Virginia E. Rutter is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Framingham State University (MA), where she continues to teach classes on families and methods. She’s a senior scholar at the Council on Contemporary Families. She has received both top teaching and scholarship honors at FSU and was a statewide union leader focused on transparency in universities and unions as well as on equity for adjunct faculty. Virginia is the lead author of The Gender of Sexuality and The Love Test, and lead editor of Families as They Really Are, Third Edition. In 2022, she left her full-time faculty position of 16 years at FSU and moved to Washington, DC, where her partner lives. 

Families as They Really Are is a brilliant title. I’m an editor of the third edition, and I didn’t make up the title, so I can say so. It says efficiently what this book is about—and what sociology, psychology, family studies, and education students want to study and discuss. Students dig in, perhaps for the first time, when they have the chance to examine and analyze new stories about this thing—family —that has been like the air they breathe. The title is a play on historian Stephanie Coontz’s paradigm-shifting 1991 book, The Way We Never Were: The American Family and the Nostalgia Trap. Like Coontz’s classic, the focus is on debunking myths, elevating reliable research, and activating readers through lively writing, all with the aim to empower students.  

How I teach families 
When I started teaching Sociology of Families at Framingham State University 15 years ago, an earlier version of this book gave me the inspiration for how to organize the class. “How do we know what we know?” the first section asks. I love all parts of the book equally, but for me this section stands out.  

Students come to my class from many different backgrounds, and no topic has more hidden assumptions and myths than families. Therefore, I do not shy away from teaching my students epistemology. How else will they be able to think critically about knowledge presented to them? Or how to produce knowledge when they start their research methods classes? All chapters in the book have embedded the recognition of today’s remarkable struggle with the notion of “truth.”  

The call for critical thinking begins with sociologist Philip Cohen’s chapter, titled “How Do We Tell What’s True?” and psychologist Philip Cowan’s chapter, titled “When Is a Relationship between Facts a Causal One?” While the topic is methods, the examples across these chapters range from family values wars to parenting strategies to domestic violence to racism in family research. Sociologist Linda Burton, for example, writes about qualitative methods and family scholar Deadric Williams and colleagues ground the work in Critical Race Theory with their chapter, titled “Racism, Family Structure, and Black Families.” Using multiple perspectives, the readings help students complicate simplistic claims about family structure, family functioning, and social policy. Later in the book, authors share their relationship to their topics—and how they developed their critical perspectives. This gives teacher and students a chance to return to the theme of epistemology. Adina Nack writes from personal and research perspectives about sexually transmitted infections (Chapter 17). Georgiann Davis (Chapter 29) shows how to question knowledge claims and reminds readers of the costly impact of misinformation, in this case as it relates to intersex children and their families.

In chapter after chapter, students learn about new topics—and they grow in their ability to see how the construction of knowledge is elemental to the case. They begin to ask the hard questions themselves. In my online class they are required to do this. At the end of each discussion post, they conclude with a “puzzle question”—one that might be hard to answer—and they must offer their “provisional response.” This highlights students’ original ideas and helps assure they are asking interesting questions.  

In my families class—as well as my upper-level childhood and adolescence class—history is the next way forward. Using history early in the course illustrates what we mean when we say that families are socially constructed. It focuses students on larger contexts and moves students away from the myths and blind spots that can dominate individual families—not to mention the entire study of families. I’m particularly excited to teach a new chapter, “Labor Unions and Families: A Brief History” by law and policy scholar Shawn Fremstad, because it reflects students’ increased interest in work, labor, and economic justice.  

After epistemology and history, my course can go in several different directions, depending upon the format and length of the semester. Students value the “In Other Words” articles, where they find novel applications of the ideas. These are 33 very brief articles paired with most of the book’s chapters. The Council on Contemporary Families research reports and Society Pages blog posts pull no punches; they are direct, personal, and frank to help facilitate student engagement. Together with the chapters, they are a lively basis for class discussions and discussion-board posts. I routinely hear students talking about the pieces before class even starts. 

The chapters themselves are also refreshed and focused on the questions students have about families. In this book of 40 original chapters, written exclusively for this volume, 17 are completely new and 17 more have been intensively revised. Chapters were written and edited to be super readable to undergraduate students while still carefully reflecting current knowledge, perspectives, and controversies. Often, I will invite students for their final paper to select a set of chapters and articles from the book that we have not had time to cover and connect it to the topics and chapters we have studied; the book has helped to produce a learning experience that means that they are ready to find a clear theme.  

That fundamental skill—students finding a theme across topics and the multiple disciplines covered in the book—is one of the best fruits of teaching with Families as They Really Are. It means students can think for themselves while staying grounded by the chapters they’ve studied. Throughout the course, students feel challenged—and validated. At the beginning they say “I didn’t know…” or “I can relate….” But when you ask my students a few weeks after the course has concluded what is their top takeaway (which I often do), students typically say that there’s no such thing as a normal family or an ideal family. And a good portion of students talk about how we know what we know being just as important as what we know about family diversity and family change.