The Result

50-72 points: The atmosphere in your family is practically always aggressive. Don’t forget that the relationship with parents is your responsibility too. You ought to take the first step as you are younger and stronger.

25-49 points: It won’t do you any good to quarrel with your parents, you will have to make up in the end. As soon as you take into consideration that your parents have feelings, wishes and needs, they will recognize you as their equal.

15-24 points: Sometimes misunderstanding, irritation and despair darken the relationships with your parents. There are no ideal families you know but practically all people try to improve their relations with family members by seeking different ways. It’s worth discussing and solving problems together.

Under 15 points: If you have answered the questions honestly, you can conclude that your relationship with your parents is rather happy. But sometimes such an idyll can hide your weakness, dependence on parents and disinclination to become an independent person.

By Kovalenko Daria

Unit 7

Divorce in Great Britain

In the past, families tended to stay together. They felt it was their duty to do this and that marriage was for life. Divorce was not socially acceptable. It was a commonly held view that a bad marriage was better than no marriage at all.

In Britain, as in many industrialized societies, there has been a steady rise in the numbers of divorces. The Second World War disrupted a lot of marriages, due to enforced separation and hasty marriages which were later regretted. Immediately after the war there were a record number of divorces and the proportion of marriages involving a divorced partner grew from 2% in 1940 to 32% in 1985.

Legal changes this century have made it much easier to get a divorce. The most dramatic change resulted from the 1971 divorce law. The law stated that there needed to be only one reason for a divorce petition – the “irretrievable breakdown of marriage”. This was a much wider category than the previous ones of cruelty, insanity, desertion or adultery.

The change in the law had an immediate effect. In 1972 there were over 119,000 divorces in England and Wales and the rate has continued to rise. The total number in 1990 was over 153,000, around 2% higher than in 1989. Proposed laws may make divorce even easier.

Couples can now afford the legal side of getting and surviving a divorce more easily than at any time in the past. However, for many families it is still an economic disaster as well as being emotionally difficult.

Another possible reason behind the rise in the divorce rate is the changing attitude to marriage itself. The traditional Christian approach to marriage has been against divorce. As the Church becomes less influential in the UK, the view of marriage as a union for life has weakened. The result is that the break-up of a marriage is seen as less of a normal crisis and more as a matter of personal happiness.

Perhaps the people most affected by a divorce are the children. According to current forecasts, about 20% of children in Britain will experience family breakdown by the age of 16. There has been growing concern for such children, who are usually between the ages of five and ten. Recent laws indicated that first consideration should be given to the welfare of the children when making financial arrangements after a divorce.

If marriage is going through a troubled time, the partners may ask for help from the voluntary counsellors of an organization which is called “Relate” (formerly the Marriage Guidance Council).

Unit 8 Russian Family Values

If you ask most representatives of today’s younger generation what family values mean, their responses will be shocking. There is no USSR with its motto “a family is a cell of the society”, which pointed out that every family should have the same set of values to be an equal part of the society. A family is a group consisting of one or two parents and their children. So, parents were responsible for bringing up obedient, able-bodied, and respectful adult children.

In the past it was common for three generations – grandparents, parents and children – to live together. People found living in a multi-generation home quite normal. So it was grandparents who took care of children and their set of values. Now older people live on their own but with rising prices most families cannot survive on one parents’ salary. So, sometimes parents depend on grandparents in terms of money because their income is too low to survive.

Parents are often busy at work trying to earn as much money as possible. As a result, children are not well supervised; they are not even given advice, so they have to live on their own.

Whole generations are growing up addicted to the telly. Food is left uneaten, homework left undone and sleep is lost. Children are kept quiet by putting them in the living room and turning on the TV set. It does not matter to their parents what the children watch: rubbish commercials or spectacles of sadism and violence, because they are too busy earning money.

As a result children try to imitate TV values. They become indifferent when people are killed. They die for alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs, – not only marijuana, but cocaine. They start close intimate relationship, not taking responsibility. So women become mothers while they are still teenagers. Many of these teenaged mothers are not married.

But I hope that the younger generation will not absorb the family values of an older one and parents will take care of their children. Then everything in our country will be OK.

By Aleksey Prokofiev