American Families
The children are leaving for school just as father grabs his briefcase and is off to work. Meanwhile, mother finishes clearing the breakfast dishes and embarks on her day filled with PTA responsibilities, household chores, and preparation of a well-balanced dinner to be enjoyed by all when father arrives home promptly at 6:00. This would have to be a scene from "Father Knows Best", "Leave It to Beaver" or that of a family during or before the sixties. Only a small minority of contemporary families fit this mold of being a "nuclear" family today. Until the 1960's most Americans shared a common set of beliefs about family life; a family should consist of a husband and a wife living together with their children. The father being the head of the family, earns the family's income, and gives his name to his wife and children. Today, the United States exhibits a pattern of attachments and disruptions in marriages and family structure, including single-parent families and such high rates of divorce that are certainly stressful for nation's developing children and adolescents, leading the American family and the nation's future to a state of crisis.It is starling that whether through their parents' divorce o
Smith, Brain. "FAMILY: Children in Crisis" Fortune, Vol. 116, Issue 3, Aug 95, p42, p6. No scale can measure the deepest wounds of divorce for children, and impressive recent research suggests they are wounds that never heal. Psychologist Judith Wallerstein, who for 15 years has intimately followed 130 children of divorce, was shocked by the extent of the harm she found, not just right after the divorce but years later. Wallerstein, co-author of Second Chances: Men, Women, & Children a Decade after Divorce, had at first assumed that an unhappy marriage must be unhappy for children too: While they would feel pain at the divorce, they would also feel relief and would be just fine as time passed and their parents grew happier. Not at all. She was taken aback by the intensity of the pain and fear that engulfed these kids when their parents split up. "The first reaction is one of pure terror," says Wallerstein. Though most were middle-class children of executives and professionals, they worried who was going to feed and care for them. Preschool children feared that now that one parent had abandoned the other, both would abandon the child, leaving him unprotected in a scary world. But it is reasonable to ask - are the bad consequences of divorce really caused by divorce itself or by the family disharmony that precipitated the split? Even though most were bright, after their parents' divorce, many of the boys in Wallerstein's study started having learning and behavior trouble in school; in adolescence and young adulthood a significant number began to drift. By young adulthood, both boys and girls from divorced families were having equal difficulty forming intimate, loving relations. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, they has been a steady increase in the number of children from single-parent families resulting from divorce having learning disabilities and emotional and behavioral problems, since 1990 (Congressman). Whitehead, Barbara. Institute of American Values Publication. "Changing Martial And Family Patters: A test of the post - Modern perspective." Social Perspective, 1998, Vol. 31. Issue 3, p381.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Health Statistics, Leave Beaver, Decade Divorce, Princeton University, Glendon Middle-and, Washington University, University Pennsylvania, American Values, American Families, Judith Wallerstein, divorced families, single-parent families, center health statistics, winter/ spring, family life, national center, center health, george washington, children feel, health statistics, national center health, institute american values, parents' divorce,
Approximate Word count = 1833
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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