Revealing Conversations

Oren, 7 1/2, is eating dinner with his parents and younger sister. He recalls in dramatic tones the time when, as a toddler, he mistook a hot chile pepper for a pickle. “Wasn’t it funny?” Oren asks his mother. “You thought that thing was a pickle, and I ate it.”

“No, that wasn’t funny,” Mother replies. She looks at Father, who nods. “I thought it was a green bean.”

“Mom thought it was a bean,” Oren tells sister Jodie, “and I ate it, and I burned to death.”

Mother: “You burnt your mouth....” “Your fault! Your fault!” says Oren, reaching over and pinching his mother’s cheeks with both hands, hard.

“It was my fault,” she says. “Ow, that really hurts, honey.” * “Your fault,” says Oren. “I get to do whatever I want to do once.”

*

This is a story about the American Family at Dinner. More precisely, it is about what Elinor Ochs, a renowned UCLA professor of linguistic anthropology, has found goes on while we eat, and what that says about who we are.

“Dinner can be a wonderful moment of the day for families,” says Ochs, whose revolutionary work in creating the new academic field of “language socialization” led to her MacArthur Foundation “genius” award last year. To her, family dinners mirror society: they are part quasi-religious ritual, part passion play, part family night court. They can be as important as, say, Head Start in contributing to a child’s success in school. But her findings also suggest dinner conversation is often a fun-house mirror. True, they reflect our burger-and-fries democratic habits as a society, but they also magnify the reality that America is child-centered and male-dominated.

Ochs has been videotaping, analyzing and writing about the American middle-class family, frequently at dinner time, for more than two decades. By her description, for many families, dinner vaguely resembles the taking of communion:

Table setting. Father and/or mother in set places of honor; fork, knife, napkin and glass in particular arrangement. Everything and everyone has a place, creating a sense of structure and soothing stability.

food.There’s a method and a sequence to the meal, with foods that are holy (steak, perhaps) or prohibited (candy). Some families begin with prayer; dessert always comes at the end. All but the youngest family members have assigned jobs for setting the table and cleaning up. Out of this tableau emerges a family pecking order and value system.

story. As we unload our burdens to each other each evening, says Ochs, a mythology is created. Family members collaborate, make judgments and help each other devise strategies for dealing with people outside the family. By creating “us versus them,” “right versus wrong” and a sense of personal history, a family unit emerges.

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Ochs, 54, is a quiet, dark-haired beauty who cringes when people ask her to solve what’s “wrong” with American life. While some people may fear that she is some Family Values politician, she tells them, “I am a scientist,” stopping the conversation cold.

She began examining the American dinner table by default. After the birth of her twin sons David and Toby in 1970, Ochs was the first to videotape the communication between twins. But she abandoned the research when Toby died five years later during heart surgery. She later remarried and gave birth to another son, Marco, and her attention focused on home and family in a new way. Ochs’ family dinners became more elaborate, and she began studying that nightly event across America, finding it especially valuable when viewed through the prism of language socialization, whose purpose is to explain how language and culture interact.

In Oren’s conversation with his mother in the “Chile Pepper” incident, most people might observe a bratty kid exploiting past pain, but Ochs sees three typical American scenarios.

Scenario 1: Establishing the Family Pecking Order.

Just about every family has a “Chile Pepper” story, an epic moment that is played and replayed in theme and variation over the years until every fault is mined and every tear runs dry. The story repeats itself, says Ochs, until each member reaches an acceptable version of the truth and understands his or her place in the family.

In “Chile Pepper,” in which the names have been changed, Oren seeks the “truth” about a childhood accident: Was eating the pepper when he was 2 1/2 actually “funny”? He wants to know whether enough time has passed to make the event less catastrophic. If it’s funny to others, he can be done with it, too. However, Patricia, Oren’s mother, emphatically tells him, no, it is still not funny. It’s been five years but she still is unable to laugh at the incident. Oren is exasperated at her answer. He pinches his mother, hard, screaming, “Your fault! Your fault!” He vows he will hurt her as she once hurt him.

This raises the more trenchant cultural question: Why is the boy so insolent? Ochs and Carolyn Taylor, an assistant professor of speech communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, videotaped Oren’s family and 19 other two-parent middle-class families, each with children age 5 and over. They analyzed conversational patterns at more than 100 separate narratives to see what family members talked about, who introduced the subjects, who most typically became the object of attention, blame and so on. What emerged from research in the late 1980s might be called the Natural Pecking Order of American life: Father typically blames Mother; Mother blames Father; Father and Mother both blame children; older children blame younger children. Above all else, Mother blames herself.

