preview

Moving To China

Decent Essays

“We’re moving to China” is the sentence that little did I know would change my life and family in an enormous way. I grew up with my Father as the traditional ‘breadwinner’ of the family and my Mom, a stay at home Mother, taking care of my sisters and me. I guess you could say we were the typical All-American family until my parents decided to pack up all our things in 2009 and move us to Beijing. The move to China had a huge impact on my life and my sisters’ lives, but it had even more of an impact on my parents’ marriage and my Dad’s contribution to family life as a Father and Husband. In this paper I will discuss how my family’s move to China caused shifts in the quality of my parents’ marriage, and how fatherhood within my family changed …show more content…

The interviews Williams conducts in his study finds that many fathers believe their responsibility as a father was a given, rather than a choice- between the ‘involved’ or ‘breadwinner’- and that it was very much shaped by circumstances out of their control. My parents have four children, three of which are triplets, so when they found out they were going to have four kids under the age of two, let alone multiples, my mother took off work to stay home as the primary caregiver. So, to explain ‘circumstances out of their control’ my parents thought with having four kids so young one parent should be at home as the caregiver and the other as the primary means of financial support. It was the rational decision to have my father, with the higher paying salary, work and my mother, nurturing care-taker, stay at home. This wasn’t so much a choice, but rather adaptations to ‘circumstances out of their control’. My Mother and Father were accepting of their roles, but when we moved to Beijing and my Father started to work even longer hours my parents’ marriage slowly started to change and fighting became more prevalent. My mother didn’t care as much about the large amount of financial provision he was providing to our family because as she exclaimed the long hours “isn’t worth

Get Access