The Working Single Mother Primary Care vs Secondary Care
Comparing its structure and function as it was in 1960 with what it had become in 1990 can highlight the dramatic changes in the American family. Until 1960 most Americans shared a common set of beliefs about family life; family should consist of a husband and wife living together with their children. The father should be the head of the family, earn the family's income, and give his name to his wife and children. The mother's main tasks were to support and enable her husband's goals, guide her children's development, look after the home, and set a moral tone for the family. Marriage was an enduring obligation for better or worse and this was due much to a conscious effort to maintain strong ties with children. The husband and wife jointly coped with stresses. As parents, they had an overriding responsibility for the well being of their children during the early years-until their children entered school, they were almost solely responsible. Even later, it was the parents who had the primary duty of guiding their children's education and discipline. Of course, even in 1960, families recognized the difficulty of converting these ideals into reality. Still, they devoted immense effort to approximating them in practice.
Giovannoni, J. M., & Becerra, R. M. Defining child abuse. New York: Free Press, 1996. Conclusively, it is difficult to blame mothers for their inability to develop and maintain relationships with their children as strongly as in previous decades. The pressures of a full-time career coupled with full-time mothering may be too much for anyone to handle wholly and effectively. It is for this reason that responsible parents seek the assistance of day care centers, professional baby-sitters, and so forth. But it is also for this reason that the relationship that exists between mother and child today has changed so drastically. As it turned out, the mother, who worked only minimally--was the parent most frequently successful in spending the most time with her children. Consequently, youngsters were almost always around a parental figure -- they were well-disciplined and often very close with the maternal parent who cooked for them, played with them, and saw them off to and home from school each day. Survey research shows a great decrease in the proportion of women favoring large families, an upsurge in their assertiveness about meeting personal needs, and an attempt by women to balance their needs with those of their children and the men in their lives (Burgess & Conger 1164). A clear and increasing majority of women believe that both husband and wife should be able to work, should have roughly similar opportunities, and should share household responsibilities and the tasks of child rearing. A majority of mothers of preschool children now work outside the home. A growing minority of young married women, often highly educated and career oriented, are choosing not to have any children and have little interest in children's issues-yet one more indication of the dramatic transformation of American families that has been taking place in recent decades (Bousha & Twentyman 106). Previous to the age of the working mother, it might have been said that children were often a bit spoiled by their mother's constant presence. All of the attention that they needed was there before school, after school, on the weekends and so forth. This created a strong dependency upon the maternal parent; relationships were overtly familiar and the bond between mother and child was more often a strong one than today. An old cliche of that time was the expression from mother to child "just wait 'till your father gets home." In many cases today, just waiting for mother to come home may carry with it the same intimidation. And wi
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Approximate Word count = 1715
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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