18th Century Family Trends
In today’s families, I noticed that there are more single parent households than there were in the seventeen hundreds. Families are no longer a father and a mother raising their shared kin under one roof. Mothers of young children are working outside their home and providing for their family, rather than having a man providing for them. Today we have much more diversity, we have, adoptions, single parent households, gay and lesbians raising families and single people living on their own. Husbands and wives no longer feel the need to stay together from, “death do us part”, since we now have the option of getting a divorce. Parents these days are a lot less strict with their children and have much less control over them, due to technology and lack of authority. Some major differences I have noticed between today and the 18th century families are: women no longer feel less significant than the men, children are no longer under such strict rules and a hawk’s eye, and women have become more independent. In the 18th century, women relied solely on the men in their lives to provide security and stability for them and their family, men were their “heads”, which means that they were above them and were to be treated with utmost respect. Today we have working women who are more than capable of providing for themselves and their family all on their own. Children today have so much freedom, often times they don’t know what to do with themselves. Children waste days playing video games, or getting high in the basement while their parents are away, not considering what the consequences might be for not finishing homework, or skipping school. As a punishment, parent today may “ground” their children, which usually results in the compensation of their phones. In the 18th century not only did children not have the option of “playing video games”, but they had very strict rules to follow and if they were to disobey, or lie, they were to be beaten. Children had six laws to