Social Problems Essay

The family is a social institution that has been underestimated and placed in a box for generations. In America, television and media has portrayed the “typical” family to be a Caucasian bread winning father, homemaker wife, and there 2 kids all living under one roof. But according to Eitzner’s book “Social Problems”, the actualization of how a family looks under one roof is based on economic conditions, and the typical family portrait never applied to immigrants and racial minorities because these people were denied equal opportunities to earn a family wage, and denied support of such grants as the GI Bill. Extended families as well as extended households grew in the light of immigration and socioeconomic reform. Now there is no longer a single culturally dominant family pattern. The idea of family has to be reconstituted frequently to relate to ever changing personal and occupational circumstances.
Some of the social problems that the family institution is dealing with are gay marriages, multi-generational households, and teenage pregnancy. In this essay, I will briefly discuss each problem, but also I will develop a program for change. The collective variety of the family in the U.S. has led researchers to study if and how different family systems are linked with different groups of people who then may experience different results. Research has found that not all racial groups participate in each family type equally, thus not all family forms are equally available to all people Intellectuals have also found that each type of family (e.g., married with kids, married with no kids, single-parent with young children, etc.) is associated with different economic, child, and health outcomes. This may be a stereotype but researchers say that children who grow up with only one of their parents "are more likely to drop out of high school, to become teenage and single mothers, and to have trouble finding and keeping a steady job in young adulthood, even after adjusting