American family: stages of marriage relationship; modern tendencies.

Americans view family as a group, whose primary purpose is to advance the happiness of individual members. The result is that the needs of each individual take priority in life of the family. So the basic American value is equality of opportunity and name and honor are less important.

The American desire for freedom from outside control clearly extends to the family. Americans do not like to have controls placed on them by other family members.

The idea of equality also affects the relationships between husbands and wives. The institution of marriage in the USA has experienced 4 stages of development. In each new state wives have increased the degree of equality with their husbands and have gained more power within the family.

STAGE 1 Wife as a servant to her husband. Husbands and wives both had family duties, but wife had no power, her earning belonged to her husband.

STAGE 2 Husband-Head, Wife-Helper. More wives were able to support themselves. The opportunity to work outside the house increased wives’ power. Husbands could no longer make family decisions alone, wives were their advisers. But still husband’s word was final.

STAGE 3 Husband-Senior partner, Wife-Junior partner. More and more wives took jobs outside the home. Her income became important in maintaining the family, her power to affect the outcome of family decisions also became greater, but still she wasn’t an equal partner. Husband provided most of the family income.

STAGE 4 Husband-Wife Equal partners. Women have come to believe that they should be equal partners in their marriages. The wife persues a full-time jobs, which have equal importance to her husband’s.

The American family is a nuclear family, consisting usually of a husband, wife and children who live in their own house\apartment. Grandparents rarely live with them and relatives almost never. Married American adults will name their husband\wife and children as their immediate family. If they mention grandparents and relatives it is called extended family. Like many other aspects of American life, families are changing. There are more and less households in which both parents work, and in which the males take household responsibilities. There are also single-parent families, usually it is a woman with 1 or more children. It is common to find unmarried couples living together, so called “blended families”, composed of a man and a woman and both their children from previous marriages.

In American families children get considerable attention. The families are called child-centred, where children’s need, interests and preferences strongly influence the way their parents spend their time and money.

In American families usually both parents work full-time, because there are so many things they want.( the problem of latch-key children) But in some families the wife may be the one going off to work while the husband is at home with the baby and the housework.

Happiness which is based on companionship is also one of the family values. But a family may not always be happy, so the way out is the divorce, which is easy to obtain. America is ‘no-fault’ divorce nation, it means that a couple states that they can no longer live happily together, that they have irreconcilable differences and that it is neither parents’ fault.

One more American value is love and respect of parents. Elderly Americans do not want to be a burden to their children, and if they are ill or handicapped a nursing home is the way out for working children.

To make a conclusion the values reinforced through American family are individual freedom, equality of opportunity, independence and self-reliance, informality and love of parents.

14. American family: values and gender roles in the family and society.

Americans view family as a group, whose primary purpose is to advance the happiness of individual members. The result is that the needs of each individual take priority in life of the family. So the basic American value is equality of opportunity and name and honor are less important.

The American desire for freedom from outside control clearly extends to the family. Americans do not like to have controls placed on them by other family members.

Independence and self-reliance are two more important values. Most American children live with their parents at least until they finish high school at age 17\18. Then may go away to college, leaving some parents sad and lovely in their empty nest, and others enjoying their release from parental responsibilities. Some children live with their parents until their marriage, but may return to Mom and Dad in case of divorce. Middle-aged or elderly people seldom live with their grown-up children. Older people don’t want to be burden to their children. If they are ill or handicapped they prefer to live at nursing houses or at the living quarters for older people who don’t need constant nursing care but cant do shopping and cooking for themselves.

As the main value is the equality of opportunity, it also affected the relationships between husband and wife, and the institution of marriage in the USA has experienced 4 stages of development. STAGE 1 Wife as a servant to her husband. ,STAGE 2 Husband-Head, Wife-Helper. ,STAGE 3 Husband-Senior partner,Wife-Junior partner..STAGE 4 Husband-Wife Equal partners

So the evaluation of women’s role in the family and society is clearly seen from these stages. And now a wife can become even the breadwinner in the family. She may be the one going off to work while the husband is at home with the baby and the housework. But occupation of husband is usually a temporary not a lifelong career.

Like any other family, American family may face a number of problems. For example, the divorce rate slowly and steadily increases. As a result, there happens that of nuclear family and more and more singled parent family appears. Americans may have problems with their children, they call the period of adolescence as the time of turmoil. Children are expected to be self-centred,moody and uncooperative, they want to establish their personal identities and separate from others in the family. So this problem is called ”rebellious teenager”. One more problem is the “empty nest syndrome”. It refers to the psychological impact on the parents, esp. the mother when the last child leaves home. The syndrome is the combination of boredom, depression and purposelessness.

