The Changing Family: American Family

      At the beginning of the twentieth century, many people thought that the American family was falling apart-in other words, they thought it was dying. A century later, we know that this was not the case. However, althoygh the family is still alive in the United States, its size and shape are very different from 100 years ago.

        In the late 1800s and early 1900s, there were mainly two types of families in the United States: the entended and the nuclear. The extended family usually includes grandparents, parents and children living under the same roof. The nuclear family consist of only parents and children. As people began to move to other parts of the country to find better jobs, the nuclear family became the most common family structure, or unit.

        Today, there are manu different kinds of families. Some people live in "traditional" families, that is, a stay-home mother, a working father, and their own biological children. Others live in two-paycheck families (where both parents work outside the house) , single parent families (a mother or father living with the children), adoptive or foster families (where adults take care of children that are not biologically theirs), blended families (where men and women who were married before marry again and combine the children from previous marriages into new families), childless families, and so on.

        What caused the structure of the family to change? In the early 1900s the birthrate began to decline and the divorce rate began to rise. Women were suddenly choosing to go to college and take jobs outside the home. The 1930s and 1940s were difficult years for most families in the United States. Many families faced serious financial, or money, problems during the Great Depression, when many people lost their jobs. During World War II (1939-1945), 5 million women were left alone to take care of their homes and their children. Because many men were at war, thousands of these "war widows" had to go to work outside the home. Most women worked long hours at hard jobs, especially in factories.

       During the next decade, the situation changed. There were fewer divorces, and people married at a younger age and had more children than previous generation. It was unusual for mother to work outside the home during the years when her children were growing up. Families began leaving cities and moving into single-family homes in the suburbs. The traditional family seemed to be returning.

In the years between 1960 and the 1990s, there were many important changes in the structure of the family. From the 1960s to the early 1970s, the divorce rate doubled and the birthrate fell by half. The number of single-parent families tripled, and the number of couples living together witout being married quadrupled.

     There are many people today who would like the "traditional" family to return. However, less then 10 percent of families in the 1990s fall into this category. In fact, the singel-parent household--once unusual--has replaced the "traditional" family as the typical family in the United States. If we canjudge from history, however, this will probably change again in the twenty-first century.

  


*The picture copied from Google.