SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion

SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion ORDER NOW FOR CUSTOMIZED AND ORIGINAL NURSING PAPERS Unformatted Attachment Preview Family in Transition This page intentionally left blank Family in Transition Seventeenth Edition Arlene S. Skolnick New York University Jerome H. Skolnick New York University Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montréal Toronto Delhi Mexico City São Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo Editor in Chief: Ashley Dodge Publisher: Nancy Roberts Editorial Assistant: Molly White Director of Marketing: Brandy Dawson Executive Marketing Manager: Kelly May Marketing Coordinator: Courtney Stewart Managing Editor: Denise Forlow Program Manager: Mayda Bosco Senior Operations Supervisor: Mary Fischer Operations Specialist: Diane Peirano Art Director: Jayne Conte Cover photo: Diana Ong/Getty Images Cover design: Bruce Kenselaar Director of Digital Media: Brian Hyland Digital Media Project Manager: Tina Gagliostro Full-Service Project Management and Composition: PreMediaGlobal/Anju Joshi Printer/Binder: Courier Corp. Cover Printer: Courier Corp. Text Font: JansonTextLTStd 10/12 Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on page 487. Copyright © 2014, 2011, 2009, by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission(s) to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458 or you may fax your request to 201-236-3290. Many of the designations by manufacturers and seller to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and the publisher was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Family in transition / [edited by] Arlene S. Skolnick, New York University, Jerome H. Skolnick, New York University. SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion — Seventeeth edition. pages cm ISBN-13: 978-0-205-21597-3 ISBN-10: 0-205-21597-1 1. Families. I. Skolnick, Arlene S., 1933- II. Skolnick, Jerome H. HQ518.F336 2014 306.85—dc23 2013009352 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 10: 0-205-21597-1 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-21597-3 Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 Part I • The Changing Family 1 Families Past and Present 13 15 ?Reading 1 William J. Goode / The Theoretical Importance of the Family 15 ?Reading 2 Anthony Giddens / The Global Revolution in Family and Personal Life 27 2 Public Debates and Private Lives 35 ?Reading 3 Sharon Hays / The Mommy Wars: Ambivalence, Ideological Work, and the Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood 35 ?Reading 4 Janet Z. Giele / Decline of the Family: Conservative, Liberal, and Feminist Views 54 Part II • Sex and Gender 3 75 Changing Gender Roles 79 ?Reading 5 Robert M. Jackson / Destined for Equality 79 ?Reading 6 Kathleen Gerson / Falling Back on Plan B: The Children of the Gender Revolution Face Uncharted Territory 87 v vi??Contents 4 Sexuality and Society 103 ?Reading 7 Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Laura Hamilton, and Paula England / Is Hooking Up Bad for Women? 103 ?Reading 8 Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker / Sex and Marriage in the Minds of Emerging Adults 109 5 Courtship and Marriage 119 ?Reading 9 Andrew J. Cherlin / American Marriage in the Early Twenty-First Century 119 ?Reading 10 Arlene Skolnick / Grounds for Marriage: How Relationships Succeed or Fail 140 6 Divorce and Remarriage 151 ?Reading 11 Lawrence M. Friedman / Divorce: The “Silent Revolution” 151 ?Reading 12 Virginia E. Rutter / Divorce in Research vs. Divorce in Media 158 ?Reading 13 Mary Ann Mason / The Modern American Stepfamily: Problems and Possibilities 169 Part III • Parents and Children 7 189 Parenthood 193 ?Reading 14 Philip Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan / New Families: Modern Couples as New Pioneers 193 Contents??vii ?Reading 15 Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, and Joanna Miranda Reed / Daddy, Baby; Momma, Maybe: Low-Income Urban Fathers and the “Package Deal” of Family Life 214 ?Reading 16 Judith Stacey / Gay Parenthood and the End of Paternity as We Knew It 232 8 Growing Up 249 ?Reading 17 Steven Mintz / Beyond Sentimentality: American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct 249 ?Reading 18 Frank Furstenberg / Diverging Development: The Not-So-Invisible Hand of Social Class in the United States 262 ?Reading 19 Richard A. Settersten, Jr. and Barbara Ray / The Long and Twisting Path to Adulthood 280 Part IV • Families in Society 9 Work and Family Life 303 309 ?Reading 20 Arlie Hochschild, with Anne Machung / The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home 309 ?Reading 21 Pamela Stone / The Rhetoric and Reality of “Opting Out” 316 ?Reading 22 Joan C. Williams / One Sick Child Away from Being Fired 325 viii??Contents 10 Family and the Economy 341 ?Reading 23 