8. American family: stages if 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 and name and honor are less important.

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

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

STAGE 1 Wife as a servant to her husband. Husbands and wives both had family duties,but wife had no power,her earning 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 and more wives took jobs outside the 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 partner. 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 persues a full-time jos,which has equal importance to her husband’s.

The American family is a nuclear family, consisting usually of a husband,wife and children who live in their own house\apartment. Grandparents rarely live with them and relatives almost never. Married American adults will name their husband\wife and children as their immediate family. If they mention grandparents and relatives it is called extended family. Like many other aspects of American life, families are changing. There are more and less households in which both parents work, and in which the males take household responsibilities. There are also single-parent families,usually it is a women with 1 or more children. It is common to find unmarried couples living together, so called “ blended families”,composed of a man and a woman and both their children from previous marriages.

In American families children get considerable attention. The families are called child-centred, where children’s need, interesnts and preferences strongly influence the way their parents spend their time and money.

In American families usually both parents work full-time,because there are so many things they want.( the problem of latch-key children) But in some families the wife may be the one going off to work while the husband is at home with the baby and 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 and that it is neither parents’ fault.

One more American value is love and respect of parents. Elderly Americans do not want to be a burden to their children, and 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 and self-reliance, informality and love of parents.