American Family

What constitutes the "American Family" is of great debate today. When you are assigned a research paper on the "American Family" you may seem overwhelmed because the topic is very broad. Defining the American Family is also very difficult. Paper Masters can write you a custom research paper on the "American Family" and deliver it to you via e-mail. Some points you will want to include in your paper are as follows:

• Statistics on the American Family
• A demographic overview of families in the United States
• The sociological definition of family
• How the sociological definition of the American Family has changed over the past 100 years
• Major problems the American Family faces today

In sociology research papers, the American Family is examined, and family studies is a popular college class. In general, sociology research papers state the ideal family in America is the nuclear family with a two-parent household and several children. This image of the family, however, is largely an ideal and is not widely supported by the actual composition of a significant number of American families. Because two-thirds of divorces occur to people who have children and substantial levels of single-mother pregnancies, the one-parent household has become very common in the United States. In addition, there is an increase in the number of families in which two individuals have no formalized legal arrangement and live together. These arrangements can affect individuals of different or the same gender, with the possibility of children entering the arrangement either by birth or adoption. Other types of family arrangements include the step family in which one of the adults in the family is not biologically related to the children.

One Parent Families

One of the major problems facing American families is the absence of one parent, which creates both financial difficulties for the family as well as gender role modeling problems for growing children. This problem is fostered by the high divorce rate in the United States as well as the trend toward single child bearing by women. A second major problem for families is the need for parents to work away from the home in order to meet the financial needs of the family. This results in the assignment of many of the parental child-rearing functions to third-party proxies.