Essay On Family Stability In The Family

Family Stability within the Hispanic Culture
Janiece Cantu
Our Lady of the Lake University

For over centuries, the term family has been specifically used to mean a group of people that consist of two parents and their children. The word is originally from the Latin word Familia, which means household or family. Although this word is known all over the world, it can have a different context to each person. In the United States alone, family can be referred to two adults and their children, a single-parent household, extended relatives, and a structure of more than two parents. Despite how the family structure may look like within a household, it plays a major role in life, either directly or indirectly.
Family stability is a term that is defined in various ways, but has been found to have a vital role in society. Global stability within a family refers to the occurrence of changes in family structure, such as divorce, remarriage, or parental death, as well as family life changes, such as changes in residence, non-normative changes in schools, or changes in household composition. Molecular family stability, on the other hand, is defined as the daily family activities and routines (Israel & Roderick, 2001; Israel, Roderick, & Ivanova, 2002). These family activities and routines can vary from family to family. Defining the construct of molecular family stability in this way embraces the notion that any one family may achieve stability in multiple ways, and the method of one family may differ from that of another (Israel et al., 2002) (as cited in Malatras and Israel, 2013). When focusing on the Hispanic culture within America, family instability in a global and molecular context is seen in divorce, chan...

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...y suggest ongoing erosion of children’s family support across generations in the United States (Landale, Oropesa, Noah, 2014).
Even though this study is only showing the effects for early pre-school age children, it is important to realize that this is a vital part of a child’s life that will affect their adulthood. Immigration affects the stability of the family as a whole because of the transition that they face. These immigrant families begin to face challenges that non-immigrant families in America face such a divorce. The binational longitudinal study results showed that children of immigrants were less likely to live with married parents (59% vs. 53%) and more likely to live with cohabiting parents (29% vs. 20%) than children in the United States (Landale, Oropesa, Noah, 2014). As a result of immigration, stability in the family is non-existent.