North American Single-Parent Families

It is evident that the family structures have dramatically transitioned over the past 100 years. The “Leave it to the Beaver” family is a thing of the past standards and a number of variations have been formed over the years. In the United States, there are six particular kinds of family configurations that are recognized by the modern society. Some of these family structures are naturally falling into several categories. For instance, a single parent family living in a large, extended family set up. Even though these types of families differ in definition, the lines are not very clear when it comes to practice.

Traditionally, the U.S. family begins with a marriage, cohabitation and finally, children. However, the “typical” family is beginning to evolve very rapidly, just as in France and Quebec. In Quebec, it is more common to find couples living together that aren’t married than to find married couples living together. Surprisingly, only 3 in 10 families in Quebec are married couples with children under 25 living with them. In France, children tend to live with their parents until they’re in their early to mid-twenties. Quebec and the United States are generally evolving together. It is more common in present day to find couples living together that aren’t married, yet may or may not have children. However, in France, couples generally won’t marry until they’re in their thirties. My family is composed of the traditional American family: marriage, creating a home together, creating a family together. Although I was raised in an orthodox household, I was also raised seeing and learning from unorthodox living and parental situations. The role of family in the U.S., Quebec, and France nowadays are all transforming to purposefully cease all structure. Same-sex marriage is now legal in these areas, and this change has definitely produced the question of what is a “typical family” anymore. There is not a typical family anymore, there is only the family one was brought up in and one creates.

Women are generally responsible for caregiving (children and elders), volunteer activities, domestic duties, and social reproduction at an average rate of 2:1 (50 hours per week) compared with men (25 hours per week), regardless of how much paid work they are committed to (Milan, Keown, & Urquijo, 2015). Men are freer to pursue paid opportunities (and investments in human capital) and women are restricted by unpaid obligations, which perpetuates inequity. Some solutions to gain equity include social welfare reform programs, universal/affordable dependents’ care programs, and the shift of unpaid duties to men, as sociologist Nancy Fraser (1997) theorizes in After the Family Wage: A Postindustrial Thought

Family is a broad term to define. In the pre-modern times, family was one of the most important unit of society which consisted of two adults of the opposite sex sharing economic resources, accommodation, reproduction (Mitchell, 2012, Pg.6). A family consisted of two parents, the husband was considered to be a “breadwinner” (Mitchell, 2012, Pg.6), while the wife was the homemaker who stayed home and took care of children. The Standard North American Family (SNAF) consists two adults of the opposite sex who are married and they share both traditional and gender roles (Mitchell, 2012, Pg.6). It is foundational for understanding families in Canada because for a lot of people, it is their identity.

In the United States today, women are far more likely than men to have lived below the poverty line at some point in their lives. One in seven women are living in poverty today, with the number hovering right around 14.7% compared to 10.9% of men (NWLC, 2015). It is undeniable that that is a serious wage gap in the United States with women making cents to every dollar that a man makes for the same work, and on top of that women are often working lower paying “pink-collar” jobs in the first place; for women of color, wages are even lower. Compound these problems with factors such as domestic violence, children, and lack of healthcare and you can begin to see how dire of a situation women living below the poverty line find themselves in. As an

In the last few decades, families in Canada have been experiencing conspicuous changes in family structure and style. Further flexible agreements have been observed with a raise in the number of couples that live in common-law relationships including stepfamilies in a larger circumstance of high divorce rates. The highest compelling family tendency in Canada is that of the growing number of single parent families. According to Statistics Canada (2007), while in 1966, single parents represented only 8.2% of the number of headcount families, this representation increased to 15.9% in 2006. In other words, in forty years the rate of single parent families approximately doubled. Even though many educational gains have been made by single parents

The families in America are steadily changing. While they remain our most valued and consistent source of strength and comfort, some families are becoming increasingly unstructured. In the past, the typical family consists of a working father, a stay at home mother and, of course, well-rounded children. Today, less than 20 percent of American families fit nicely into this cookie cutter image. American households have never been more diverse. Natalie Angier takes stock of the changing definition of family in an article for the New York Times.

