American family

Most American families consist of a mother, a father, and three or four children living at home. There may be relatives — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and in-laws in the same community, but American families usually maintain separate households. This familial structure is knows as the "nuclear fam­ily." It is unusual for members of the family other than the hus­band, wife, and children to live together. Occasionally an aging grandparent may live with the family, but this arrangement is usually not considered desirable. Although the nuclear family unit is economically independent of the rest of the family, members of the whole family group often maintain close kinship ties.Vis­iting between parents and their married children and between married sisters and brothers is frequent when they live close to each other. If they live in different communities, they keep in touch by writing letters and by telephone.

In the American family the husband and wife usually share important decision making. When the children are old enough, they participate as well.Foreign observers are frequently amazed by the permissiveness of American parents. The, old rule that "children; should be seen and riot heard" is rarely followed, and children are often allowed to do what they wish without strict parental control. The father seldom expects his children to obey him without question, and children are encouraged to be inde­pendent at an early age. Some people believe that American par­ents carry this freedom too far. Young people are expected to break away from their parental families by the time they have reached their late teens or early twenties. Indeed, not to do so is often regarded as a failure, a kind of weak dependence.

This pattern of independence often results in serious prob­lems for the aging parents of a quclear family. The job-retirement age is usually 65. The children have left home, married, and set up their own households. Elderly couples feel useless and lonely with neither an occupation nor a close family group.'Many com munities and church groups sponsor social centers for "senior citizens." At these centers older mep and women can make friends and participate in a variety of planned activitiesiincluding games, trips, lectures, and discussion groups. These programs may help some old people, but they do not provide the complete solution to the problems of old age.

Marriage in the united states

Americans have one of the highest marriage rates among the industrial nations. Other countries with high marriage rates are Russia, Egypt, and Japan. This has always been so. More than 90 percent of the members of every birth cohort since the early 1800s have eventually married.

Yet the marriage rate has undergone great fluctuations in the past forty years. This is reflected mainly in the behavior of people between the age of 20 and 24. The percentage of men and women in this age group who have never married started to fall at the beginning of World War II and reached a low point by the end of the 1960s. At that time the median age at first marriage was 22.5 for men and 20.2 for women. Thereafter the percentage rose steadily for twenty years, so that by 1984 more than half of the women in the United States between,the ages of 20 and 24 had never been married.

Paul Glick and Arthur Norton offer several reasons for this trend. During the ^Vietnam War many young men postponed marriage in order to enter service or to avoid military service by continuing their education! Women tended to stay in school and then work to support themselves. Moreover, during the late 1960s and early 1970s the children born duringthe post-World War II baby boom came of age and competed for jobs. Because many people prefer to postpone marriage until they can get a job and afford to set up a household and raise a family, the tight job market resulted in a lower marriage rate.