialism', the family is viewed as a special social group in which family members are willing to help each other and have the responsibility to take care of their needy members. This article is located in the theoretical background which strongly denies the ‘familialist’ presupposition on family. First, families are constituted by the agent's family practice which is the individual's transformative performance interacting with the social condition. The responsibility of elderly parents caring is rather a negotiated commitment than an individual's normative behavior. The second theoretical perspective of this article is the ethics of Care, which is critical on the independent, self-sufficient self of the western individualism. The ethics of Care views human being as a 'relational self'. It re-conceptualizes the concept of autonomy as 'relational autonomy' which focuses on the interaction between the social condition and the individual's autonomy. The ‘ethics of care’ perspective tries to locate the social structure, in which caring and autonomy can co-exist.
This article divides the negotiation and practice for the parents care into three dimensions; 1) whether or not there is coercion and interference on their decision making, 2) critical reflection on their motivation and choice, and 3) their caring competency like how they do self-realize, what kind of self-knowledge and self-definition they have and what value they give to the elderly people and the caring experience. These three dimensions correspond to each analytic theme; 1) the existence of the social norm, 2) the married adult children's justification of his (or her) moral identity using the mainstream moral theories, and 3) how the caring partner's competency in the present social condition affects the quality of caring relations. This article evaluates the quality of the caring relations, which varies depending on the characteristics of relational autonomy constructed by these three levels, based on the ethical criteria of the four steps of caring process.
I analyzed how people accept and respond to the social normative expectation using qualitative research methods that give the voice to the agent's life and his interpretation. Among the qualitative methods, life story method includes data on not only the agent's various choices and styles of behavior, but also his/her relation, value, identity incorporating the past on the present time. The narrative analysis on the life story reveals the narrator's identity, the horizon of the interpretation, the sociocultural context and the political intention interfering with this interpretation, and the narrative conventions of each period.
Based on the dichotomy between the macro and the micro, the previous research on the family care analyzed the social norm and family institution, the interaction among the kinship and the individual's caring consciousness and attitude separately. On the contrary, I analyzed how these various dimensions are intertwined in the narrative life story of the family members. I collected life story data from three family members (parents, their married adult children and his/her spouse) for each family. I interviewed total eight families including four eldest son's families, one second son's family, and three daughter’s families. This paper explains the gap between what people are expected to do and what they really do. It also explains ambiguous transferring of various interexchange to care, and the other side of the caring beyond the objective and subjective burden. Even in the seemingly similar typical caring situation, characteristics of caring relations and its qualities are different from each other according to the various contextual and family relations.
The result of this research shows that caring responsibilities are negotiated around the family institutional norm incorporating the history of the individual family relation with the social historical time. The caring adult children's capabilities of critical reflection are exercised differently according to the degrees of coercion and interference on the decision making by the institutional norm. They justified their moral identities differently using mainstream moral theories. That affected the meaning of care to themselves and the self-recognition of their own caring capability which are transferred to the quality of giving care. This dissertation categorized eight families broadly into three types: the external coercion, the internal coercion, and the internal reflection type. Firstly, I’d like to summarize the characteristics of three types including family care negotiation and practice.
The parents caring of my research cases do not exist as the universal ideal norm. The filial piety norm says that the eldest son has to take care of his parents. Yet the norm is applied to my case families only through the negotiated practices in all the family relations and various circumstances. The negotiation process is lead by the recognition on the authority of that genealogical position and the expectation of economical support and inheritance. Added to this, the patriarchal authoritarian, oppressive experience and its injuries play the leading role in the negotiation. In the changing gender relations and generational power relations, there are some implicit negotiations on care in favor of instrumental exchanges and the economic combination of two households. But this doesn't function as the emotional base which invokes the motivation of caring. Only in the case that there are no negative history of family relation and no negative experience of caring burden, it is possible to negotiate the responsibility with the identity as the eldest son and his wife without the other external factors.
For the eldest son's family, their negotiation has been going on with their patrilineal parents not only in the form of economic, instrumental and emotional exchange but also in identity formation. Their present negotiation does not focus on whether they will continue the caring relations or not. They have been in the cumulative commitment to the caring relations as a result of living together. The caring situation is served as the instrument for the other negotiations like getting inheritance or sharing care burden. They think they care for their parents not because they want to do it but because they have to do it. On the other hand, for the other married adult children’s family, the negotiation starts when their parents need care. As a result, their decision making process develops around the moral reflection. But their moral agency is provoked by the rational reasoning on the situation of not accomplishing the institutional model. They point out many reasons why they bear the burden: because the eldest son doesn't take responsibility actively, because his situation makes care impossible, because there is no people willing to take care of, because they see the negative relations between the parents and the eldest son’s family. The elderly parents in this case suffer from the fact that they are taken care of by ‘non-eldest son’, because they are locked in the stereotype of the institutional norm.
