Brave New Family

The "brave new family": a model for a flawless family policy

This assignment is an exercise in comprehensive thinking about policy making and families. You are asked to construct a model of a much improved family system for the USA, to be effective by the year 2010. What, in you opinion, would the most optimal family system look like? The concept of "family system" refers to the system made up of present-day families, including the opinions held by the majority of citizens as they ought to be. Of course, none of us has full knowledge about every aspect of either actual families or what people think ideal families should look like. Don't worry about the incompleteness of your knowledge: begin your discussion with your personal opinion, belief, or impression of what the present-day family system in the USA looks like, and what the majority of the Americans believe families should look like.

In this paper, you need to assess of what needs to be changed in families currently - a critique of the present-day family system. Because you will discuss the main problems, shortcomings, and defects of our current system (including what is wrong with American's notions of the ideal family), your critique will constitute the backdrop for much better, if not perfect, family system.

Brave New Family Description

1. The description of the current system's shortcomings (a minimum three).
2. The description of the major structural changes required to bring about your improved family system. You need to propose changes to each of the three shortcomings that you described in the first part of your paper.
3. The important societal and cultural changes required to ensure that a majority of people freely accept, value, and are willing to make sacrifices to maintain this improved (and perhaps utopian) family system.
4. A brief description of how these changes would be instituted- how they would come about. In schools? In mass media? In the legislature? Through the efforts of elected officials such as the president? In other institution?
5. Provide a personal conclusion that not only repeats what you had said in introduction but provides your own reflection of whether your system is feasible, possible, or doable, and if it is, say how we all can benefit as a society from implementing it.

Model Brave New Family

Your model has to be coherent and logical. The changes that you propose must be consistent with the information that you learned in class and through the assigned readings. That is, for example, if you arrange for all mothers to be at home taking care of their children, you must also discuss the implications of this arrangement for a family income, marital interactions, etc. Discuss the larger context: do not speak only of nuclear families as they were unconnected to a larger society. The model you propose may seem unlikely but it must be possible (do not ship all the criminals to Mars and marry all the unwed mothers to all the divorced man out there!). You should provide some discussion of how your model accommodates families in different social classes, preferably including the very rich and the very poor. While you don't have to cite sources when describing your proposed system, you need to cite sources when you are describing and critiquing the present-day family system.