The Importance Of Traditional Family Values

There are many ways that the idea of the “traditional” family has changed over the past several centuries. For instance prior to the 19th century family was often considered anyone who lived within a household whether related by blood or not. This included employees and extended family. Per Coontz (2010) “The biological family was less sacrosanct, and less sentimentalized, than it would become in the nineteenth century.”(p. 35) In society at the time it was socially unacceptable to be separate or not included as part of a family household. Over time, the term family came to encompass the immediate family, a husband, wife and their children. During the late 1800’s through the mid 1900’s there were emerging ideas of family that were not widely accepted as traditional or normal, these included single parent homes with only a Mom or Dad, Stepfamilies and same sex couple and parent households. Today, American ideas of what constitutes a family have drastically expanded to include these formerly “non-traditional” families

    Several changes have occurred since the 1920s in traditional family values and the family life. Research revealed several different findings among family values, the way things were done and are now done, and the different kinds of old and new world struggles.

During the 1950's, there was a lifestyle in America that was essentially set in stone from birth. Television portrayed an image that women were to stay to home with the children. Shows such as, Leave it to Beaver, and Father Knows Best displayed a stereotypical way of life and structure in a family. “The sitcoms were simultaneously advertisements, etiquette manuals, and how-to lessons for a new way of organizing marriage and child rising” (Coontz, 39). Although television shows of the 1950's were not true reality, it seemed to be a good model at the time. Family life in the 50's era differs greatly from today's family unit.

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 emphasis on individualism has provoked a deeper inspection of one’s personal values and beliefs while feminism has opened the door for a new type of traditional family to emerge with new dynamics between parents, children and their roles within the home. These new dynamics merge right along with cultural values as the two merge. In America, life is varied from home to home with different culturally-influenced family values. While throughout other parts of the world, different countries have maintained a balance within a core value system that affects all families alike through religion and a national way of life. There is no doubt that the many varied factors of modern society, ethnic background and religion all play significant roles in forming family values that shape the life of an

Social organization depended on the traditional notions of the male and female role in the family to model a stereotyped community in 1930s America. Marriage existed as a institution in the thirties because the priorities of young Americans radically shifted. People did not question if they would marry, but rather who they would marry and when. Young women never doubted they would have children, rather they questioned how many children would they have and when. The impulsiveness of early marriage stemmed from the government’s attempt to elevate family domesticity into a national trend. Society needed to establish the idea that prosperity, freedom and future were the main interests rooted within this nation, the harsh times of war were over.

Parsons and Bales develop fundamental assumptions about 1950s society that allow them to build their model of the ideal “modern” family. The underlying assumptions are everchanging and not true of our current society and thus are the main reasons why the their model of the family is inefficient and unattainable. One assumption made is that the industrial economy is the significant force behind the emergence of the male breadwinning family. He failed to consider the social conditions that influenced the model’s prominence during the 50’s. Parsons had very little actual observations or statistics that supported the popularity of his model of the nuclear family. Rather, it could be argued that his theory was mostly based on speculation. Studies show that the nuclear family

Where do family values stand in today’s world? There is the traditional family that make ends meet no matter what and more common today is the modern family that take divorce like it is no big deal. Kingslover and White give great examples of what a traditional family is like and how the modern family is taking over. The world makes it easy to deplete family values in this day and age but really divorce has been considered for centuries. Divorce has become a regular occurrence and highly prevalent in today’s society, which is focused upon and exemplified throughout the essay “Stone Soup,” whereas, traditional family values and permanent marital status is shown in “Once More to the Lake.”

The 1950’s family model consists of a suburban white collar man, his stay at home wife and two children. It can also be described as an embodiment of “traditional” gender and family roles that portray a simpler, comforting lifestyle, a notion that is widely disputed during this day and age. This idea of living has been fueled by a heavy influence through media and an unwavering inclination to live the “American Dream”. This “ideal” lifestyle is ultimately damaging to families of differing cultures and classes because it develops an unrealistic expectation and definition of true family values which can differ among households. What many also neglect to consider is that the nuclear family’s appeal may be mislead entirely. It’s extremely flawed sense of uniformity and simplicity can argue that the appeal of a nuclear family may be more desired based on the period of time rather than the family

Healthy family systems, such as the traditional family, with a father and mother, was no longer the majority in America, in 2014. “Fewer than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. This is a marked change from 1960, when 73% of children fit this description, and 1980, when 61% did.”4

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.

Beginning in the 1970s, a cultural debate has raged over the function of the traditional family in American life, a debate that has subjected the roles of fathers, mothers, and even children to intense scrutiny. Freedom of choice, self-fulfillment, the emergence of blended families, feminism, the sexual revolution, and social rebellion against traditional family forms—all of these have facilitated a widespread cultural experimentation with different family structures. Feminist activists have argued that the traditional family is outdated and even damaging to adults and children. Some have even argued that women and children do not need men; in fact, families are better off without them. Advocates for radical marital change welcomed the

When we are young we play house and we play doctor, we pretend we are husbands and wives to the kids we play with. Marriage is imbedded into our minds at a young age and we value marriage as we get older. We see examples of marriages through personal experience, the TV, and through the media, but how much has marriage changed now compared to the 1950’s? The idea of marriage has been altered and improved since the 1950’s because of feminism, views about individualism, and views of same-sex marriage.

Many couples in the United States idealize the myth of a “tradition family”. The idea that a woman

The American family has continuously been changing over the years and has been shaped by changing ideas about gender, sexuality, race, and class. The institution of the family has changed but it has also remained the same in some aspects. Society’s acceptance of changes in gender and sexual norms have reshaped representations of the family. Betty Friedan, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Dorothy Sue Cobble have written articles that pertain to the changing of the institution. As the American society changes its views on gender and sexual norms, sometimes through movements, it has informed representations of the family.