Quick – How Many Kids, by How Many Wives, Does Trump Have? The Matter of Family Privilege

Did you have at your fingertips – or even in the deep recesses of your mind – the answer to the question in the title of this article? Did you know that Donald Trump has five kids from three marriages? And if you didn’t know that, why didn’t you?

That remarkable biographical detail has not gotten all that much attention. Our friend Nichole Rodgers at Family Story co-authored a piece for the Washington Post on the matter in 2016, “Trump is respected for fathering children by multiple women. That’s because he’s a rich, white man.” She and Julie Kohler asked us to “Imagine the public response if either President Obama or Hillary Clinton had children from three different partners. That would have likely barred them entirely from high-level politics.”

The matter at hand is far more sweeping and consequential than still another story about what Donald Trump can get away with. It is about a kind of privilege that has not gotten the recognition of, say, white privilege or male privilege, but is perpetuated with similar dynamics: that’s family privilege.

In an article published online in July in the Journal of Family Theory & Review, Bethany L. Letiecq of George Mason University is trying to change that. She wants to explain family privilege and persuade her fellow family scientists to do research and theorizing in ways that no longer perpetuate unearned advantages and unwarranted disadvantages.

In this article, I will address the following:

• What Is Family Privilege and Which Families Are Privileged?
• Privilege Checklists: What Would One for Family Privilege Look Like?
• 5 Ways Social Scientists Have Perpetuated Family Privilege
• The Challenges of Taking Family Privilege Seriously

What Is Family Privilege and Which Families Are Privileged?

Letiecq defines family privilege as:

“the benefits, often invisible and unacknowledged, that one receives by belonging to family systems long upheld in society as superior to all others.”

Once those unearned advantages are laid bare, other stories that privileged families like to tell about themselves become less convincing. If, for example, those families, and not others, are benefited and protected by a whole raft of laws and policies and practices, then maybe they did not succeed solely because of their hard work. Maybe they were not entirely “self-made.” They didn’t just pull themselves up by their bootstraps but had laws, institutions, and norms doing some of the heavy lifting for them. Perhaps even more importantly, the blaming, shaming, and stigmatizing stories told about other families start to seem suspect, too.

In the U.S., for more than a half-century, the most privileged family form as been the nuclear family consisting of a married mom and dad and their kids. The nuclear family is celebrated as best for both the children and for society. Any deviation is scorned as a social problem that must be solved.

There are, of course, plenty of variations on family that get construed as “lesser than.” They include, among many others:

• Families with one parent, or multiple parents, instead of two
• Couples who are cohabiting or divorced instead of married
• Couples who are living apart instead of together
• Couples who are not heterosexual
• Couples who do not have kids
• People who have had kids with more than one partner
• Relatives such as grandparents, aunts and uncles who may be very important but are not treated as such
• People who are considered family, even if they do not fit any of the usual definitions; close friends, for example, are often members of people’s “families of choice”

Privilege Checklists: What Would One for Family Privilege Look Like?

Privilege is sometimes illustrated by checklists that underscore the kinds of unearned advantages some people get simply by being a member of a particular group. Lisa Arnold, Rachel Buddeberg, Christina Campbell and I put together a checklist to identify marital privilege. The 32 items describe the kinds of privileges that married people enjoy. Some examples:

• If I decide to raise kids, no one will worry that because I’m married, my kids will become juvenile delinquents.
• I do not find lists of reasons why I am still married on websites and in magazines.
• When I pay into Social Security, I know that when I die, someone important to me (my spouse or dependent) will be able to claim my Social Security benefits.
• I can give large sums of money or estate property to someone important to me (my spouse) without paying taxes.
• I can count on finding huge numbers of movies, TV shows, and books featuring characters desperately seeking to join my marital status and being celebrated when they succeed.
• If I want to adopt, my marital status will work in my favor.

As yet, there is no such checklist for family privilege, but Professor Letiecq suggests that items such as the following could be included:

• “As part of a biological, heteronormative, traditional, two-parent-headed family, I do not have to think about how to describe my family system to others.”
• “As a heterosexual married person, I can be reasonably assured that my relationship will be respected, legitimized, supported, and celebrated in my community.”

An important article that Mia Birdsong and Nicole Rodgers wrote about nuclear family privilege also included some suggestions that I’ve converted into items:

• Bereavement policies provide no time off for the death of an aunt, even if she is the one who raised you.
• Long-term childfree couples are treated as not quite a family because they are not married and don’t have kids.
• Fathers—particularly, poor and/or black fathers—who are not married to the mothers of their children, are incorrectly believed to be ‘absentee.’
• Schools engage in Father’s Day celebrations even though 25 percent of children are raised in homes without their fathers.
• Workplaces regularly hold evening events without considering the childcare needs of single parents.

5 Ways Social Scientists Have Perpetuated Family Privilege

Because her article is addressed to fellow family scientists, Letiecq describes many of the ways that they have, perhaps unintentionally, perpetuated family privilege. You don’t need to be a social scientist to appreciate her critique. It is instructive to anyone who reads about the findings from studies of families.

1. Assigning stigmatizing labels

The people who do family research, who are often themselves privileged in many ways, get to decide on the language they will use. Some of the labels for families that are not privileged are stigmatizing.