American families have never been as diverse as they are today. There is a constant changing definition of what we call “family”. We as Americans are straying further and further from the idea of a classic nuclear family. One of the biggest reasons is a dramatic rise in kids living with a single parent. In 2014, just 14% of children younger than 18 lived with a stay-at-home mother and a working father who were in their first marriage (Livingston, 2015). This research will address in depth why households are now more diverse than ever, what’s the normal family now, and why aren’t the laws adjusting to how the average American family lives today.

Many sociologists argue that the nuclear family is a universal and dominate institution however there has been an increase in diverse family types for various reasons. Examples of these diverse families are lone parents, reconstitutions and cohabitation families. Although most people experience life in a nuclear family, it represents only a stage in their life cycle. Social and demographic changes have meant that an increasing part of many people’s lives are spent in households that are not based on conventional nuclear families.

"Women do two thirds of the world’s work...Yet they earn only one tenth of the world’s income and own less than one percent of the world’s property. They are among the poorest of the world’s poor." –Barber B. Conable Jr, President, World Bank

During the years, single parent families have become a more common thing. This is starting to become a problem, because family dynamics can really influence a child’s life. According to studies it affects not only the child but the parents too.

Family is one of the hardest words to define. There are many definitions and thoughts of what a family consists of. When one accepts the definition of the census family given by Statistics Canada then a family becomes “a married couple and the children, if any… a couple living common law and the children, if any… a lone parent with at least one child living in the same dwelling… grandchild living with grandparents but no parents present… Census families can be opposite or same sex and children may be adopted, by birth, or marriage and all members must be living in the same dwelling” (Baker 2014). With family being such a difficult term to agree on, the creation of a complex study of family life emerges. The factors that influence family life are put into three theory categories; Social Structure, Interpersonal Factors, as well as Ideas, Global Culture, and Public Discourse.

Throughout the history of mankind, women have not been in the workforce until recently. A woman 's place has mainly been at the home, until only about sixty years ago. Women would take care of the children, cook, clean, care for the sick, and when needed, they would be extra labor around the farm. Women first started to work in large numbers during the industrial revolution, mainly in the textile industry. Since then, most women have gone into the workforce. Today a family cannot survive on the wages of the man alone. However, even though women are needed to work, they still do not make as much as men. There are still inequalities between men and women, and there is still a large wage gap.

I keep asking myself how is it possible that such developed countries with such powerful economies like UK and US don't even break up into the top 10 countries, where the country like Iceland maintain the smallest gender gap, followed by Finland, Norway, Sweeden, Denmark, Nicaragua, Rwanda and Ireland. Empowering women is smart economics. However, a lot of women were disadvantaged in a lot of economic spheres because of the stereotypes and gender role classification.Now, women spend at least 2.5 times more time than men bu doing domestic work like cooking, cleaning and taking care of children and she is not paid for it. It has a direct impact on the category of paid work they can access. They are usually involved in part-time and low-paid jobs, thus earning less than men. Yes, is true that women choose low-paid jobs, it's their choice to work or not, but let's not to forget that being a mother is a full-time job and in EU for instance, 25 % of women report family responsibilities as one reason for not being in the labour force, compared with 3 % of men. This clearly has a negative effect

Globally, woman have little opportunities than men in participating in economics, and in having opportunities to have greater positions in the world. In addition women are facing a huge issue regarding economic and political empowerment all over the world. Women contain more than 50% over the world 's population and they own only 1% of the world’s wealth and stated that they perform better than men in working long hours of unpaid domestic work. “While women represent 50% of the world’s adult population, and one-third of the official labor force, they perform nearly two-thirds of all working hours, receive only one tenth of the world income and own less than 1% of the world’s property”