Preview

Non Traditional Family Essay

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
646 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Non Traditional Family Essay
In modern day society, family’s face unique challenges as the world shifts towards a non-traditional way of life that people have stood by for decades. Such changes include a difference in roles within a marriage, who is considered family, childhood in a nontraditional family, and the ways in which we conceive a child. These diverges from the norm are discussed in the articles New Families: Modern Couples as New Pioneers by Philip Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan, Beyond Sentimentality: American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct by Steven Mintz, Making Babies by Anna Mulrine, and Baby Knows Best by Jill Smolowe. The world is entering uncharted territory, where the way in which a family operates and is defined is reluctantly changing. …show more content…
To elaborate, women have gained the right to work, which led to financial independence and not having to rely on their husband. Despite this huge accomplishment, I discovered that marriages are still traditional in many ways, such as how women still do most housework chores upon arriving back from work. Therefore, in addition to providing labor outside the home, they arrive at home to even more labor they are expected to perform, despite having the same exhaustion as their husband. This is interesting to me because I never once thought about the fact that when my mother came home from work, she still cleaned the dishes, did the laundry, and tucked us into bed, despite my father also working the same amount of time as her. This portion of the article made me realize that because of how most modern marriages still haven’t given up traditionalism completely, women are now burdened with twice the work. After having read this article, I came to the decision that on the chance that I have children in the future, I will make sure I have a husband that understands that while we are equal outside the house, we must also be equal inside the home. In summation, I concluded that once marriages can move forward from this aspect of traditional family life, I believe it will impact a

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Comparative Critique

    • 812 Words
    • 4 Pages

    According to examples seen in the idealized Nuclear Family of the 1950’s, wives handle domestic life whereas husbands retain financial support. Edelman shows how fixed gendered work is in our society. Even though many women feel liberated and inspired to be independent from their husbands, more often than not, these women still end up doing most of the domestic work and end up as stay at home moms (323). Edelman discusses the challenges that married couples face when trying to find a balance between responsibilities at work and at home. Edelman uses her own marriage as her example in her article, in which her husband works ninety-two hours a week and she is forced to put aside her dreams temporarily to support her children at home (321). Like Bartels, she feels neglected by her spouse.…

    • 812 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Recent scholarship has demonstrated that diversity and change have been the only constants in the history of the American family. Far from signaling the family's imminent demise or an erosion of commitment to children, recent changes in family life are only the latest in a series of disjunctive transformations in family roles, functions, and dynamics that have occurred over the past three centuries.…

    • 3941 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Women and Glbt

    • 305 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The general consensus of a woman today is no longer confined to the home as a housekeeper and mother taking care of her children. Great strides have been made for women. Today, women are CEOs, hold political offices, business owners, police officers, and much more. Not only are women all of these, but they continue to be the mother and housekeeper as well. They are not simply seen as the weaker sex, but are now seen as intellectually equal to their male counterparts. In some instances, the roles have been reversed in this modern age and some women are the wage earners of the family and the male is the housekeeper and…

    • 305 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    Men are more comfortable with their wives going to work than they are willing to help out at home more. In the 1950s, women were expected to be good housewives. Women were not to go college and if they did it was only to meet their future husbands. Women were expected to stay home and do housework and take care of the children. Ferber says, “Housework and childcare continued to be viewed as the women’s responsibility whether or not she also had a paid job” (2). Mothers today are arguing back and forth over the “Mommy Wars”. The “Mommy Wars” is where working mothers are criticizing stay at home mothers for not working and in turn, non-working mothers criticize working mothers for not spending enough of family time together. Rather than debating the “Mommy Wars” some women are complaining of having to work “the second shift” once they get home from work. The second shift refers to when a mother has worked a full day and then goes home to do just about the same amount of work by cooking dinner, doing laundry, cleaning the house, and taking care of the kids. Ferber says, “Women do fifty-two hours a week in housework and child rearing while the men do eleven hours a week” (2). Men should be contributing to the housework more, regardless if the wife works or stays at home. The resource theory, proposed by Robert Blood and David Wolfe, “Focuses on the importance of accumulated resources of a spouse as the source of power within a marriage, which is likely to be used to make the other partner do more of the housework” (3, Ferber). The more control women have at work the more control they have at…

    • 1281 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Coontz also states, “What’s new is not that women make half their families living, but for the first time they have substantial control over their own income, along with the social freedom to remain single or to leave an unsatisfactory marriage”(Coontz, Stephanie). A large part of families today being less “traditional” as they used to be is on how society views traditional. Things that used to be socially unheard of in the past, is socially acceptable today. And in all societies and cultures over the world, eventually change is something we, as a part of it, have to accept and move along with…

    • 659 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Second Shift

    • 988 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Traditionally men worked and brought home the bacon while women stayed home and took care of the children and the home. This changed when the new liberated independent women became driven towards acquiring a career, caring for the children and balancing domestic work. Thus women started to complain about being exhausted from working, multi-tasking, and solely taking care of the house-hold, while their husbands worked and bring forth a paycheck and think that is efficient enough and his job is pretty much done. ‘’I definitely concur with The Second Shift because this essay most women can really relate to, including me. It filters the contribution of what the husband brings to the house-hold versus the woman. It makes me ponder about why our husbands are letting us become husbands”. The author, Ariel Hochschild demonstrates keen examples and stated factual research from her findings on the percentages of husbands that said they should help out around the house and the ones that actually did, and furious Wives who not only had to work an eight hour shift; but also took care of the house-hold duties and tended to the children. From the author’s eight year research she concluded that failed marriages were not due to alcohol, physical and or mental abuse, infidelity, or financial problems, but due to the lack of domestic assistance from the husband.…