According to their findings, Oren is an example of a child who feels free to brazenly find fault with a parent. This propensity, Ochs says, does not come from out of the blue; it is taught by example. In Oren’s family, the father, Dan, is critical of everyone; he is videotaped second-guessing his wife’s acceptance of what he believes are unnecessary gifts of dresses from his mother and mother-in-law. He accuses his son of lying about innocent matters, such as how many kids are in his camp group. He snidely questions his daughter Jodie when she tells him about getting a tuberculosis shot. No wonder Oren feels safe rebuking mother.

Scenario 2: The Guilty Mom Syndrome.

If Oren feels free to blame his mother for letting him eat a pepper, she has already beaten him to it. By analyzing dinner-table talk, Ochs discovers that the Guilty Mom Syndrome derives from yet a second pecking order, one of personal responsibility. In her study, American children are least likely to ‘fess up to their wrongdoings. Fathers will sometimes acknowledge responsibility for their actions, but usually lay most of the responsibility on Mother. Mothers not only accept blame, they also voluntarily place themselves in jeopardy by telling stories in which they are at fault.

In “Chile Pepper,” Patricia has yet to forgive herself. Just before Ochs’ camera records Oren pinching his mother, Patricia incredibly instigates the episode yet again by serving her family guacamole with chiles in it. Dan detects the taste and confronts his wife. Patricia instinctively lies, mumbling, “no,” she didn’t add chiles. Caught, she voluntarily gives Dan the guacamole’s ingredients, chiles included. The whole family comes unhinged: Jodie begins to choke. Oren gasps for breath, playing dead. “I ate hot salsa and chile?” Oren says, feigning a faint. And that’s when Oren asks, well, was it funny or not? Patricia had brought it all on herself!

Scenario 3: Perpetuating the Power of Dad.

Where was his father while Oren was pinching his mother? The videotape shows that he was oblivious to his son’s antics. He instead is talking to daughter Jodie, trying to persuade her to let him eat her dinner roll. Even so, as father, he is a central force. Not only had he raised the chile issue earlier during dinner, but Ochs’ record of “eye gaze” movements shows that his wife keeps looking at her husband as she speaks, playing out her guilt for his benefit and attempting to gain his forgiveness.

Ochs and Taylor call this father-centered behavior the “Father Knows Best” dynamic. “I give their research to all my incoming students,” says anthropologist Bambi Schieffelin of New York University. “It opens their eyes.”

Eye-opening indeed is the documentation that, despite two generations of feminism and two-wage-earner families, much of what goes on at the family dinner table still perpetuates the power of the father.

Not only is “tell your father about . . .” the mantra of the nightly meal, but almost every bit of dialogue is for the father’s information. Moreover, each scenario places the father in the role of family judge.

Why do women let men get away with it? The fact is women often invite their husband’s involvement by second-guessing their own actions, then asking, “What do you think?”

Says Ochs, “Men pass judgment over a far greater range of topics than women do. They criticize their wives’ conduct on child-care, meal preparation, even their careers. Men keep their own lives well off limits from such critiques.” Wives typically ask for it, Ochs says, granting their husbands “problematizing rights.” “Men as fathers and husbands scrutinize and problematize everything.”

“What was your own childhood family dinner like?” I ask Ochs.

“I never said a word,” she answers.

Ochs grew up in Annapolis, Md., where she, older brother Max and mother Virginia, an artist, were enthralled by her brilliant father, Irving. He was a doctor, scholar and competitive boxer raised among the street gangs of New York’s Far Rockaway neighborhood. He and a chemist friend, Preston Veltman, developed VoSol, a prescription antibacterial used to treat swimmer’s ear. It is still sold today.

In his Baltimore medical practice, Irving rarely ate lunch. So dinner began at 6 sharp, “and you had to be there,” says Max. Irving dominated the dinner-time talk, regaling the family with stories about the patient who swallowed a fish hook, or the one who got a bug in his ear. Irving had the last word.

Max was Irving’s golden child, grilled relentlessly about his grades. Elinor was ignored. Max, who teaches high school history in Maryland, recalls his sister as a quiet girl who refused to eat carrots or sweet potatoes or any food that was orange. Their mother was afraid to speak. “Just ask your father. I might say the wrong thing,” she’d say.

“No one expected anything from me,” Elinor recalls. She dreamed about becoming a folk singer, like Joan Baez, a distant cousin by marriage on her mother’s side, or folk singer Phil Ochs, a cousin on her father’s side.