The contents of daily caring practice are as follows: the caring role of daughters-in law is reduced to the formality and domestic labour. Accordingly, most of caring concerns, activities, personal caring is up to the son. This son seeks to share the caring burden with the other sons and express the resentment when sharing is not accomplished. This tendency is reinforced in the non-eldest son's family. Sons don’t expect their wives to play the normative role. Daughters can care for their parents in need under the positive attitude and active support of her husband. They, even if their husbands are not the eldest son, consolidate by themselves the responsibility of taking care of parent in-laws. All the case families suffer from the competing and conflicting needs of care giving women, the nuclear family and the elderly parents. In the eldest son's family, this conflict is narrated as a legitimate excuse for the bad quality of care, where as in the non-eldest son' families, it is narrated as an on-going moral dilemma.
Under these characteristics of the parent caring, the type of external coercion is the case in which caring is coerced regardless of one's own intention. Three eldest son's families belong to this type. They criticize their life subjugated to the institutional norm as immoral, pressured and locking their capability of critical reflection into the institutional logic such as reciprocity and its fairness which tends to be substituted with the caring motivation. This rational reason tends to be reverted to the emotional arms such as rage, derision and indifference etc. Therefore, they efface their own self concerning to care, deny the caring responsibility and suggest an alternative of institutionalization.
In the type of internal coercion, there is a moral luck not realizing the negative restriction to genealogical position. One eldest son's family belongs to this type. This family negotiates caring responsibility without explicit external compulsion and recognizes the latent responsibility at the time of issuing care. But this family substitutes their own wants and desires with the rule of parent care and doesn't have the opportunity of critical reflection on their choice and decision making. As a result, there cannot be any narrative emancipation. Giving the meaning to the fixed responsibility, they continue to care in the asymmetric satisfaction of needs and lose the opportunity to balance their multiple needs. As family culture changes, their meaning of caring life become relative and their own emotions get nullified.
The type of internal reflection negotiates their responsibility with an opportunity of moral reflection given by the (eldest) son's refusal, after enjoying the privileged institutional irresponsibility. It includes most of non-eldest son's family. They don't sacrifice their own selves to the institutional norm or they don’t let their own selves dominated by the institutional norm. They find the caring motivation in the internal reflection. But their internal reflections are based not on the attachment and intimacy to the cared-for but on the objective circumstance and negative family relations of other family members. Most of them feel the moral obligation based on the rational reasoning of moral knowledge. Only very few people grow their caring relation reaching to the moral understanding of each other's life and emotional rationality. But their rational reason also demands the fairness of sharing the caring burden. So their willingness and sustainability are very weak and unstable. In the lack of alternative experience and imagination except family care, stabilization of care on the part of the elderly parent leads to the accumulation of caring burden on the part of their caring adult children. As a result, their identities as caring subject become weak and they lose confidence in their own capability. They deny the value of coexistence with their elderly parents in the end.
This dissertation evaluates the quality of caring relations compared with the criteria of the ideal caring processes. For the external coercion, there is little attentiveness to the needs of the cared-for and real caring relations don’t exist. All of the people in the external coercion are alienated. In the case of internal coercion, the care giver's need of taking responsibility is more important than the attentiveness to the needs of the cared-for. The lack of communication among family members prevents them from responding to the needs of the cared-for. For the internal reflection, even if there is attentiveness, responsibility and active care taking, the elderly generation's fossilized self locked in the traditional family caring model blocks up the delivery of their non-eldest son's family's care. Due to the life experienced under the patriarch, they lack intimacy and communicative ability and finally they give up getting responsive.
This article tears down the stereotype that only the family can take care of the family members well, showing the variety of internal base and quality of care depending on the difference in relational autonomy. It also demonstrates the limit of family care under the present social condition. On the contrary, the current system of the elderly care only takes care of the poor, severely disabled, or living alone elderly people. It is built on the assumption that caring is taken only by living together with family members, that family's economic power means the intention to provide support, and that the basic inability of everyday life is inferred as the only needs of the elderly and their family.
Recognizing care as the public responsibility is not to weaken the family value but to encourage the genuine care. All the family cases assure the impossibility of care for the lying sick in bed. I thought that is because they have no experience and imagination of caring with the social service in the household. "It is unavoidable" and "It's the current of the times" are frequently the key narrative conventions which show the social condition around them. I do claim that an autonomous caregiver is more likely to give ideal care than a nonautonomous one. Autonomous caregiving is more likely to be based on the intimacy. If people sacrifice themselves to take care of the elderly parents, their willingness will decrease in the long run and the value of care and family itself will become weaken in the end. There is the paradox that the familialism forcing family to do care by the moral politics leads to the defamilialism. Ultimately, according to the ethic of Care, we should recognize the interdependency of human being and reorganize the social order around the Care beyond the ethics of Justice or Labor. In consequence, the moral boundary should be shifted from the individual and the family to the society and the politics.
주제어
#elderly parents caring
#relational autonomy
#family practice
#negotiated commitment
#narrative
#the ethics of Care
#filial piety norm
#familialism
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