Family Diversity
Diversity In Families
According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, "A family consists of a domestic group of people (or a number of domestic groups), typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships-including domestic partnership, adoption, surname and (in some cases) ownership. Although many people (including social scientists) have understood familial relationships in the terms of "blood", many anthropologists have argued that one must understand the notion of "blood metaphorically, and that many societies understand family' through other concepts rather than through genetics."# The families of our nation and our world are steadily changing. While they remain our most valued source of strength and comfort, about which we exult and anguish, families are becoming somewhat amorphous. Our uncertainty about their changing shape has fueled acrimonious political debate and engendered widespread discomfort. Many of us would like families to stay the same or, more accurately, stay the way we thought they were, but demographic trends suggest that change and diversity will continue to characterize American family life for years to come. The question is "Can we all tolerate the drastic changes being made?" Even as family scientists and sociologists dispel our mythology of family with facts, we cling to the Ward-and-June-Cleaver vision of the way we were and ought to be. In truth, we never were as perfectly shaped as we thought. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just 43 percent of families in 1940 were "traditional" in the sense that they had a working father and a homemaker mother and, of course, well-rounded children. Today, less than 20 percent of American families fit nicely into this shape and two-income marriages are now the norm (Otten). Others are blended and step-parent families, single-parent families, and extended families. Still united by the common threads of shared experience and, in the best of circumstances, shared
According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, "A family consists of a domestic group of people (or a number of domestic groups), typically affiliated by birth or marriage, or by comparable legal relationships-including domestic partnership, adoption, surname and (in some cases) ownership. Although many people (including social scientists) have understood familial relationships in the terms of "blood", many anthropologists have argued that one must understand the notion of "blood metaphorically, and that many societies understand family' through other concepts rather than through genetics."# The families of our nation and our world are steadily changing. While they remain our most valued source of strength and comfort, about which we exult and anguish, families are becoming somewhat amorphous. Our uncertainty about their changing shape has fueled acrimonious political debate and engendered widespread discomfort. Many of us would like families to stay the same or, more accurately, stay the way we thought they were, but demographic trends suggest that change and diversity will continue to characterize American family life for years to come. The question is "Can we all tolerate the drastic changes being made?" Even as family scientists and sociologists dispel our mythology of family with facts, we cling to the Ward-and-June-Cleaver vision of the way we were and ought to be. In truth, we never were as perfectly shaped as we thought. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, just 43 percent of families in 1940 were "traditional" in the sense that they had a working father and a homemaker mother and, of course, well-rounded children. Today, less than 20 percent of American families fit nicely into this shape and two-income marriages are now the norm (Otten). Others are blended and step-parent families, single-parent families, and extended families. Still united by the common threads of shared experience and, in the best of circumstances, shared