Tiffany Porter, health and diversity specialist in University Counseling Services, recently wrote a chapter for the book Handbook on Race-Ethnicity and Gender in Psychology.
Porter’s chapter, titled “Parenting, Ethnicity, Race and Gender: Deconstructing the Nuclear Family Archetype,” illustrates contextual complexities and the relevance of integrative diversity associated with parenting, gender and race-ethnicity. The chapter also reviews how the culturally constructed archetype of the nuclear family as a standard of comparison within psychology literature, research and practice has shifted over the past two generations toward “modern families,” who create family identities of choice.