Lillian B. Rubin / Families on the Fault Line 341 ?Reading 24 Arlene Skolnick / Middle-Class Families in the Age of Insecurity 11 Dimensions of Diversity 358 365 ?Reading 25 Ronald L. Taylor / Diversity within African American Families 365 ?Reading 26 Maxine Baca Zinn and Barbara Wells / Diversity within Latino Families: New Lessons for Family Social Science 389 ?Reading 27 Min Zhou / Conflict, Coping, and Reconciliation: Intergenerational Relations in Chinese Immigrant Families 415 ?Reading 28 Ann Bookman and Delia Kimbrel / Families and Elder Care in the TwentyFirst Century 428 12 Trouble in the Family 451 ?Reading 29 Jeremy Travis / Prisoners’ Families and Children 451 ?Reading 30 Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas / Unmarried with Children 468 ?Reading 31 Demie Kurz / Violence Against Women or Family Violence? Current Debates and Future Directions 474 Credits 487 Preface This edition of Family in Transition is once again aimed at helping students make sense of current trends in family life. It presents recent important research findings in articles that are scholarly and yet readable for an audience of undergraduates.SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion Among the new readings are the following: New to This Edition • Richard A. Settersten, Jr. and Barbara Ray explore a fundamental shift in family life: Today’s parents play much larger roles in the lives of their young adult children than in the past. Without supportive parents, young people are less likely to succeed in a highly risky and competitive world. • Arlene Skolnick examines the precarious economic lives of middle-class families in today’s “high risk, high stress,” winner-take-all economy. The costs of middleclass living standards have risen faster than middle-class incomes, while the security of jobs and benefits has declined. • Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, and Joanna Miranda Reed report that low-income urban fathers no longer fit the “package deal” model of fatherhood in which a man’s bond to his child depends on his relationship with the mother. Today, these men seek to be involved in their children’s lives even if they are not connected to the mothers romantically. • Joan C. Williams explains that while the media focuses on professional women “opting out” from high-pressure careers, low income employees are typically only “one sick child away from being fired.” • Judith Stacey shows how widespread gay fatherhood is overturning traditional concepts of parenthood. • Demie Kurz examines the debate over domestic violence: Should it be seen as a family issue or a problem of violence against women? Student and Teacher Resources This text is available in a variety of formats—digital and print. To learn more about our programs, pricing options, and customization, visit www.pearsonhighered.com. ix x??Preface MySearchLab with eText A passcode-protected website that provides engaging experiences that personalize learning, MySearchLab contains an eText that is just like the printed text. Students can highlight and add notes to the eText online or download it to an iPad. MySearchLab also provides a wide range of writing, grammar, and research tools plus access to a variety of academic journals, census data, Associated Press news feeds, and discipline-specific readings to help hone writing and research skills. Test Bank (0-205-21598-X) For each reading in the text, this valuable resource provides test questions in multiple choice, true/false, and essay formats; the answers are page-referenced to the text. MyTest (0-205-90642-7) This computerized software allows instructors to create their own personalized exams, to edit any or all of the existing test questions, and to add new questions. Other special features of this program include the random generation of test questions, the creation of alternative versions of the same test, scrambling question sequences, and test previews before printing. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank all those who have helped us with suggestions in this edition, as well as the previous ones. Special thanks to Rifat Salem, assistant professor of sociology at the BMCC campus of the City University of New York, for her suggestions on revising the previous edition. Also, many thanks to the reviewers: Erica Hunter, University at Albany; Antoinette Livingston, West Virginia University; Teresa Mayors, Northeastern University; Amanda Moske, University of North Texas; Dennis McGrath, Community College of Philadelphia; and Rosalind Fisher, University of West Florida. Arlene S. Skolnick Jerome H. Skolnick Introduction The aim of this book is to help the reader make sense of American family life in the early twenty-first century. Most important, it aims to make clear the complicated links between families and the larger society. SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion