Comparison Contrast Essay
Some people grow up with the dream of having a family with a lot of kids. Others choose not to have kids. Society seems to dictate that having a family with kids is the norm. However, over time this has changed. Now more than ever more people are just cohabitating and choosing there careers and lifestyles over having a big family and getting married with children. Getting married and having children takes financial responsibility and stability. There is more at home time needed and less "me" time for yourself. Usually, one parent will be the stay at home mom or dad while the other works to provide for their family. Statistics have shown that over time more and more people are less likely to get married using the excuse
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They were both young when they first got together. They also had kids at a very young age. They live together now with 2 kids. Jeff works and Casey stays at home raising the kids. I asked them how they felt about marriage and why they have not done it. The responses I received from them were very different. Jeff states that he is very happy with the situation the way it is. He feels comfortable just living together and not being married. He feels that marriage is just a word but what is real is the love that you show to your partner that justifies being together. He says you don 't need a ring Casey, on the other hand, want to get married but does not want to push Jeff away. She dreams of the fairy tale wedding one day and having that ring to symbolize their vows. When I asked her why she doesn 't push Jeff more to get married, she kind of shies away from the question and only states that she don 't want to push him away. She also says that she feels that if she keeps pushing him to do it she may lose him altogether. It seems that in today society it 's becoming a norm for couples to just live together and still have kids and be a regular …show more content…
The same Pew study reports that approximately 50 percent of adults over age 18 marry; this number is compared to 72 percent in 1960." That 's a big difference over time. They also find that "The Pew Research Center findings show that most of the rise in non-marital births is among couples living together." Many experts believe that cohabitating couples has a greater risk of instability vs. marriage. They even think you should get married before your child turns 3 in order to have a greater chance of keeping the relationship together. While this may have been the norm in earlier generations it seems like with time everything
there is also an increase in friends placed in the voluntary kin category. The article states that people who are single or live alone think of themselves as a family. Yet studies shown that these single families tend to keep more in touch with the relatives. A statement that Dr. Coontz makes is that We’re seeing a class divide not only between the haves and the have-nots, but between the I do’s and the I do nots,”. The article also states that the way demographer noticed differences in today’s family from previous one was through the birth rates, today’s rate is about half of what it used to be in 1960. After the era of the baby boom in 1964, the rate was 36 percent, and last year the number dropped to 23.5 percent predicting a 21 percent of child births by 2050. This because less women are become mothers – yet those who are only have one or two children compared the 3 children per family in the 1970s. Another reason the articles bring up about child care is the expenses, a child can easily cost a family as little as 241,080 to about a million dollars. However, the article agrees with chapter when it states that women with a bachelor or higher wait longer to get married and have children (about 90 percent)
finally the opportune moment for individuals to build a stable family that previous decades of depression, war, and domestic conflicts had restricted. We see that this decade began with a considerable drop in divorce rates and rise in marriage rates, which is often assumed as the result of changed attitudes and values. However, this situation cannot be only just attributed to women’s
“We keep putting marriage off. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s if not earlier”. People are also marrying less which is going to change the amount of men left in the dating/marriage pool when women are finally ready to start considering marriage. Even more than that men and marriage aren’t necessarily needed for to have kids anymore. As said in the article more than 40% of children are born to single mothers. Of course not all women who fall into that category chose it like to. The idea of a “nuclear family” is slowly becoming obsolete. “That gays and lesbians (married or single) and older women are also having children, via adoption or in vitro fertilization—has helped shrink the stigma against single
Bumpass LL, Sweet JA, Cherlin A. 1991. The role of cohabitation in declining rates of marriage. Demography 53:913 27
The ideal American family has become diminished. In the 21st century only 46% of children in the United States live in that ideal American family. Meanwhile you have 15% of children living with a parent that has been remarried at least once. It may seem like 15% is a small number, but in actuality it is 8, 76, 00 divorces a year that is occurring.
Jayson, Sharon. “Census reports more unmarried couples living together.” USA Today. 28 Jul. 2008. Web. 14 Sept. 2011. .
