American Families
American FamiliesChanging American Families
The children are leaving for school just as father grabs his briefcase and is off to work. Meanwhile, mother finishes clearing the breakfast dishes and embarks on her day filled with PTA responsibilities, household chores, and preparation of a well-balanced dinner to be enjoyed by all when father arrives home promptly at 6:00. This would have to be a scene from "Father Knows Best", "Leave It to Beaver" or that of a family during or before the sixties. Only a small minority of contemporary families fit this mold of being a "nuclear" family today. Until the 1960's most Americans shared a common set of beliefs about family life; a family should consist of a husband and a wife living together with their children. The father being the head of the family, earns the family's income, and gives his name to his wife and children. Today, the United States exhibits a pattern of attachments and disruptions in marriages and family structure, including single-parent families and such high rates of divorce that are certainly stressful for nation's developing children and adolescents, leading the American family and the nation's future to a state of crisis.
It is starling that whether through their parents' divorce or never having been married, every other American child spends part of his or her childhood in a single-parent family. The increase in the proportion of children living with just one parent has strongly affected large number of children. By the time they reach age sixteen, close to half the children of married parents will have seen their parents divorce. For nearly half of these, it will be five years more before their mothers remarry. Close to half of all white children whose parents remarry will see the second marriage dissolve during their adolescence. (Hamburg, 1996) With all of this, family matters get complicated very fast. Let's take the instance of Paul, a high-school student. Paul's parents, Mary and John get a divorce. John moves in with Sally who already has two boys. Mary meets Jack, who is divorced and has three girls. When Mary and Jack get married, Paul has a mother, a father, a stepmother, a stepfather, five stepbrothers and stepsisters, and four sets of grandparents, both biological and step. Demographers from the Institute of for American Values point out that one-third of all children in America will probably live with a step-family before the age of eighteen. They also point out that one of every four children today is being raised by a single parent. The size of the average family decreased from more than four people (2 parents and 2 children) in the 1940's to a little over two in the 1980s.
A recent long-term study conducted by Princeton University found that elementary school children from divorced families, especially boys, on average scored lower on reading and math tests, were absent more often, were more anxious, hostile, withdrawn, and were less popular with their peers than their classmates...
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