Contrary to most students’ expectations, “the family” is not an easy topic to study. One reason is that we know too much about it, because virtually everyone has grown up in a family. As a result there is a great temptation to generalize from our own experiences. Another difficulty is that the family is a subject that arouses intense emotions. Not only are family relationships themselves deeply emotional, but family issues are also entwined with strong moral and religious beliefs. In the past several decades, “family values” have become a central battleground in American politics. Abortion, sex education, single parenthood, and gay rights are some of the issues that have been debated since the 1980s. Still another problem is that the current state of the family is always being portrayed as “in decline” compared with the way families used to be. The trouble is, most people tend to have an idealized image of families in “the good old days.” No era ever looked like a golden age of family life to people actually living through it. That includes the 1950s, which many Americans now revere as the high point of American family life. Finally, it is difficult to make sense of the state of the family from the statistics presented in the media. For example, the Pew Research Center reported that in 2010, married couples made up only 51 percent of ­American households. Only 9 percent of 18 to 24 year olds were married, compared to almost 50 percent in l960. The headlines seemed to suggest that marriage is becoming obsolete. But in fact, 90 percent of Americans are expected to marry eventually, according to the Census Bureau. Another example: before Father’s Day in 2003, the Census Bureau issued a press release headlined “Two Married Parents the Norm.” It went on to state that, according to the Bureau’s most recent survey, about 70 percent of children live with their two parents. Two months earlier, however, a report by a respected social science research organization contained the following 1 2??Introduction headlines: “Americans Increasingly Opting Out of Marriage” and “Traditional Families Account for Only 7 Percent of U.S. Households.” These are just a few examples of the confusing array of headlines and statistics about the family that the media are constantly serving up. Most often, the news tells of yet another fact or shocking incident that shows the alarming decline of the family. But every once in a while, the news is that the traditional family is making a comeback. No wonder one writer compared the family to a “great intellectual Rorschach blot” (­Featherstone, 1979). Everyone agrees that families have changed dramatically over the past several decades, but there is no consensus on what the changes mean. The majority of women, including mothers of young children, are now working outside the home. Divorce rates have risen sharply (although they have leveled off since 1979). Twenty-eight percent of children are living in single-parent families. Cohabitation—once called “shacking up” or “living in sin”—is a widespread practice. The sexual double standard—the norm that demanded virginity for the bride, but not the groom—has largely disappeared from mainstream American culture. There are mother-only families, father-only families, grandparents raising grandchildren, and gay and lesbian families. Indeed, the growing public acceptance of homosexuals is one of the most striking trends of recent time. Local governments and leading corporations have granted gays increasing recognition as domestic partners entitled to spousal benefits. In June 2003, the Supreme Court struck down the last state laws that made gay sex a crime. The following November 18, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that gays have the right to marry. As of early 2013 nine states allow same-sex couples to marry, and more are likely to follow.SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion In 2011, the military dropped its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. All these shifts in family life are part of an ongoing global revolution. All industrialized nations, and many of the emerging ones, have experienced similar changes. In no other Western country, however, has family change been as traumatic and divisive as in the United States. For example, the two-earner family is the most common family pattern in the United States; 75 percent of mothers of children under age 18 and more than 60 percent of those with young children work outside the home. Yet the question of whether mothers should work is still a fiercely debated issue. Family issues have been at the center of our electoral politics. Thus, the typical pattern for public discussion of family issues is a polarized, either–or debate. Is single motherhood the main cause of our social problems, such as poverty crime, drug use, school failure? Is divorce