“Elinor was smarter than we all knew,” Max says. “We all sold her short.”

As an academic, Ochs’ theories of collaborative storytelling and inner “dialogue” helped split the field of linguistics. “Pure” linguists are still arguing that language is biological science; “social linguists,” like Ochs, are saying that we construct our language from our culture. The MacArthur Foundation praised Ochs for work that bridges four major disciplines: sociology, psychology, linguistics and anthropology. In their book “Constructing Panic,” she and co-author Lisa Capps, a UC Berkeley psychologist, seek to show that even some illnesses have their roots in culture. They listened to the secret stories of agoraphobics who tell themselves why the world is unsafe. Ochs has since been studying autistic children, who, she says, are not so far removed from social life as some believe.

Ochs is “a genius,” says John Schumann, chair of the UCLA applied linguistics department. “Elinor knows where to look, where to point her video camera and what setting to study to find the most important insights. And what she gives us in return is a window on society.”

“She’s influenced the whole field of linguistics by recording women, men, kids in their natural environment,” says Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University, whose bestsellers include “You Just Don’t Understand.” “She really sees what’s happening.”

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Ochs started investigating the guilt-tripping American mother nearly 30 years ago with her groundbreaking doctoral field work on the relationship between gender and culture among the Malagasy-speakers in Madagascar. Ochs lived for a year in Madagascar with her then-husband, Ed Keenan, now head of the UCLA linguistics department. They met at George Washington University, where Ochs received her bachelor’s degree in 1966. Keenan is a “pure” linguist, but Elinor was doing original work on culture and society right from the beginning, says professor Dell Hymes, who supervised her 1974 doctoral thesis when he taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

For two years, beginning in 1978, Ochs did extensive field work in Samoa. There, she and New York University anthropologist Schieffelin demonstrated that “baby talk” is not universal, but is built into Western culture. Many people were skeptical, Schieffelin says in an interview. “They think that the minute we were out of the room and turned off our recorders, Samoan mothers start to coo.”

The baby-talk study was explosive. Baby talk, Ochs says, is part of the whole reversal of power between American mothers and their children. As a linguist hears it, baby talk is the high-pierced, flat singsong tone that is almost universally used by those who feel they must accommodate those with power. In Western Samoa, those same vocal qualities are used when Samoans talk to government officials. “Usually the voice of accommodation is used by those who have no power toward those who do,” Ochs has written. In America, the powerless person is the mother; the power-holder is the child.

Her baby-talk work established Ochs as an international scholar, a recipient of numerous grants and fellowships. Following a lectureship in Cambridge, Ochs came to USC in 1974 and continued her work in mother-child conversation. In 1990 she moved from USC, then a stronghold of “pure” linguistics, to UCLA, where she helped create a social linguistics program now regarded as first-tier in the nation. She arrived when anthropology was turning away from an emphasis on “native cultures” toward “inner” research on American society. The core of her work, you might say, is language and power: Who has it, who doesn’t.

*

The implication of the power reversal between American children and their mothers is enormous. As Ochs sees it, baby talk is part of a syndrome of subservience among American mothers. How different it is in Samoa, Ochs says, where mothers hold their babies facing out from their chests, ready to fit into the world. In Samoa, when mother and child do a project, each praises the other. When a middle-class American mother and child do a puzzle together, the child gets praised even if the mother does all the work.

This habitual accommodation by mother to the needs of the child continues at the American dinner table. As Ochs reports, Mother is the overriding initiator of all dinner talk. Father and kids would hardly talk to one another if Mother didn’t say, “Tell your father.” Mothers do the talking, the inquiring. But too frequently at dinner’s end, they wind up like Oren’s mother, feeling guilty or bad.

If the family dinner table provides the best moments of home life, that’s not the whole story. Ochs, married to Italian-born linguist Alessandro Duranti, her colleague at UCLA, makes no secret of her preference for the food-loving, convivial aspects of the Italian family dinner. In her 1996 study, “Socializing Tastes,” Ochs and Italian scholars Clotil de Pontecorvo and Alessandra Fasulo of the University of Rome compared videotapes of American and Italian families at the dinner table. She found that, in the way Americans talk about food, in our dread of carcinogens and fat, we see food more as medicine. Italians like food because it tastes good.

All this begs the question: What are we to make of dinner hour in our homes? Must we feel guilty if we eat out at McDonald’s, serve everyone fish sticks or eat together in front of the tube?

Absolutely not. “The way we live our lives is continuously shaped by the way in which we tell our lives,” Ochs says. What’s important is not what we eat, she says, but how we eat together. And that the story goes on.