Family value changes in America

这篇讲述的是美国家庭价值观变迁的文章。我认为有2个主要变化，第一个变化是，在一个家庭中的妇女地位的提高，特别是传统的母亲或父亲的角色转变为多样化的角色扮演。二是对婚姻家庭观念的转变。

Have you ever considered the role of yourself in your family? Should you take the responsibility of doing housework and nurse the children as a mother? Should you be responsible for making money or taking the trash out on Monday night as a father? No matter the answer is which, why do you think it is your responsibilities or why do you think is not? By my definition, a family is a willing combination of two people in the form of marriage legally, then most of them will have babies to form the small family, but it is not that simple, and there should have love between the family members no matter the love between the couples or the love between children and parents. Once you have a family, you play specific role, however, The role that family members play changes with the family values change in the past 50 years in America. There are 2 major changes in my opinion, the first change is that statue improve of women in a family, especially, the traditional specific role of mother or father change to diversity role-play. And the other is the change of the opinions about marriage and and family.

A family begins in the form of marriage, which is“a union of”,”the celebration of”,”the pleasure of our company” of two people being together legally(Bennett,paragraph 1).” It was how women ensured their financial security, got the father of their children to stick around, and gained access to a host of legal rights“ in the past decades(Bennett,paragraph 2), As you can see, two person willingly get together in the form of marriage under the permission of laws. And many of them will have babies to expand the family, there have husband, wife, fathers and mothers basically. Of course, family is not that simple but complicated. It is the sort which was “watched on television every day”, “the neat patch of lawn, the apple tree, the mother who never once raised her voice, the three lovely children:a Princess, a Kitten, a Bud’s and ,always, the father who knew best.” where love spread in the last decades (Hoffman, paragraph 1).“there are real family values, the same once we knew when we were a children. As far as we were considered the same ones we were considered our mother could cure a fever with a kiss, this may be the only thing we ever need to know about love”(Hoffman, paragraph 12), thus no matter in the past or modern society, love is the core value of a family.

The first change is the statue of women in the family, they used to stay at home as a housewife to do most of the housework and take care of children and rely on their husband in the past.” Since the early 1900s, the Driving force behind marriage, along with procreation, was that women couldn’t land well-paying jobs: we relied on our husbands to survive.(Bennett, paragraph 9) and in even in the 1960s, although”men’s contributions to housework and child-rearing may have doubled,women still do about two-thirds of the housework among dual-earning couples”(Bennett,paragraph 8). However, with “the feminist movement established our rights in the workforce”(Bennett, paragraph 2), women’s roles change and their status improve, they make large number of workforce, become the main income source of a family,  have the equal rights with their husband.”Women now constitute a majority of the workforce, we’re more educated, less religious, and living longer, with vacuum cleaners and washing machines to make domestic life easier. We are also the breadwinner in two thirds of American families”.(Bennett, paragraph 2). It is obvious that the role of women in a family different from the past, they are more independent and more freely in a family.

Secondly, people’s opinions about marriage change, when women are dependent on men and want a marriage to hold the family in the past, now they are more refused to the marriage until they find the right one. We can see from the high divorce rate in America, “the numbers are familiar but staggering:Americans have the highest divorce rate in the western world”(Bennett, paragraph 3). People’s opinion are more open and more compatible, in fact, it is a “motley mix of single parents, same sex couples, and ,yes, unmarried monogamists”(Bennett, paragraph 7). In the past, marriage means long-time with each other, but now as anthropologist says”Human are not meant to be together forever, but in short term, monogamous relationships of three or four years(Bennett, paragraph 7). More and more Americans are reluctant to get married, “Goodbye, marriage, as of 2013,”unwed Americans may find it even more advantageous -financially, anyway-to stay single”(Bennett, paragraph 6). As a matter of fact, people’s opinions about family changes also. Family used to be should like that in the TV with happy father, mother and Children, but as a child who was raised in a single parent family, the author Hoffeman of The Perfect Family tell us “When I growing up, we paid to high a price when we cut ourselves off the rest of the world. We ourselves did not dare to be different. In the safety we created, we became trapped.”(Bennett, paragraph 10). If we have the courage to question do a happy love their children any more than the single mother who works all day? Of course not, family is not that simple as I mentioned above, we need to realize the core value of family-love to feel the change.

Finally, family is a warm word and a harbour where full of love although people’s attitudes toward family change. Family is not just what you see on the television in the past, it is more complicated, and accepting to be different from the traditional family definition seems to reasonable. Women is making a large part of the workforce compared to the past when women are expected to stay at home and take care of children and they become independent from their husband and have more freedom to chase what they want. At the same time, people’s opinions toward marriage and family change, which can be shown in the form of high divorce rate, they are more free when it comes to marriage. It seems the rights of people is respected and the whole society become more equal for women and men and we come to more tolerable the existence of difference, which is a good sign for the achievement of human rights.

Reference
Alice Hoffman. Viewpoint, The perfect family.
Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison. Viewpoint, I DON’T: The Case Against Marriage.


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