so damaging to children and their futures that the government should make it harder to get? This kind of argument makes it difficult to discuss the issues and problems facing the family in a realistic way. It doesn’t describe the range of views among family scholars, and it doesn’t fit the research evidence. For example, the right question to ask about divorce is “Under what circumstances is divorce harmful or beneficial to children?” How can parents make divorce less harmful for their children? (Amato, 1994). In most public debates about divorce, however, that question is never asked, and the public never hears the useful information they should. Introduction??3 Still another problem with popular discourse about the family is that it exaggerates the amount of change that has actually occurred. For example, consider the previous statement that only 7 percent of American households fit the model of the traditional family. This number, or something like it, is often cited by conservatives as proof that the institution is in danger of disappearing unless the government steps in to restore marriage and the two-parent family. At the opposite end of the political spectrum are those who celebrate the alleged decline of the traditional family and welcome the new family forms that have supposedly replaced it. But is it true that only 7 percent of American households are traditional families? It all depends, as the saying goes, on how you define traditional. The statement is true if you count only families with children under age 18 in which only the husband works outside the home. But if the wife works too, as most married women now do, the family doesn’t count as “traditional” by that definition. Neither does the recently married couple who do not have children yet. The couple whose youngest child turns 18 is no longer counted as a “traditional” family either. Despite the current high divorce rates (actually down from 1979), Americans have not abandoned the institution of marriage. The United States has the highest marriage rate in the industrial world. About 90 percent of Americans marry at some point in their lives, and virtually all who do either have, or want children. Further, surveys repeatedly show that family is central to the lives of most Americans. Family ties are their deepest source of satisfaction and meaning, as well as the source of their greatest worries (­Mellman, Lazarus, and Rivlin, 1990). In sum, family life in the United States is a complex mixture of continuity and change, satisfaction and trouble. While the transformations of the past three decades do not mean the end of family life, they have brought a number of new difficulties. For example, although most families now depend on the earnings of wives and mothers, the rest of our institutions have not caught up to the new realities. For example, most schools are out of step with parents’ working hours—they let out at 3:00 p.m., and still maintain the long summer vacations that once allowed children to work on the family farm. Most jobs, especially well-paying ones, are based on the male model—that is, a worker who can work full time or longer without interruptions. Workers can be fired if they take time off to attend to a sick child. An earnings gap persists between men and women in both blue-collar and whitecollar jobs. Employed wives and mothers still bear most of the workload at home. And since the financial meltdown of 2008 and the start of the Great Recession, millions of families continue to face joblessness, pay cuts, losses of funds saved for children’s education or their own retirement. Understanding the Changing Family During the same years in which the family was becoming the object of public anxiety and political debate, a torrent of new research on the family was pouring forth. The study of the family had come to excite the interest of scholars in a range of disciplines—­history, 4??Introduction demography, economics, law, and psychology. We now have much more information available about families of the past, as well as current families, than we have ever had before. The main outcome of this research has been to debunk myths about family life, both past and present. Nevertheless, the myths persist and help to fuel the cultural wars over family change. The Myth of Universality In some ways, families are the same everywhere. Yet families also vary in many ways— in who is included as a family member, emotional environments, living arrangements, ideologies, social and kinship networks, and economic and other functions. Although anthropologists have tried to come up with a single definition of family that would hold across time and place, they generally have concluded that doing so is not useful (Geertz, 1965; Stephens, 1963). For example, although marriage is vir … Purchase answer to see full attachment Get a 10 % discount on an order above $ 100 Use the following coupon code : NURSING10

SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion ORDER NOW FOR CUSTOMIZED AND ORIGINAL NURSING PAPERS Unformatted Attachment Preview Family in Transition This page intentionally left blank Family in Transition Seventeenth Edition Arlene S. Skolnick New York University Jerome H. Skolnick New York University Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montréal Toronto Delhi Mexico City São Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo Editor in Chief: Ashley Dodge Publisher: Nancy Roberts Editorial Assistant: Molly White Director of Marketing: Brandy Dawson Executive Marketing Manager: Kelly May Marketing Coordinator: Courtney Stewart Managing Editor: Denise Forlow Program Manager: Mayda Bosco Senior Operations Supervisor: Mary Fischer Operations Specialist: Diane Peirano Art Director: Jayne Conte Cover photo: Diana Ong/Getty Images Cover design: Bruce Kenselaar Director of Digital Media: Brian Hyland Digital Media Project Manager: Tina Gagliostro Full-Service Project Management and Composition: PreMediaGlobal/Anju Joshi Printer/Binder: Courier Corp. Cover Printer: Courier Corp. Text Font: JansonTextLTStd 10/12 Credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on page 487. Copyright © 2014, 2011, 2009, by Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission(s) to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458 or you may fax your request to 201-236-3290. Many of the designations by manufacturers and seller to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and the publisher was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Family in transition / [edited by] Arlene S. Skolnick, New York University, Jerome H. Skolnick, New York University. SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion — Seventeeth edition. pages cm ISBN-13: 978-0-205-21597-3 ISBN-10: 0-205-21597-1 1. Families. I. Skolnick, Arlene S., 1933- II. Skolnick, Jerome H. HQ518.F336 2014 306.85—dc23 2013009352 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 10: 0-205-21597-1 ISBN 13: 978-0-205-21597-3 Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 Part I • The Changing Family 1 Families Past and Present 13 15 ?Reading 1 William J. Goode / The Theoretical Importance of the Family 15 ?Reading 2 Anthony Giddens / The Global Revolution in Family and Personal Life 27 2 Public Debates and Private Lives 35 ?Reading 3 Sharon Hays / The Mommy Wars: Ambivalence, Ideological Work, and the Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood 35 ?Reading 4 Janet Z. Giele / Decline of the Family: Conservative, Liberal, and Feminist Views 54 Part II • Sex and Gender 3 75 Changing Gender Roles 79 ?Reading 5 Robert M. Jackson / Destined for Equality 79 ?Reading 6 Kathleen Gerson / Falling Back on Plan B: The Children of the Gender Revolution Face Uncharted Territory 87 v vi??Contents 4 Sexuality and Society 103 ?Reading 7 Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Laura Hamilton, and Paula England / Is Hooking Up Bad for Women? 103 ?Reading 8 Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker / Sex and Marriage in the Minds of Emerging Adults 109 5 Courtship and Marriage 119 ?Reading 9 Andrew J. Cherlin / American Marriage in the Early Twenty-First Century 119 ?Reading 10 Arlene Skolnick / Grounds for Marriage: How Relationships Succeed or Fail 140 6 Divorce and Remarriage 151 ?Reading 11 Lawrence M. Friedman / Divorce: The “Silent Revolution” 151 ?Reading 12 Virginia E. Rutter / Divorce in Research vs. Divorce in Media 158 ?Reading 13 Mary Ann Mason / The Modern American Stepfamily: Problems and Possibilities 169 Part III • Parents and Children 7 189 Parenthood 193 ?Reading 14 Philip Cowan and Carolyn Pape Cowan / New Families: Modern Couples as New Pioneers 193 Contents??vii ?Reading 15 Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, and Joanna Miranda Reed / Daddy, Baby; Momma, Maybe: Low-Income Urban Fathers and the “Package Deal” of Family Life 214 ?Reading 16 Judith Stacey / Gay Parenthood and the End of Paternity as We Knew It 232 8 Growing Up 249 ?Reading 17 Steven Mintz / Beyond Sentimentality: American Childhood as a Social and Cultural Construct 249 ?Reading 18 Frank Furstenberg / Diverging Development: The Not-So-Invisible Hand of Social Class in the United States 262 ?Reading 19 Richard A. Settersten, Jr. and Barbara Ray / The Long and Twisting Path to Adulthood 280 Part IV • Families in Society 9 Work and Family Life 303 309 ?Reading 20 Arlie Hochschild, with Anne Machung / The Second Shift: Working Parents and the Revolution at Home 309 ?Reading 21 Pamela Stone / The Rhetoric and Reality of “Opting Out” 316 ?Reading 22 Joan C. Williams / One Sick Child Away from Being Fired 325 viii??Contents 10 Family and the Economy 341 ?Reading 23 Lillian B. Rubin / Families on the Fault Line 341 ?Reading 24 Arlene Skolnick / Middle-Class Families in the Age of Insecurity 11 Dimensions of Diversity 358 365 ?Reading 25 Ronald L. Taylor / Diversity within African American Families 365 ?Reading 26 Maxine Baca Zinn and Barbara Wells / Diversity within Latino Families: New Lessons for Family Social Science 389 ?Reading 27 Min Zhou / Conflict, Coping, and Reconciliation: Intergenerational Relations in Chinese Immigrant Families 415 ?Reading 28 Ann Bookman and Delia Kimbrel / Families and Elder Care in the TwentyFirst Century 428 12 Trouble in the Family 451 ?Reading 29 Jeremy Travis / Prisoners’ Families and Children 451 ?Reading 30 Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas / Unmarried with Children 468 ?Reading 31 Demie Kurz / Violence Against Women or Family Violence? Current Debates and Future Directions 474 Credits 487 Preface This edition of Family in Transition is once again aimed at helping students make sense of current trends in family life. It presents recent important research findings in articles that are scholarly and yet readable for an audience of undergraduates.SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion Among the new readings are the following: New to This Edition • Richard A. Settersten, Jr. and Barbara Ray explore a fundamental shift in family life: Today’s parents play much larger roles in the lives of their young adult children than in the past. Without supportive parents, young people are less likely to succeed in a highly risky and competitive world. • Arlene Skolnick examines the precarious economic lives of middle-class families in today’s “high risk, high stress,” winner-take-all economy. The costs of middleclass living standards have risen faster than middle-class incomes, while the security of jobs and benefits has declined. • Kathryn Edin, Timothy Nelson, and Joanna Miranda Reed report that low-income urban fathers no longer fit the “package deal” model of fatherhood in which a man’s bond to his child depends on his relationship with the mother. Today, these men seek to be involved in their children’s lives even if they are not connected to the mothers romantically. • Joan C. Williams explains that while the media focuses on professional women “opting out” from high-pressure careers, low income employees are typically only “one sick child away from being fired.” • Judith Stacey shows how widespread gay fatherhood is overturning traditional concepts of parenthood. • Demie Kurz examines the debate over domestic violence: Should it be seen as a family issue or a problem of violence against women? Student and Teacher Resources This text is available in a variety of formats—digital and print. To learn more about our programs, pricing options, and customization, visit www.pearsonhighered.com. ix x??Preface MySearchLab with eText A passcode-protected website that provides engaging experiences that personalize learning, MySearchLab contains an eText that is just like the printed text. Students can highlight and add notes to the eText online or download it to an iPad. MySearchLab also provides a wide range of writing, grammar, and research tools plus access to a variety of academic journals, census data, Associated Press news feeds, and discipline-specific readings to help hone writing and research skills. Test Bank (0-205-21598-X) For each reading in the text, this valuable resource provides test questions in multiple choice, true/false, and essay formats; the answers are page-referenced to the text. MyTest (0-205-90642-7) This computerized software allows instructors to create their own personalized exams, to edit any or all of the existing test questions, and to add new questions. Other special features of this program include the random generation of test questions, the creation of alternative versions of the same test, scrambling question sequences, and test previews before printing. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We would like to thank all those who have helped us with suggestions in this edition, as well as the previous ones. Special thanks to Rifat Salem, assistant professor of sociology at the BMCC campus of the City University of New York, for her suggestions on revising the previous edition. Also, many thanks to the reviewers: Erica Hunter, University at Albany; Antoinette Livingston, West Virginia University; Teresa Mayors, Northeastern University; Amanda Moske, University of North Texas; Dennis McGrath, Community College of Philadelphia; and Rosalind Fisher, University of West Florida. Arlene S. Skolnick Jerome H. Skolnick Introduction The aim of this book is to help the reader make sense of American family life in the early twenty-first century. Most important, it aims to make clear the complicated links between families and the larger society. SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion Contrary to most students’ expectations, “the family” is not