Can the American Family Be Saved? : A Study in the Evolution of Family Life in America
The American family and the way its members interact have evolved throughout the history of this nation. As we examine this evolution it becomes evident that over the past several decades this evolution has accelerated and there has been a dramatic shift in the dynamics of the roles of the members within the American family. Where as the majority of American families still consist of the traditional make up of a father, a mother and children, there are now an increasing amount of variations upon this theme which have become accepted as recognizable family units. Even in traditional families comprised of father, mother, and siblings, the roles of these individuals have changed with the invention of new technologies and economies. With these new roles come different relationships the family unit has between their greater communities and political entities they are interdependent with. All of these changes have been well documented by the media in the form of art as well as acade!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
odied people dropping out of the labor force, casual violence etc. He then states that we must work to reverse this trend through the following methods, "To restore the rewards and penalties of the marriage does not require social engineering. Rather, it requires that the state stop interfering with the natural forces that have done the job quite effectively for millennium... Throughout human history, a single woman with a small child has not been a viable economic unit" (83.) This point of view represents one section of society's perspective. Others would contend that all family units have the potential to contribute both economically and culturally to the society as a whole given the opportunity. A child does not have the option of whether his or hers father will stay around to be part of the family. 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! ort on the part of the individual when doling out welfare payments. Most importantly individuals need to take more responsibility in their decisions, whether it is a sixteen-year-old couple experimenting with sex or a forty seventy-year-old couple finally deciding to start a family. 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! great amount of time and attention. Different aspects of a
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2101
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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