Urban Tribes
24/3/04 22:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eredienThis is mostly a post to the people I will be living with at some point within the next year, although others are certainly welcome to read it.
So sometime around late junior highschool, I noticed that more and more people I know had begun to form permanent social groups around friends. This, as anyone who has ever been a teenager will recall, is nothing new. Friends are the center of life, then.
But--and this is a large but--parents and the traditional nuclear family have started becoming less and less so. We've become so alienated from each other that people can make a movie about leaving a child home alone, and that child can go out and take care of themselves for over a month with the poise of an adult, and everyone expects this. (Home Alone, if you're wondering. I just read an article on this the other day, and have been thinking about it).
It's not that they don't love us in their way (one hopes), or that I don't love them in my own. But it's that no one does anything to bridge that awful disconnect, mostly because people aren't expecting that it can be bridged anymore--that stops people from trying. I know I've tried.
My own attempts at bridging this gap have been mildly disastrous by my own standards, and I know that from about the age of fifteen on I was more of a parent-figure to my sister than my parents were--they actually asked me to enforce their punishiments on her (which I refused to do) and to talk to her when there were problems (which I, on occasion, did. She somehow turned out to be a responsible, caring, free person and individual, and the person in my immediate family I like the most. Go figure).
So, we're expected to be our own parents from an early age. We're expected (and we expect) to grow apart from our parents.
People are not meant to live alone (I tried that for a while too. Ick). So what do we do? We form groups of friends-like-family. And we stick with them. What else have we got?
I put this theory forward for the past four years with other friends, with my sister, with adults that worked with kids, with teachers and adult friends I knew and trusted. There was a general agreement that this might be a trend. I thought about writing a book about it.
Well, it's a trend: there's a book. It's not mine, but that just saves me the trouble of trailblazing research and I will merely write the reviews.
It's called Urban Tribes, by Ethan Watters.
Canaday has it, but Rabidfangurl has it out, and I have dibs on it after her, but you can go read it. Or go to the blog. Or the book's website. Or both. They profile different things.
That idea of how we're family and know it? That's what this book is about. I think we all ought to read it. I don't know anyone who wouldn't want to read it, come to think of that.
Isn't this great?
Update: I just found out this guy will be in Boston this year to promote this book. BOSTON Tuesday, October 7 Harvard COOP, 7:00 p.m.
So sometime around late junior highschool, I noticed that more and more people I know had begun to form permanent social groups around friends. This, as anyone who has ever been a teenager will recall, is nothing new. Friends are the center of life, then.
But--and this is a large but--parents and the traditional nuclear family have started becoming less and less so. We've become so alienated from each other that people can make a movie about leaving a child home alone, and that child can go out and take care of themselves for over a month with the poise of an adult, and everyone expects this. (Home Alone, if you're wondering. I just read an article on this the other day, and have been thinking about it).
It's not that they don't love us in their way (one hopes), or that I don't love them in my own. But it's that no one does anything to bridge that awful disconnect, mostly because people aren't expecting that it can be bridged anymore--that stops people from trying. I know I've tried.
My own attempts at bridging this gap have been mildly disastrous by my own standards, and I know that from about the age of fifteen on I was more of a parent-figure to my sister than my parents were--they actually asked me to enforce their punishiments on her (which I refused to do) and to talk to her when there were problems (which I, on occasion, did. She somehow turned out to be a responsible, caring, free person and individual, and the person in my immediate family I like the most. Go figure).
So, we're expected to be our own parents from an early age. We're expected (and we expect) to grow apart from our parents.
People are not meant to live alone (I tried that for a while too. Ick). So what do we do? We form groups of friends-like-family. And we stick with them. What else have we got?
I put this theory forward for the past four years with other friends, with my sister, with adults that worked with kids, with teachers and adult friends I knew and trusted. There was a general agreement that this might be a trend. I thought about writing a book about it.
Well, it's a trend: there's a book. It's not mine, but that just saves me the trouble of trailblazing research and I will merely write the reviews.
It's called Urban Tribes, by Ethan Watters.
Canaday has it, but Rabidfangurl has it out, and I have dibs on it after her, but you can go read it. Or go to the blog. Or the book's website. Or both. They profile different things.
That idea of how we're family and know it? That's what this book is about. I think we all ought to read it. I don't know anyone who wouldn't want to read it, come to think of that.
Isn't this great?
Update: I just found out this guy will be in Boston this year to promote this book. BOSTON Tuesday, October 7 Harvard COOP, 7:00 p.m.
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(no subject)
25/3/04 08:57 (UTC)My best friend besides my boyfriend, who roomed with me almost all through college, remains in the city where we went to school, hundreds of miles from her family. I know that her social network there is not extensive and that the connections are fairly weak. She's lonely.
Last year I moved away from my parents to another part of the country. Here, my aunt and uncle and my cousins are within a 10 minute drive from my apartment, and I see them often. Despite the fact that they've known me since I was a baby, I don't think they know me as well as I would like them to.
And I haven't made any new friends. My boyfriend is the only connection that's as strong as I'd like. I keep planning to take up some activity to meet new people, but for now my tribe is extremely small. And I get the impression that there are a LOT of twentysomethings in fairly analogous situations.
Are these tribes more common for people in their 30s, I wonder?