More Americans are getting divorced at an astonishing rate, according to the McKinley Irvin Family Law, there are about 16,800 divorces per week. This phenomenon has triggered a general panic among young adults. Therefore, animated by their fear of getting divorced, young adults have elaborated a new solution to avoid divorce which is cohabitation. They see cohabitation as a test to avoid divorce. However, does cohabitation really work? Meg Jay in her text entitled “The Downside of Living Together” defends the idea that seeing cohabitation as a preventive way to avoid divorce leads to increase the chance of divorce. I believe that cohabitation
With everything thing that has happened in the last decade, people have to wonder whether they should get married or not.
Many aspects of the traditional family and marriage have changed, in fact, a 2014 survey taken by the Pew Research Center revealed that less than half of children (aged 17 and younger) in the United States are living in a “traditional” household (Livingston). The median age at which individuals are marrying has also seen a drastic change. In the 1950s, the average age at marriage was 23 for men and 20 for women, historic lows (Cherlin 183). As of 2014, the median age at marriage was 29 for men and 27 for women (U.S. Census
It is not a new thought that today’s young Americans are facing issues, problems and difficult decisions that past generations never had to question. In a world of technology, media, and a rough economy, many young adults in America are influenced by a tidal wave of opinions and life choices without much relevant advice from older generations. The Generation Y, or Millennial, group are coming of age in a confusing and mixed-message society. One of these messages that bombard young Americans is the choice of premarital cohabitation. Premarital cohabitation, or living together without being married (Jose, O’Leary & Moyer, 2010), has increased significantly in the past couple of decades and is now a “natural” life choice before taking the plunge into marriage. Kennedy and Bumpass (2008) state that, “The increase in cohabitation is well documented,such that nearly two thirds of newlyweds have cohabited prior to their first marriage”(as cited in Harvey, 2011, p. 10), this is a striking contrast compared with statistics of our grandparents, or even parents, generations. It is such an increasing social behavior that people in society consider cohabitation “necessary” before entering into marriage. Even more, young Americans who choose not to cohabitate, for many different reasons, are looked upon as being “old-fashioned”, “naive”, or “unintelligent”. This pressure for young people to cohabitate before marriage is a serious “modern-day” challenge; especially when given research that states, “... most empirical studies find that couples who cohabited prior to marriage experience significantly higher odds of marital dissolution than their counterparts who did not cohabit before marriage”, stated by Jose (2010) and colleagues (as c...
According to the Council on Families In America, “for the average American, the probability that a marriage taking place today will end in divorce or permanent separation is calculated to be a staggering 60% and more than half of divorcing couples have children under the age of 18. The odds that a child today will witness the divorce of their parents, is twice as great as a generation ago, with as many as half of all children likely to experience a parental divorce before they leave home.”
In the article “Grounds for Marriage: How Relationships Succeed or Fail” by Arlene Skolnick talks a lot about how the attitudes towards marriages now a days is much different then what peoples attitudes have been in the past. The article talks about how there are two parts of every marriage “the husband’s and the wife’s”. This article touches on the affects cohabitation, and how cohabitation is more likely to happen among younger adults. This article talks about how the younger adults are more inclined to cohabitate before marriage, and that currently the majority of couples that are interring in to marriage have previously lived together. The article stats that some of the Possible reasons for couples to live together before marriage might include shifting norms
The article that I researched regarding this area explores the reasons why women may be taking the steps to start a family without marriage, whether these pregnancies are planned or unplanned. The study was conducted using a couple of different methods including the National Survey of Family Growth and a Discrete-Time Hazard Model. “The National Survey of Family Growth is a periodic, nationally representative fertility survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics.
Lauren Fox of The Atlantic stated, “moving in together without a diamond ring involved didn’t, on its own, lead to divorce. Instead, she found that the longer couples waited to make that first serious commitment, the better their chances for marital success.”
In today’s society, a majority of young couples are taking the opposite route when it comes to preparing for marriage. Instead of waiting till their newlyweds to move in together, many couples have decided to move in together. They believe that by living together, the divorce rate is decreased significantly. This idea of living together before marriage baffles a lot of people who are pro and against the idea. Yet, when you think about it for a moment, it does kind of make sense. Compared to previous generations, millennials would rather live together to decide whether marriage is in their future. There have been arguments for and against this idea of couples moving in together.