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, th

Gembrowski, Susan. "A Portrait of Families Today." Los Angeles Times, 22 Oct. 1992 : 3.

It is unavoidable that those mothers who work simply are not there as much for their children. In fact, in many cases the relationship between the contemporary mother and her children is similar to the age-old traditional role of the father and his children. Often, the mother is indeed a strong-minded disciplinarian in the evening after work-but she is very frequently not much more than that. To very children, care is a nursery or some school of others with caregivers. To the pre-adolescent youth, care is either a baby-sitter, nanny, or just phone call to 'mom' after work--if even that much. In some of the more positive cases, this creates an early sense of responsibility and independence for the child. But more commonly, it is known to invite poor behavior, recklessness, and even accidents at home when the mother is not there. Some children become despondent; others grow adamantly rebellious. But regardless of patternistic character, they all reportedly exhibit a diminished sense of relationship with their mother. With regard to interpersonal signals, today's working mothers are unlikely to respond to child signals and more likely to initiate spontaneously nonreciprocal types of interaction, such as requests and demands (Aragona & Eyeberg 599). I infer that this comes in part from the pressures and stresses of their own busy work schedules (plus they are still usually left with a plethora of time-consuming "mothering" responsibilities) as well as from their own diminished relationship with the child(ren). My readings strongly indicate that mothers who work all day often become almost unavoidably neglectful in that they fail to perceive, and attend to, child signals and information about child needs. Evidently, the underlying process in such cases is often one of prematurely ending the processing of information about feelings. That is, in cases where mothers are consistently withdrawn, psychologically unavailable, and/or stressed over work, it is proposed that parental style of processing information is typified by preconscious exclusion from perception of information that elicits affect (Giovannoni 14). Such information is of crucial importance to human functioning as it provides the earliest (both developmentally and situationally) interpretation and prescription for response (Zajonc, 1998). Later developing cognitively generated information and processing interaction with affect to produce increasingly differentiated, sophistic

Some common words found in the essay are:
Care Comparing, Egeland Erickson, Burgess Conger, Aragona Eyeberg, Bousha Twentyman, Eyeberg Neglected, Twentyman Mother-child, Child Development, Conger Family, Angeles Times, mother child, egeland erickson, mother children, child development, burgess conger, husband wife, child signals, responsible parents, children course, aragona eyeberg,
Approximate Word count = 1723
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)