an easy topic to study. One reason is that we know too much about it, because virtually everyone has grown up in a family. As a result there is a great temptation to generalize from our own experiences. Another difficulty is that the family is a subject that arouses intense emotions. Not only are family relationships themselves deeply emotional, but family issues are also entwined with strong moral and religious beliefs. In the past several decades, “family values” have become a central battleground in American politics. Abortion, sex education, single parenthood, and gay rights are some of the issues that have been debated since the 1980s. Still another problem is that the current state of the family is always being portrayed as “in decline” compared with the way families used to be. The trouble is, most people tend to have an idealized image of families in “the good old days.” No era ever looked like a golden age of family life to people actually living through it. That includes the 1950s, which many Americans now revere as the high point of American family life. Finally, it is difficult to make sense of the state of the family from the statistics presented in the media. For example, the Pew Research Center reported that in 2010, married couples made up only 51 percent of ­American households. Only 9 percent of 18 to 24 year olds were married, compared to almost 50 percent in l960. The headlines seemed to suggest that marriage is becoming obsolete. But in fact, 90 percent of Americans are expected to marry eventually, according to the Census Bureau. Another example: before Father’s Day in 2003, the Census Bureau issued a press release headlined “Two Married Parents the Norm.” It went on to state that, according to the Bureau’s most recent survey, about 70 percent of children live with their two parents. Two months earlier, however, a report by a respected social science research organization contained the following 1 2??Introduction headlines: “Americans Increasingly Opting Out of Marriage” and “Traditional Families Account for Only 7 Percent of U.S. Households.” These are just a few examples of the confusing array of headlines and statistics about the family that the media are constantly serving up. Most often, the news tells of yet another fact or shocking incident that shows the alarming decline of the family. But every once in a while, the news is that the traditional family is making a comeback. No wonder one writer compared the family to a “great intellectual Rorschach blot” (­Featherstone, 1979). Everyone agrees that families have changed dramatically over the past several decades, but there is no consensus on what the changes mean. The majority of women, including mothers of young children, are now working outside the home. Divorce rates have risen sharply (although they have leveled off since 1979). Twenty-eight percent of children are living in single-parent families. Cohabitation—once called “shacking up” or “living in sin”—is a widespread practice. The sexual double standard—the norm that demanded virginity for the bride, but not the groom—has largely disappeared from mainstream American culture. There are mother-only families, father-only families, grandparents raising grandchildren, and gay and lesbian families. Indeed, the growing public acceptance of homosexuals is one of the most striking trends of recent time. Local governments and leading corporations have granted gays increasing recognition as domestic partners entitled to spousal benefits. In June 2003, the Supreme Court struck down the last state laws that made gay sex a crime. The following November 18, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that gays have the right to marry. As of early 2013 nine states allow same-sex couples to marry, and more are likely to follow.SOC 240 MC From the Skolnick & Skolnick Reader Hooking up Sex & Marriage Discussion In 2011, the military dropped its “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly. All these shifts in family life are part of an ongoing global revolution. All industrialized nations, and many of the emerging ones, have experienced similar changes. In no other Western country, however, has family change been as traumatic and divisive as in the United States. For example, the two-earner family is the most common family pattern in the United States; 75 percent of mothers of children under age 18 and more than 60 percent of those with young children work outside the home. Yet the question of whether mothers should work is still a fiercely debated issue. Family issues have been at the center of our electoral politics. Thus, the typical pattern for public discussion of family issues is a polarized, either–or debate. Is single motherhood the main cause of our social problems, such as poverty crime, drug use, school failure? Is divorce so damaging to children and their futures that