Even in a family with a dual parent household things have changed since the fifties and sixties. In the seventies the woman’s movement gained equal opportunities in the workplace and women started to work along with their husbands. This factor along with the need for more income in order to support families took mothers out of the home, significantly changing the family structure, and placing children in day care. Due to busy work schedules and hectic schedules families started to not be the first priority. Everyone went their separate ways every morning and wouldn’t see each other again until the evening, when parents were worn out from work (Hersch 1998). This put strain on the family structure that still remains today.

These family structures which leaves the children to raise themselves forces the adolescents to find alternative support systems, and they find that the only community that they can rely on in the present day is the community of peers. Friends become the psuedo family. This is obviously a flawed system. Children should be looking to their parents for advise and information, they are older and know more, but when parents or any elders aren’t available they end up looking to friends, who are not well-informed and are just as immature as they are. The family structure has become an institution, which relies on the motto of to each his own. I don’t think that this is the best system for raising a child. They need guidance and parenting that they cannot do on their own.

ir parent’s society. They face many more things at much younger ages than their parents did. This causes parents to have a difficult time understanding what their children are going through and relating to them.

In the past century the typical family structure has changed dramatically. Divorce rates have shot up to fifty percent of all marriages fail, along with an increase in unmarried cohabitation, and out of wedlock births (Thornton 2001). Not only did these changes occur but the attitudes towards these life choices have changed as well. People are now more open and tolerant, different structures for families are not as stigmatized. The people who partake in these supposedly unorthodox relationships and actions within relationships are not as ostracized for not fitting the mold of the perfect ‘nuclear’ family. In a poll in 1995, ninety percent of the participants said that they believed that society should value all types of family structures (Coontz 1997).

Another change in behavior in the past few decades has been the increase of unmarried couples living together. The number of couples cohabitating increased six hundred percent from 1970 to 1996 (Horn 1998). This very taboo subject in the fifties and sixties (Thornton 2001) is now commonplace and is not viewed as an experimental or radical decision by most of the general public. This practice is now so accepted that even mothers find it an acceptable living arrangement as long as there are plans for the couple to marry in the future (Thornton 2001). Although cohabitation in theory should work in a testing the waters sort of way, it causes t

Some topics in this essay:
Summary Findings, Middle America, thornton 2001, , family structure, family structures, hersch 1998, raise child, sun 2001, single parent, whitehead 2001, change family, single woman, woman bear raise, change family structure, graph vanneman 2000, single woman bear, ideal family structure,