13

13. American family: stages of marriage relationship; modern tendencies.

Americans view family as a group whose primary purpose is to advance the happiness of individual members. The result is that the needs of each individual take priority in life of the family. So the basic American value is equality of opportunity, & name & honour are less important.

The American desire for freedom from outside control clearly extends to the family. Americans don’t like to have controls placed on them by other family members.

The idea of equality also affects the relationships between husbands & wives. The institution of marriage in the USA has experienced 4 stages of development. In each new stage wives have increased the degree of equality with their husbands & have gained more power within the family.

Stage 1. Wife as Servant to Husband. Husbands & wives both had family duties, the wife had no power, her earnings belonged to her husband.

Stage 2. Husband – head, wife – helper. More wives were able to support themselves. The opportunity to work outside the house increased wives’ power. Husbands could no longer make family decisions alone, wives were their advisers. But still husband’s word was final.

Stage 3. Husband – senior partner, wife – junior partner. More & more wives took jobs ouside home. Her income became important in maintaining the family, her power to affect the outcome of family decisions also became greater, but still she wasn’t an equal. Husband provided most of the family income.

Stage 4. Husband, wife – equal partners. Women have come to believe that they should be equal partners in their marriages. The wife pursues a full-time, which has equal importance to her husband’s.

The American family is a nuclear family, consisting usually of a husband, wife & children who live in their own house/ apartment. Grandparents rarely live with them & relatives almost never. Married American adults will name their husband/ wife & children as their immediate family. If they mention grandparents & relatives, it’s called extended family. Like many other aspects of American life, families are changing. There are more & more households in which both parents work, & in which the males take on household responsibilities. There are also single parent families, usually it is a woman with one or more children. It’s common to find unmarried couples living together, so-called ‘blended families’ composed of a man, a woman & both their children from pervious marriages.

In American family children get considerable attention. The families are called child-centered, where children ‘s needs, interests & preferences strongly influence the way parents spend time & money.

In American families usually both parents work full-time, because there are so many things they want. But in some families the wife may be the one going off to work while the husband is at home with the baby & the housework.

Happiness, which is based on companionship, is also one of the family values. But a family may not always be happy, so the way out is the divorce, which is easy to obtain. America is no-fault divorce nation, it means that a couple states that they can no longer live happily together, that they have irreconcilable differences & that it is neither partner’s fault.

One more American value is love & respect of parents. Elderly Americans do not want to be a burden to their children, & if they are ill or handicapped, a nursing home is the way out for working children.

To make a conclusion, the values reinforced through American family are: individual freedom, equality of opportunity, independence & self-reliance, informality & love of parents.