Definition_of_Family

How We Define Family Now According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a family is "a group of two or more people who reside together and who are related by birth, marriage, or adoption". Whenever we think of a family we picture a happy family that consist of a father, mother, and then one or two children and maybe a pet. We believe this is how a family is to be because this was imbedded in our minds by sitcoms such as Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Donna Reed Show. The definition of family has changed throughout the years though; it used to be where the wife of the family stayed home and took care of the house and children, but now in this century some women are the breadwinners in their family. It used to be where the father would come home from a full time job and just relax at home with his family; now some men have trouble finding work and maintaining a full time job and are expected to help around the house. Dinner around a table talking about their day was what it was like decades ago, but now its dinner on TV trays in separate rooms with barely any conversation to be heard over the television. Are families drifting apart with the use of everyday technology and their lifestyles' All families are different; they have different cultures, beliefs, ideals, and pasts. Although the picture of what a family is supposed to look like is changing, up until quite recently most Americans of our era considered the nuclear family as the ideal family to have. Men and women were expected to marry and raise children so that they can have a good future to take care of them later on. The children, upon reaching adulthood, were to leave their parents homes and follow the example they were showed their whole life, and thus the cycle began all over again. Family values are different for every ethnicity. An example would be that Latino and Hispanic families are where the child will grow up to be more successful than their parents and take care of them when they can no longer take care of themselves. In “The Color of Family Ties” Naomi Gerstel and Natalia Sarkisian have a study that shows that the nuclear family tend to ignore extended because they believe that it will take away from their immediate family. The families would be more close knit than that of white families. With technology today we have many methods of communication that generations in the past never had and it has created a rift in society; a communication rift. The dinner conversations that used to happen when we were all younger and technology was more limited don’t happen anymore. In my family my parents eat in the living room while my brother and I eat in the den, watching separate televisions and even we have our own television my brother still plays on his iPod or new phone instead of actually watching the show or movie.. The only communication that goes on at dinner is the sound of the two separate televisions, my parents when they want a refill for their drink, or when one of us has to ask someone in the other room a question. My parents push for conversations all of the time, how our day was, do we have any homework, or did we need any help with homework, yet every moment we are at home all of us are on some piece of technology. Whether it be from watching television, working on a computer, playing a video game, and so many other things that society has made it where we can’t go a second without glimpsing at some sort of technology. In a family household there isn’t anything that we can do that isn’t dealing with an electronic device and taking you away from spending time with your family. Cell phones are always by our sides, in our pockets, or in our hands, there are even moments where people text their family members or friends that are inside the same house in the next room or worse in the same room. Communication is almost to the point where we don’t talk face to face anymore. I suppose the big definition of family properly includes children. For without them, all we are left with is a pair or a group of adults. On babble.com they have an article that has an eight year study funded by a grant to the University of Denver from the National Institutes of Health showed 90% of couples expressed marital dissatisfaction once the first child was born. Another unrelated study in 2006 showed “parents are generally more depressed than non-parents”. In “The Accordion Family” by Katherine S. Newman, Newman discusses adults that are in their mid-20’s and are still living with their parents, because they cannot hold a job and buy their own house or they refuse to leave the comforts of home. We have this today still where the sons are more likely to stay at home with the parents well into their adult life than the daughters. My uncle stayed to live my grandparents until the day both of them died; he had lived in an apartment at one time but couldn’t maintain the bill. Since they have died he has sold the house and moved into a different apartment that he has maintained. He lives by himself and his dog; he has a hard time finding work, is an alcoholic, and can’t get his head out of the past. My mom when she got married at the age of twenty she moved out but still lived close enough to her parents and held contact. She lived her life beyond her childhood home even though she did look back occasionally. The definition of family has changed so much in the past few decades than it has ever before; family values differs with social class and not ethnicity, communication between the members of families has started to have no voice and is just text on a bright screen, and children can be the cause for the failure of a marriage and they can equally be responsible for helping a marriage with the hardships that they go through raising the child. When family values and communication become none existent that is going to be too late to worry about reclaiming old family ties. Works Cited Appleton, Michael. Photograph. N.d. Columbo, Cullen, and Lisle 62. Print. Bolante, Anthony. Photograph. N. d. Columbo, Cullen, and Lisle 22-26. Print. Burger, Erika. Photograph of Thomas Jefferson’s descendents. N.d. Columbo, Cullen, and Lisle 57. Print. Cast, Roz. More Nontraditional Family Units. Cartoon. Columbo, Cullen, and Lisle 53. Print. Columbo, Gary, Robert Cullen, and Bonnie Lisle, eds. 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