For example, social scientists have a name for the practice of having biological children with more than one partner – “multiple-partner fertility.” Letiecq wondered whether anyone would want to identify with the term “multiple-partner fertility.” People of privilege – rich, white men such as Trump, for instance – who practice multiple-partner fertility sometimes find that their families are described in softer ways; for example, as “blended.” Or, their siring of multiple children by multiple partners just isn’t mentioned.

Far worse than the label “multiple-partner fertility” is “broken family.” As Bethany Letiecq told Meredith Landry in an interview for the Family Story blog:

“…let’s stop calling families “broken.” Families are dynamic, resilient, and are working hard to adjust to inequalities and overcome adversities – so many of which are social made.”

2. Studying problems behaviors mostly in families that are not the most privileged

Some of the most problematic behaviors that occur in families, such as intimate partner violence, occur in all kinds of families. Wealth, education, whiteness, and fancy neighborhoods are no guarantees of a safe home environment. And yet, studies of violence sometimes focus on poor people, people with lower levels of education, or people of color. Or, if all sorts of people are included, it is the members of the stigmatized groups who are highlighted.

The same is true of behaviors or family forms that family scientists have characterized as problematic (regardless of whether they actually are), such as multiple-partner fertility or single-parent families. Many wealthy, educated, white men have biological children with several different partners, and many well-off, well-educated, white women are raising children on their own, but they are not the ones who are studied most persistently or described as social problems.

3. Highlighting strengths and ignoring weaknesses when studying privileged families, and the opposite for other families

“For too long,” Letiecq notes, “family science has failed to document, describe, and detail the strengths of diverse and complex family systems” – basically, any family types other than the married-with-children variety. The nuclear family is the standard and is assumed to be good; the search is on for the problems with all the other kinds of families.

In my decades of studying single and married people, I’ve found the same thing. Researchers have focused on what is expected to be good in the lives of married people and bad in the lives of singles, ignoring the flip sides. So, for example, they ask how much money people have (married people, with their unearned financial advantages, usually have more), but not whether they get to save or spend money as they wish. They ask people about the time they are spending with a romantic partner, but not whether they are getting the amount of time to themselves that they want.

4. Failing to recognize factors of great significance

When researchers compare privileged families to devalued ones, they sometimes find differences. In the U.S., for example, the children of single parents sometimes do less well in some ways than the children of two married parents. (In some other countries, the differences are smaller or nonexistent and sometimes even favor the children of single parents.) The social scientists doing those studies want to say that the children of single parents are having a harder time because they have one parent raising them instead of two. They know they have to rule out other factors.

For example, single-parent families often have less money than married-parent families, so the researchers need to demonstrate that their findings aren’t just about money. Often, they cannot do so. Results sometimes show that if the single-parent families had the same financial resources as the married-parent families, the children would do equally well.

The problem, Letiecq pointed out, is with the kinds of factors that researchers typically investigate. They often look at factors such as income or education, and those are important. But it is rare for them to consider factors that may be just as significant. For example, are the children in single-parent families more likely to experience racism or classism or discrimination than the children in married-parent families? What about racial or ethnic segregation? Maybe, when the children of single parents seem to be struggling more than the children of married parents, it is not because they are being raised by just one parent but because they are being stereotyped, stigmatized, marginalized, or treated in discriminatory ways.

5. Suggesting solutions that sometimes (a) pathologize individuals and blame the victims; (b) disregard powerful structural and institutional forces; and (c) ignore the role of privileged groups in perpetuating their own advantages

When people in families other than nuclear ones are shown to be having a hard time in some way, the recommended solutions often focus on the individuals in those families and what they are doing wrong. A popular suggestion is that they are making bad choices, and if only they would make better choices, their lives would improve.

But as Letiecq points out:

“For too long, family science has been deficient for failing to delineate how colonization, structural racism, sexism, and heterosexism, economic and family marginalization, and resultant traumas and poor health outcomes may have caused or produced familial challenges and disadvantage.”

Also overlooked are the ways in which members of privileged families perpetuate their own unearned advantages and stigmatize people in other families. There should be systematic research on this. Instead, what I have to offer are some suggestive anecdotes:

• Amy Andrada, a single mother, was upset when the kids at school were ignoring her son and the other parents were standoffish with her. She tried a simple experiment – wearing what looked like a wedding ring – and everything changed.
• On Twitter, a teacher demonstrated that on the very first day of school, she is already expecting the worst from the children of single parents: “As a school teacher, there’s no question in my mind that children of married parents have a huge advantage. You can pick them out in the class on the first day: by and large secure, calm, and dressed appropriately. Don’t ask me why.”
• A high school student and daughter of a single mother wanted to do some research on families. She found “many articles that stereotype children of single parents as delinquents and failures.” She wrote to me to ask why that was happening.

The Challenges of Taking Family Privilege Seriously

Bethany Letiecq’s article, “Surfacing family privilege and supremacy in family science,” had a subtitle: “Towards justice for all.” Understanding family privilege and doing what it takes to dismantle it is critical to that great goal of justice for all.

But these are fraught times, especially for considerations of privilege and conversations that include race. Mention any such issues and the blow-back can be fierce. “You’re playing identity politics,” the privileged ones will cry. Or they will come up with some dismissive, disdainful put-down about political correctness.

You know the quote, if not the author:

“When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) For links to previous columns, click here.]