Families

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of the way the core family unit has changed over the years. It looks at how families in times past were strongly patriarchal, the result of an arranged marriage rather than a love match, how parents were often indifferent to their children, and how childhood was not viewed as any special part of life. In comparison, it explores how it is only in modern times that the nuclear family has developed into a nurturing and child-centered family unit, even though today's families include remarkable changes. Today's families include single women who choose to be artificially inseminated, gay couples who adopt or use approaches such as artificial insemination or surrogate mothers to have children, and couples who marry later in life and have children despite being well into their forties.

From the Paper:

"Interestingly, after half a century of rising or stable but high rates of divorce, the Census bureau results that there have been modest increases in the number of nuclear families. In 1991, they reported 51% of the country's children as living with both parents; by 1996 that number had risen to 56% (Blankenhorn, 2002). Nevertheless, this means that 44% of all children live in some kind of non-nuclear, non-traditional family format. However, in considering these statistics, one has to look at how they were gathered. The Census Bureau defined a "traditional nuclear family" as consisting of two biological parents and their children, with no one else. So, if the grandparents lived with the family, they would no longer consider it "nuclear.""

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• Research Paper # 33809 : "Families in Canadian Society"
• Analytical Essay # 122695 : "Families and Family Life"

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