Another major turning point is likely to come when the parents’ parents become enfeebled or die. It is usually considered a difficult situation when an aged parent is living with grown children, thus ideas about independence and self-sufficiency make the situation of enforced dependency extremely uncomfortable both for the elderly and their children.

Family life in Great Britain

Most young people eventually get married, buy or rent a house or flat of their own and start a family. However, a great many changes are taking place in this pattern of behavior. As in many other Western European countries, more and more men and women are living together without being married. In the mid 1980s more than a quarter of new brides had lived with their husbands before marriage, compared with 8 per cent in 1970. People are also getting married later than they used to.

However marriage is still popular even among those whose first marriage has failed. In fact, in 36 per cent of all marriages one of both partners have already been married and divorced. Britain now has the highest divorce rate in Europe and about 10 per cent of children live with only one parent.

Another trend is towards smaller households. Very few children now grow up in large families and more and more adults are living alone (25 per cent in l987). Many of the people who live alone are elderly; it is unusual to find three generations living in one house as they used to do in the past. It is quite common for close relatives to live in different parts of the country and many people hardly ever meet their uncles, aunts and cousins. One reason for this is that British people move house every five years on average. They do this in order to change jobs or to buy a bigger or better house.(From “Britain Today”, Longman, 1996.)

Identity. The family

In comparison with most other places in the world, family identity is rather weak in Britain, especially in England. Of course, the family unit is still the basic living arrangement for most people. But in Britain this definitely means the nuclear family. There is little sense of extended family identity, except among some racial minorities. This is reflected in the size and composition of households. It is unusual for adults of different generations within the family to live together. The average number of people living in each household in Britain is lower than in most other European countries. The proportion of elderly people living alone is similarly high.

Significant family events such as weddings, births and funerals are not automatically accompanied by large gatherings of people. It is still common to appoint people to certain roles on such occasions, such as ‘best man’ at a wedding, or godmother and godfather when a child is born. But for most people these appointments are of sentimental significance only. They do not imply lifelong responsibility. In fact, family gatherings of any kind beyond the household unit are rare. For most people, they are confined to the Christmas period.

Even the stereotyped nuclear family of father, mother and children is becoming less common. Britain has a higher rate of divorce than anywhere else in Europe except Denmark and the proportion of children born outside marriage has risen dramatically and is also one of the highest (about a third of all births). However, these trends do not necessarily mean that the nuclear family is disappearing. Divorces have increased, but the majority of marriages in Britain (about 55%) do not break down. In addition, it is notable that about three-quarters of all births outside marriage are officially registered by both parents and more than half of the children concerned are born to parents who are living together at the time. (From “Britain” by James O’Driscoll, Oxford, l995)

Men and women

Generally speaking, British people invest about the same amount of their identity in their gender as people in other parts of northern Europe do. On the one hand, society no longer overtly endorses differences in the public and social roles of men and women, and it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex. On the other hand, people still (often unconsciously) expect a fairly large number of differences in everyday behaviour and domestic roles.

In terms of everyday habits and mannerisms, British society probably expects a sharper difference between the sexes than most other European societies do. For example, it is still far more acceptable for a man to look untidy and scruffy than it is for a woman; and it is still far more acceptable for a woman to display emotions and be demonstrably friendly than it is for a man to do so.

As far as roles are concerned, most people assume that a family’s financial situation is not just the responsibility of the man. On the other hand, they would still normally compliment the woman, not the man, on a beautifully decorated or well-kept house. Everyday care of the children is still seen as mainly the woman’s responsibility. Although almost as many women have jobs as men, nearly half of the jobs done by women are part-time. In fact, the majority of mothers with children under the age of twelve either have no job or work only during school hours. Men certainly take a more active domestic role than they did forty years ago. Some things, however, never seem to change. A comparison of child-rearing habits of the l950s and the l980s showed that the proportion of men who never changed a baby’s nappy had remained the same (40%).

In general, the sharpest distinction between the expected roles and behaviour of the two sexes is found in the lower and upper classes. The distinction is far less clear among the middle classes, but it is still there.

At the public level there are contradictions. Britain was one of the first European countries to have a woman Prime Minister and a woman chairperson of debate in its Parliament. However, in the early nineties, only about 5% of MPs were women, only 20% of lawyers in Britain were women, less than 10% of accountants were women and there was one female consultant brain surgeon in the whole country.

At the 1997 election the proportion of women MPs increased sharply (to 18%) and nearly every institution in the country has opened its doors to women now. One of the last to do so was the Anglican Church, which, after much debate, decided in favour of the ordination of women priests in l993. However, there are a few institutions which, at the time of writing, still don’t accept female members – for example, the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London, an association for graduates of these two universities.