The American Family Has Changed Drastically Over The Years

Stephanie Coontz in “The Way We Weren’t: The Myth and Reality of the Traditional Family” emphasizes that the traditional and ideal nuclear family widespread in media and textbooks are false and far from reality. In fact, it is common to see more similarities to the traditional family consistent of “male breadwinner and nurturing mother” (1) today than in the past.

The article Family and Social Memory: Why History Matters mentioned the concept of the nuclear family. The ideal white-picket fenced family, with a mother, father and children who happily live together in privacy. It was during the postwar era when technological discoveries were rapid and mind-blowing, an era where hope was renewed and the ideal family was remodeled. It involved a father being the head of the house, and the mother being the primary caretaker. It was this notion that reigned as the ideal family for a long period of time. However, I find this stereotype to be rather poisonous because, as the article also mentioned, soon the media uncovered the dark realities behind the nuclear family. During the post-war era, abuse and sexism

Within a generation, America has seen radical changes in the home. My mother was raised in an era where the nuclear family was the norm, however, in recent years, its has become increasingly acceptable for children to be born out of wedlock. After learning this, the question on my mind, and probably yours, is “what happened to the American family”. June Carbone and Naomi Cahn believe that changes in marriage dynamics are responsible. In the book, Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family, they report that the age in which couples get married is rising, yet the rate of marriage is falling, and it is found that nearly half of all who marry, wind up separating. Additionally, the number of children born out of wedlock is now nearing those of children who are born within wedlock and the percentage of children who grow up in a single parent household is the highest it 's ever been. Using quantitative research methods, Carbone and Cahn were able to assess the changes America has seen in recent years. The changing dynamic of the family reinforces economic inequality and predetermines a child’s income as an adult.

In William Bennett (2003), The Broken Hearth, the author tells an in-depth explanation of some of the theories that revolve around the moral collapse of the American family. Bennett (2003) begins with what the American family looks like today as compared to how the traditional family looked before the wars. The difference between these two pictures gives a stark contrast and gives us glimpses of where human relationships of the future are going. Bennett covers many different social aspects that affect our families today as well as our civilization overall. Nuclear families of the past have evolved over the years into cohabitating couples resulting in out of wedlock births, illegitimate children, fatherless children, poverty, crime,

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.

Changes in American society in recent decades have had a major impact on the social structure of the country. A hundred years ago it was only now forty-seven years is seventy-eight. The meaning of family also change, a hundred years ago only four percent of the women had children out of wedlock, for children was normal losing his parents at the age of fifteen, the marriage rate was high and education it was low. The ideal family was that the man was working and who was the head of the family, and the woman was the figure responsible for the home and parenting, based on the rules of marriage model. Today we see a completely different picture, although the family remains an essential part of our society, has been affected by structural changes,

Times have changed; the nuclear family is no longer the American ideal because family needs have changed since the 1950's. This American convention of a mother and father and their two children, were a template of films and early television as a depiction of the American family life. Now seen as archaic and cliché by today’s standards, but the idea is common throughout many of the first world nations in the world. This ideal was a vast departure from the past agrarian and pre industrial families, and was modeled and structured as the ‘American dream’ father working, mother maintaining the household and children molded to be simulacra of the parents. This portrayal was not the standard; many communities throughout America had a different

During the industrial revolution, the nuclear family was considered the norm, consisting of a mother and father living together with two biologically related children. Traditionally, the wife stayed home as the homemaker and looking after the children without pay. While the husband earns the money through working at a job away from the home. Furze (2015 p. 174) states that ‘in the 1940s and 1950s, many sociologists and the general communities of Western countries such as Australia and New Zealand considered the traditional nuclear family the most widespread and ideal family form.’ Additionally, backing this statement up Fletcher (2017) claims that ‘from a functionalist perspective the nuclear family is ideally suited to meet the necessities

Within a generation, America has seen drastic changes in the home. My mother was raised in an era where the nuclear family was the norm. Now, it has become largely acceptable for children to be born out of wedlock and into single parent homes. I’m guessing the question as to why it has become so widely accepted, is on your mind as well. June Carbone and Naomi Cahn have set out to see why this is happening in their new book, Marriage Markets: How Inequality Is Remaking the American Family. Carbone and Cahn are well-known for their work in the field of family dynamics due to their previous book, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture; a book discussing the effect political parties had on family morals and values. Marriage Markets is essentially a sequel, using much of the same data while adding more contemporary findings. Using quantitative research methods, Carbone and Cahn were able to assess the changes America has seen in recent years. They have hypothesized that “economic inequality is remaking the American family along class lines, and families are not going through the same changes together” (Carbone 1). . Based on the reading, there is strong evidence that supports their thesis, including statistics from the Census. In the following review of Carbone and Cahn’s work, I will summarize the book’s contents and survey its major strengths and weaknesses.

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.

In today's overall population, the structure of family is evolving. People's perspective toward race, sex, religion, and society has allowed more open entryways in the way that families are developed. As demonstrated by Natalie Angier, "Researchers who look at the structure and headway of the American family express unsullied amazement at how rapidly the family has changed of late" ("The Changing American Family," 2013). A substantial bit of these critical changes are credited to women's parity and their passageway into the workforce. In fact, even as fiscal uniqueness develops, the American families are ending up being more socially populist over all. Social unions within the unmistakable races, religions, and political get-togethers are growing.

Single parent and divorced, shared-custody families have become more common place in American society over the past fifty years. During the 1940s and 1950s, “85% of children lived in two-parent families, 70% lived in an intact (biological or adoptive) two-parent family, and the remaining 15% lived in two-parent stepfamilies….. however, since the 1970s, there has been a large increase in the proportion of children living with never-married mothers (from 1.1% in 1970 to 6.7% in 1988) or divorced mothers (from 3.5% in 1970 to 7.8% in 1988)” (Shiono and Quinn par. 2). Since there has been an increase in divorced and never-married mothers taking care of families, there have been countless studies done on how different family structures affect the children involved and the family unit as a whole. I believe that the two biological parent family structure is the best for children and society because it provides stability, allows for stable financial income, and also prevents role strain for the parents.

Much like the apples, adoption ranges greatly. There are now five types of adoptions: Agency, Independent, Step Parent, International, and Open Agency Adoption. An international adoption or transracial adoption is defined as, “the joining of racially different parents and children together in adoptive families” (Silverman 104). Among the five types of adoptions, international adoption is considered a controversial topic.

Single parent households are a sensitive topic that is highly debated today. This topic is one that has repercussions for both the parents and the children involved. However, regardless of the different consequences, these households continue to grow in the coming years. “In 1970, traditional two-parent married households dominated, making up 81 % of all households in the United States (US). By 2012 this number dropped to around 66 % … In 2012, approximately 21 million children, or 28 % of all children in the US, lived with one parent” (Kramer, 2015). It is interesting to look at the way the single parent households continue to grow throughout the years, all while being a hot topic for discussion on its consequences. When thinking about a book to read for this course, there was no real choice. I stumbled upon this book and knew right away that I could benefit from this book, as well as connect to it on a deeper level and relate to it personally.

Over the last twenty years, one of the most remarkable changes in family structure has been the increase in the number of single-parent families. In this type of family, one parent in the household is raising the children due to the high divorce rates and adults choosing not to marry. This is “currently the fastest growing family type in North America”. According to a research, “88 percent of these families are headed by women currently.”9