Coming Home

ELINOR OCHS AND BELINDA CAMPOS

This chapter is the first of several in this volume to document parents and children coming home from work and school and their challenges and triumphs in forging connections as a family. The concept "coming home" is filled with sentimentality in American society, and adages that capture these feelings abound: home is where the heart is; home is where one belongs; homeward bound. Yet these adages are misleading in assuming that familiarity and belonging are rewards that naturally await homebound working adults and children. Rather, such rewards are the result of an interactional endeavor that begins the instant that family members arrive home. Seemingly trivial behaviors like greeting or noticing a returning family member turn out to be consequential for opening lines of communication and nourishing parent-child and couple relationships.

In his classic article on human interaction the sociologist Emanuel Schegloff argued that ostensibly mundane routines such as an exchange of greetings actually require a great deal of coordination and are best understood as complex interactional achievements. You might imagine that people who do not know each other well or who see each other rarely may have to pay attention to how they initiate and respond to each other's social overtures when they meet. But what happens when parents and children and couples meet one another on a daily basis after returning home from work and school? Is it also an effort for them to greet and reengage one another after going their separate ways during the day? The message of this chapter is, yes, initiating face-to-face social interaction between family members at the end of the work- and school day demands a degree of cooperation that is not always forthcoming in different families or in the same family from one day to the next or on the same day between one family member and another. Working parents may be warmly welcomed home by some members of their family but treated as if they were invisible by others. When CELF working parents arrived home, they often encountered family members who were content to see them but distracted by their own concerns. Garnering attention and reconnecting as a family was not a matter of course; rather, at times it was quite an undertaking.

To get a sense of the vicissitudes of family reunions at the end of the day, we invite you to look at what transpired among members of the Gruvich family on two separate days after work and school. On one of these days Ray Gruvich had already arrived home from work and was sorting through the mail when his ten-year-old son, Tim, burst through the door calling out, "Hi Dad!" Ray asked, "How are you::: kiddo?," and Tim replied, "Fine!" Ray was buoyant: "Excellent. Good." They embraced. Next through the door was six-year-old Becky, followed by her mother, Beth. Ray approached them, greeting Becky with a long "Hello:::!," a kiss, and the observation, "You found your jacket, huh?" While Becky clamored for more attention, Ray and Beth greeted and kissed each other. The family had successfully reunited at the end of the day.

Lest we think that this twenty-first-century family comes straight out of a 1950s TV series, let's observe how the Gruvich family welcomed each other on another day that week. On this day Ray's parents had picked up the children from school and brought them to their house. When Ray arrived at his parents' home after work, Tim and Becky were glued to the TV set watching a cartoon. While the reunion between Ray and his children began well, with Tim embracing his father and reporting on homework progress, Becky remained transfixed by the television and did not acknowledge her father. Even when Ray opened his arms for a hug and called, "Becky," she merely flashed him a nanosecond's glance. Ray then exclaimed, "Ah!," wryly noting his daughter's minimal acknowledgment of his presence. This lament prodded Becky to say, "Hi," but she did so while watching the cartoon. At this point Ray dropped his arms in exasperation, sighing, "Well, hi to you too," to deaf ears. And then an argument ensued. Ray asked Becky about her homework; she mumbled something, continuing to be entranced by the television; Ray pulled away the bottle of soda she had in her hand; reaching for the bottle, Becky protested, "No::! that's mi::ne!" Holding on to the bottle, Ray insisted, "Talk to me," until Becky resentfully responded to a stream of questions reminiscent of an interrogation: "Did you finish your homework?" "Who checked your homework?" "Is that your trash?" "When are you going to throw it away?" "I'll be back to check, okay?" Shortly after this rebuff, Ray's wife, Beth, arrived and greeted the children but overlooked him. As she passed him to help her mother-in-law in the kitchen, Ray twice called out "Hey!" to catch her attention, then entreated, "Say hi first, then you can go help." Beth retraced her tracks to affectionately greet her husband.

The Gruvich family illustrates the challenges that working parents in the CELF households in Los Angeles encountered when reconnecting with the rest of the family after a day apart. Parents and children knew little about what happened in each other's lives during the day, including plans that affected the rest of the family. The first moments after returning home were imbued with parental anticipation of affection and information that was not always forthcoming.

This daily pattern of being apart for at least six hours a day during the work- and school week contrasts with family life in a number of other societies, where school-aged children are isolated from family members for shorter periods. For example, many rural Samoan children attend school on the edge of the village close to their homes. While some parents work in the capital, other adult family members remain in the village. The path to some of the family plantations runs past the schoolhouse, allowing family members on their way to or from cultivation to overhear children's recitations or relay information if necessary. Children return home at midday and immediately become immersed in a thicket of family tasks. In such communities family members encounter each other intermittently throughout the day and are integrated through cooperative activities. If a child or spouse is...