Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Family gender roles
A family is made up of two or more people who are related by marriage or birth. Most families are made up of a father, a mother and the children. Married couples make up the largest part of U.S. households. This comes to 55.5 million. The second most household is 31 million and consist of people living alone. 2. What is a nuclear family? A nuclear family consists of a married father and mother, and the children. A nuclear family can be biological or adopted. A nuclear family may also include a household with one parent (mother or father) and children. In a nuclear family, also called nuclear household, there could be one or more children related to the parent(s) by birth or by adoption. 3. Describe family trends in the historical context? …show more content…
There were very few big cities. During the first and second world wars the communities are typical in the forms of household with a structure of the nuclear family. This is constituted of parents and children as well as childless couple. The nuclear homes served the economic purpose of members working together on farm and in family businesses. The gown-up children live near their parents thus creating communities of close multigenerational kinships. After second world war, there significant changes to kingships, relationships in communities, and the responsibilities of governments. There was shift to two-parent and one-parent family households. By the dmd-1960s family sizes began to become smaller, which marks and end to the postwar baby boom
Census Bureau, the definition of family consists of two or more individuals related by blood, marriage, or adoption living in the same home. The authors define family as a social group whose members are bound together with legal, emotional, or biological ties, or any combination of the three. The definition of the U.S. Census Bureau seems a little outdated and confined. This definition seems to more define nuclear families and not those who break the norms. Many relationships are long distance, same-sex, or practice cohabitation. This definition leaves out many contemporary families, similar to the ones just discussed. This is the exact reason that the authors prefer their definition over the U.S. Census Bureaus. The textbook definition is more open-minded to contemporary and nuclear families the same.
Family used to be a single unit, consisting of a husband, wife and children. This unit was widely thought as a group based on marriage and biological parenthood as sharing a common residence and united by ties of affection, obligations, care, support, and a sense of common identity. However, due to the change in values, laws, family structure and social trends, the definition of family has been defined as a married or cohabiting couple with or without children living under one roof, children may be dependent or independent. (Office for national statistics) (2006)
Thus these elite necessities prompted high rates of fertility - couples during and after the world war two wedded at an ever more youthful age with the posterity therefore more various - creating the desire for, without a doubt, more commodious housing. Greater homes and greater families suggested a greater workload for spouses and mothers and requested a more noticeable obligation to the private space. Extending auto proprietorship both made the suburb possible and ensured its isolating effect upon housewives: public transport was seen immaterial, disregarding the way that most families had one vehicle which was utilized by work-away
My family that lives with me for the most part of the year is my two parents, mom and dad, and two siblings, one brother and one sister. One-third of the year my dad’s mom lives with us. She goes to Arizona from September to April. While my grandma does not live with us, I would say that we are close to your typical “nuclear” family. A nuclear family is usually two parents and their children, so we fit that when my grandma does not live with us. However, when my grandma does live with us, I would say we stray away from the “nuclear” family because grandparents do not typically live with you.
Nuclear families had a mom, dad, and perfect children who seemed like they each had their own special role that tied in to the family. The moms main role was mostly to stay home to do housework while also taking care of the children. The dads would be the ones who go to work and bring home money. Children, when not a lot school, helped around the house and did small chores for their parents. These families would usually be together to watch sitcoms that taught them different ideas. Coontz writes, “People didn’t watch these shows to see their own lives reflected back at them. They watched them to see how families were supposed to live - and also to get a little reassurance that they were headed in the right direction.” As great as all of these sitcoms were, they said nothing about race, class, or politics. This is why people desire the 1950’s nuclear family. They won't have to deal with any conflicts that go on today. In the 1950’s you could just ignore racial and political problems. Now they are in everybodies daily
Family is a very fluid word, it can serve a different meaning to everyone. In this case however, I will be discussing biological family systems. There are many demographic types of households, such as husband- wife, single parent, and living alone. In Lumberton, my home town, there are approximately 2700 husband- wife homes, approximately 2500 single parent homes, and 380 living alone homes. Of the single parent homes, 441 were male led single parent homes, which means the father had custody of the children.
A family might include anyone related by blood or by adoption such as: step parents, grandparents acting as parents, and even brothers and sisters sharing the same household. However, worldwide “the family is regarded as the most ba...
There has been quite a bit of research done on what a family in America today looks like. In fact, the American family is changing and the family unit is undergoing challenging fluctuations. There really isn’t one typical American family unit any long and families are more diverse now than in times past. Parents in America today are less likely to be married when they decide to have children and are more likely to be older and more educated. Families can consist of two parent households, single family households, blended households, same sex households and households wherein unrelated people live together due to economic circumstances. In fact, two parent households in America is on the decline and is no longer the definition of a family. How you define your family is up to you.
The family structures of a childless and sole parent family structure consist of specific aspects and factors which define these two structures. Regarding childless family structures, according to www.edu.pe.ca it’s defined as “a group of people from all kinds of backgrounds and all walks of life who, for whatever reason, have never had children”.
Following Murdock’s idea of the nuclear family, further family types were devised. According to Office for National Statistics (2013) the most common family type is married couple with or without children, making up 12.3 million families out of 18.2 million families in total, in the UK. The family is arguably one of the most important aspects of society and has an essential part in satisfying the emotional and physical requirements of an individual, which is compulsory for attaining economic and social growth. The other most common family types include, lone parent families, cohabiting couple families, same sex cohabiting families, extended families and blended families. It has been argued that a family does not to be a nuclear one to function effectively. As long as a family provides a support system for the adults and children within it, then it will be a positive family structure. However, it should be noted that the rise in break downs of the nuclear family, and the decrease of extended families, has significantly increased anxiety and worry in young children, and a considerable growth in the number of teenagers and adults suffering from depression.
The extended family predominated pre-industrially because of the need for a large family to help tend the land or look after those who were unable to do so. Infant mortality was high so you had to produce more children to be sure of having enough help. The family were a unit of production producing only the goods needed to survive and trading the remainder. Following the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, it was replaced by the nuclear family which was a unit of consumption as family members became wage earners and families needed to become more geographically mobile and move to where they could find work.
First of all, there is a need to explain the difference between household and family and give the definition of the family from the sociological point of view. According to Braun (2011), a household is either one person or a group of people who live at the same address and share living dispositions. They
So what makes a family then? If you asked anyone they would probably give you a basic surface level answer of two parents and their kids. This answer is pretty close the definition found in an Oxford dictionary of “a group consisting of two parents and their children
What is family? When people think of family they think of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, etc. Family are the people that we grow up around and they have a big impact on how we see certain things in life. The Merriam-Webster Online dictionary says family is a group of people who are related to each other. However, the definition might shift as people go from being children to adolescence then to adults.
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.