mic writings. Television, music, magazines, novels and the Internet all record and promote this acceleration of change.

Before the 1950s, families in America consisted of not only the "nuclear family" (father, mother, and children) but also the extended fa

Even in so called traditional families today, the pressures from this fast paced cultural cyclone we call America society are changing the dynamic make up of the family unit. Where as in times of old, the mothers generally stayed at home and managed household matters such as raising the children, tending to their needs of food and clothing. The vast majority of mothers today must also work outside of the home in order to contribute to the financial needs of today's household. Present day Americans love their luxury items and gadgets and must find a way to pay for them. The father today is hard pressed to keep up with being the sole breadwinner when the costs of living are so high. What this has created is the "Latch key kid" syndrome with children essentially raising themselves from the hours after school until the time their parents drag themselves home. During this four or five hours of unmonitored down time for the children, there is always access to the great molder of mi!

ded to nuclear. In the 1970's through the present single parent households have become not only much more common, they have become an acceptable family structure. It used to be somewhat of a stigma if you were a child of a broken family, " Only slightly more than one in four marriages ended in divorce during the 1950s. Very few young people spend any extended period of time in a nonfamily setting" (Coontz 59). "Ninety percent of all the households in the country were families in the 1950s, in comparison with only 71% by 1990" (Coontz 60). With the loosening of America's so called moral standards from the late 1960s to the present, there have also been a greater acceptance of alternative families. The stigma placed on homosexual lifestyle's has relaxed somewhat introducing publicly same sex unions with adopted children. This is a new phenomenon, which is still under societies microscope to understand if there is an effect on these children's development. Before the civil rights!

movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the occurrence of interracial marriages and mixed families was almost non existent. In America, today there is an ever-increasing amount of families of mixed racial backgrounds. Some might say this is the epitome of the melting pot of the United States. Another type of alternative family unit, which is reaching epidemic proportions, is that of an unwed mother and her illegitimate child or children. Charles Murray states in his essay " The Coming White Underclass" that " In 1991, 1.2 million children were born to unmarried mothers, within a hair of 30 percent of all live births. How high is 30 percent? About four percent points higher than the black illegitimacy rate in the early 1960s that motivated Daniel Patrick Moynihan to write his famous memorandum on the break down of the black family" (81). He goes on to state that this increase in illegitimate children contributes to many of societies ills, such as drug use, droves of able b!

day's medical advances, it is becoming common place for older women to have their eggs removed, fertilized outside the body, and returned to the womb. Without these a

Some common words found in the essay are:
Patrick Moynihan, Dependent Children, , Coontz Stephanie, Jerry Springer, White Underclass, family unit, extended family, father mother, unwed mothers, Charles Murray, family units, american family, mother children, 30 percent, 1950s 1960s, alternative families, father mother children,
Approximate Word count = 2101
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)