Single Mother Care Essay Research Paper Comparing

Single Mother Care Essay, Research Paper

Comparing its structure and function as it was in 1960 with what it had become

in 1990 can highlight the dramatic changes in the American family. Until 1960

most Americans shared a common set of beliefs about family life; family should

consist of a husband and wife living together with their children. The father

should be the head of the family, earn the family’s income, and give his name to

his wife and children. The mother’s main tasks were to support and enable her

husband’s goals, guide her children’s development, look after the home, and set

a moral tone for the family. Marriage was an enduring obligation for better or

worse and this was due much to a conscious effort to maintain strong ties with

children. The husband and wife jointly coped with stresses. As parents, they had

an overriding responsibility for the well being of their children during the

early years-until their children entered school, they were almost solely

responsible. Even later, it was the parents who had the primary duty of guiding

their children’s education and discipline. Of course, even in 1960, families

recognized the difficulty of converting these ideals into reality. Still, they

devoted immense effort to approximating them in practice. As it turned out, the

mother, who worked only minimally–was the parent most frequently successful in

spending the most time with her children. Consequently, youngsters were almost

always around a parental figure — they were well-disciplined and often very

close with the maternal parent who cooked for them, played with them, and saw

them off to and home from school each day. Over the past three decades these

ideals, although they are still recognizable, have been drastically modified

across all social classes. Women have joined the paid labor force in great

numbers stimulated both by economic need and a new belief in their capabilities

and right to pursue opportunities. Americans in 1992 are far more likely than in

earlier times to postpone marriage. Single parent families–typically consisting

of a mother with no adult male and very often no other adult person present-have

become common. Today at least half of all marriages end in divorce (Gembrowski

3). Most adults no longer believe that couples should stay married because

divorce might harm their children. Of course, these contemporary realities have

great consequential impact on mother-child relationships and child development;

even from an early age. Survey research shows a great decrease in the proportion

of women favoring large families, an upsurge in their assertiveness about

meeting personal needs, and an attempt by women to balance their needs with

those of their children and the men in their lives (Burgess & Conger 1164).

A clear and increasing majority of women believe that both husband and wife

should be able to work, should have roughly similar opportunities, and should

share household responsibilities and the tasks of child rearing. A majority of

mothers of preschool children now work outside the home. A growing minority of

young married women, often highly educated and career oriented, are choosing not

to have any children and have little interest in children’s issues-yet one more

indication of the dramatic transformation of American families that has been

taking place in recent decades (Bousha & Twentyman 106). It is unavoidable

that those mothers who work simply are not there as much for their children. In

fact, in many cases the relationship between the contemporary mother and her

children is similar to the age-old traditional role of the father and his

children. Often, the mother is indeed a strong-minded disciplinarian in the

evening after work≈but she is very frequently not much more than that. To

very children, care is a nursery or some school of others with caregivers. To

the pre-adolescent youth, care is either a baby-sitter, nanny, or just phone

call to ‘mom’ after work–if even that much. In some of the more positive cases,

this creates an early sense of responsibility and independence for the child.

But more commonly, it is known to invite poor behavior, recklessness, and even

accidents at home when the mother is not there. Some children become despondent;

others grow adamantly rebellious. But regardless of patternistic character, they

all reportedly exhibit a diminished sense of relationship with their mother.

With regard to interpersonal signals, today’s working mothers are unlikely to

respond to child signals and more likely to initiate spontaneously nonreciprocal

types of interaction, such as requests and demands (Aragona & Eyeberg 599).

I infer that this comes in part from the pressures and stresses of their own

busy work schedules (plus they are still usually left with a plethora of

time-consuming "mothering" responsibilities)

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