the government should make it harder to get? This kind of argument makes it difficult to discuss the issues and problems facing the family in a realistic way. It doesn’t describe the range of views among family scholars, and it doesn’t fit the research evidence. For example, the right question to ask about divorce is “Under what circumstances is divorce harmful or beneficial to children?” How can parents make divorce less harmful for their children? (Amato, 1994). In most public debates about divorce, however, that question is never asked, and the public never hears the useful information they should. Introduction??3 Still another problem with popular discourse about the family is that it exaggerates the amount of change that has actually occurred. For example, consider the previous statement that only 7 percent of American households fit the model of the traditional family. This number, or something like it, is often cited by conservatives as proof that the institution is in danger of disappearing unless the government steps in to restore marriage and the two-parent family. At the opposite end of the political spectrum are those who celebrate the alleged decline of the traditional family and welcome the new family forms that have supposedly replaced it. But is it true that only 7 percent of American households are traditional families? It all depends, as the saying goes, on how you define traditional. The statement is true if you count only families with children under age 18 in which only the husband works outside the home. But if the wife works too, as most married women now do, the family doesn’t count as “traditional” by that definition. Neither does the recently married couple who do not have children yet. The couple whose youngest child turns 18 is no longer counted as a “traditional” family either. Despite the current high divorce rates (actually down from 1979), Americans have not abandoned the institution of marriage. The United States has the highest marriage rate in the industrial world. About 90 percent of Americans marry at some point in their lives, and virtually all who do either have, or want children. Further, surveys repeatedly show that family is central to the lives of most Americans. Family ties are their deepest source of satisfaction and meaning, as well as the source of their greatest worries (­Mellman, Lazarus, and Rivlin, 1990). In sum, family life in the United States is a complex mixture of continuity and change, satisfaction and trouble. While the transformations of the past three decades do not mean the end of family life, they have brought a number of new difficulties. For example, although most families now depend on the earnings of wives and mothers, the rest of our institutions have not caught up to the new realities. For example, most schools are out of step with parents’ working hours—they let out at 3:00 p.m., and still maintain the long summer vacations that once allowed children to work on the family farm. Most jobs, especially well-paying ones, are based on the male model—that is, a worker who can work full time or longer without interruptions. Workers can be fired if they take time off to attend to a sick child. An earnings gap persists between men and women in both blue-collar and whitecollar jobs. Employed wives and mothers still bear most of the workload at home. And since the financial meltdown of 2008 and the start of the Great Recession, millions of families continue to face joblessness, pay cuts, losses of funds saved for children’s education or their own retirement. Understanding the Changing Family During the same years in which the family was becoming the object of public anxiety and political debate, a torrent of new research on the family was pouring forth. The study of the family had come to excite the interest of scholars in a range of disciplines—­history, 4??Introduction demography, economics, law, and psychology. We now have much more information available about families of the past, as well as current families, than we have ever had before. The main outcome of this research has been to debunk myths about family life, both past and present. Nevertheless, the myths persist and help to fuel the cultural wars over family change. The Myth of Universality In some ways, families are the same everywhere. Yet families also vary in many ways— in who is included as a family member, emotional environments, living arrangements, ideologies, social and kinship networks, and economic and other functions. Although anthropologists have tried to come up with a single definition of family that would hold across time and place, they generally have concluded that doing so is not useful (Geertz, 1965; Stephens, 1963). For example, although marriage is vir … Purchase answer to see full attachment Get a 10 % discount on an order above $ 100 Use the following coupon code : NURSING10