    • 988 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    This article states the basic ways in which the American family has been changing in recent years. Researchers…

    • 715 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The ideal family from the American perspective has traditionally been known as the nuclear family by sociologists. The nuclear family, consisting of a married couple and their unmarried children, materialized as a romantic ideal as the Industrial Revolution transformed the United States into a country where families didn’t have to depend on many children and extended families for help on a farm or financial stability and families got smaller. Wealthier families could afford to have a home for themselves and their family of procreation (an individual, their mate, and their children) without needing the financial support of additional family members, and this kind of a family became desirable. Additionally, some other characteristics of the ‘ideal American family’ became popular and commonplace in the US and around the world as well.…

    • 1153 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Women 50's

    • 292 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In life itself women are the household care takers, they bore the children, raise the children, cook, and clean, that is the role of the women. The 21’st century has made an exception to that rule, today the average woman has a career, a family, along with rights that were not equally given to them only 62 years ago. After World War II was over in 1945, American’s were overwelmed with the amount of soldiers returning home to their girlfriends, families, and jobs. Women were responsible for taking up on the work that men left behind when they went off to war, the return of thousands of men pushed women out of the work force and back into their homes. It almost seemed as if women had a choke hold on their lives and roles, Brett Harvey the author of Fitting In for Fifties Women was a young women living in the 1950’s she quoted, “1950’s women were second class citizens who’s roles were utterly restricted by business, the media, and by social pressures” –Brett Harvey. What the world didn’t understand was how hard it was for women to lose their independence all over again, unfortenoutly it back fired on America. Over time by the end of the late 50’s there was a rising birth rate, a stable divorce rate, and declining age of marriage. Today 4.95 per 1,000 people divorce here in America (University Libraries, Ohio University ), there are more single parent homes prodominantly by the mother, there is also a decline in home involvement from the mother working a full time job or two part-time jobs. Women have evolved over time, they’ve adapted to society, the choke hold is not as strong as it were…

    • 292 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Before i had a family, i dreamed of my "made up family", having a joyous time. Well that sure made me understand perception can alter your true life experiences when you go thru real situations. My point being, it was June of 2015 last year, and my small family and my mother planned to take a trip. My mother resides in New Mexico and we live in Las Vegas, so the demand for togetherness was of a longing feeling. One could say even mutual. When all the plans went thru we were on our way to Las Cruces,N.M. We were initially going to pick up my baby daughter. She had been with my mother for a few months and daddy was missing her. At this time i had'nt seen my family in 16 years and they were interested in meeting my wife and kids for the first…

    • 645 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    American Family History

    • 1158 Words
    • 5 Pages

    In the last ten years of American history, there have been many milestones, events, and trends that have shaped American history. Not only did it shape history, but it changed how the American family lived. Examples such as the 9/11 attacks and new technological advancements have prompted serious and emotional conversations among family members and is considered important to cultural historians on how to understand the current mythologies of family. Aside from the ideal decade of the 1950s, the idea of family has changed in the twenty-first century because of new trends and recent events that set to define what family is really about.…

    • 1158 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Household chores are never ending and can be exhausting when trying to juggle family and a career. Even though many women agree with the added work, many more are coming to terms with their life and choosing routes leading far away from marriage. In today’s culture women have better opportunities to work outside of the home. They are treated with respect and often work outside the home just as much as men, yet the bulk of household chores are still considered the women’s job. The international Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family concludes “the lonely and never ending aspects of housework contribute to the increased depression for U.S. housewives,” thus leading women to the socially accepted marital separation. Women are pulling forty hour weeks plus countless hours of household work with out the help of their husband. With all the increased stress, women are now able to make choices such as getting a divorce without the financial fear or reputation once associated with…

    • 1139 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Domestic Abuse In America

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Today in America, many damaging challenges have surfaced, bringing upon more issues that must be faced. Many factors in today's society have begun to break down the structure of the family. The foundation of all great civilizations is the family, and in America due to divorce, domestic abuse, and issues within the foster care system, the structure of the American culture is crumbling.…

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Cade was once a small town boy from Davis, Ok with a traditional small town life. As a child, the dreams of being a successful vet never crossed his mind. Cade is now a large and small animal vet that serves Murray County and the surrounding communities. Through his diligent work and dedication he has accomplished what all veterinary students dream of, he owns and operates his own veterinary clinic. He has put forth many years of hard work to become as successful as he is today.…

    • 765 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    ‘Tradition is the enemy of happy families’ is an article written by Jack O’Sullivan. Here, the author informs readers about the tragedy faced by modern couples after the birth of their young ones. It also goes on to explain how the “mother and father” slip into the stereotypical roles consisting of being the home-maker and the provider respectively. The author uses a variety of anecdotes and scientific studies and facts which also to some extent help persuading the readers that having a stripling is actually not that good an idea as it is a major cause for cracks in the relationship between the husband and wife. The author writes subjectively and engages the reader deeply as well. The article is targeted at mostly youngsters in a relationship…

    • 840 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays