Family, Research Paper Example

It has become the trend in the United States for families to take on a more diverse typology in terms of household makeup, the division of labor, and socioeconomic factors.  Benokraitis (2010) reports that an increasing number of American families are headed by women, and noted a special decline in two-parent households that have an employed father and a stay-at-home mother.  These changes can be attributed to, in part, rising divorce rates, a lessening stigma for single motherhood, and a rising social acceptance of same-sex couples (Benokraitis, 2010).  Unlike many of the families discussed in both Benokraitis (2011) and Risman (2010), my family does not exhibit many of the more modern tendencies found in recent demographic surveys.  Instead, it tends towards the values and make-up of a more traditional time.

We are a White, Christian family living in a middle-class neighborhood where most of our neighbors have similar family typologies.  I live at home with my parents, my younger sister.  Both my maternal and paternal grandparents are still alive and live in nearby communities.  My father is an executive for a paper supply company, a position he’s held for over twenty years, and my mother stays at home to look after the needs of her family.  My parents met in high school and have been married for 17 years; their own siblings (they each have a brother and sister) exhibit similar tendencies as no one in the family has ever divorced.  My parents both attended college, but only my father completed his degree as my mother dropped out so that she and my father could begin a family.  Recently, my parents have been considering the possibility of moving into a house that could accommodate my maternal grandparents, who are currently living in an extended care facility.  In order to make an inter-generational family arrangement work for us, they are considering finding a home that has a separate living unit that would maintain my grandparents’ privacy while allowing them to remain close to us.  Among my extended family, there has been a limited amount of racial inter-marriage in the most recent generation:  one of my cousins recently married an African-American man, and another cousin adopted two children from South America.

With the help of my maternal grandmother, I was able to explore the origins of my family on  my maternal side.  We were assisted with this, in part, by several genealogy websites, a new technology that my grandmother embraced wholeheartedly.  This demonstrates Benokraitis’ (2011) observation that technological advances such as the Internet can help to connect family members with both distant relatives and a better understanding of their family’s origins.  I am a second-generation American citizen, and most of my family has lived in the state of Florida since the 1930s.  My maternal great grandparents emigrated from Scotland in their early teens, and met at an immigrant integration center shortly after arriving in the United States.  They married, had one child, and then decided to move to Florida so that my great-grandfather could pursue his dream of living in a tropical climate.  My grandmother said that her father always loved the heat and wanted to live somewhere that was always sunny.  He worked as a general laborer for many years, eventually starting his own construction company.  He employed my grandmother’s brothers to work for him, and would have hired my grandfather as well.  However, according to my grandmother, my grandfather saw this as charity and decided to carve out his own professional future as an advertising copywriter.

The history of my father’s side of the family has been much more difficult to determine.  Although my paternal grandparents live near by, and often visit us, they dislike talking about the past.  My father advised me that it would be upsetting for them if I asked to many questions.  This is due, in part, to the complicated relationship that they have with their own ethnicity.  My father’s parents emigrated to the United States from Germany prior to World War II, and subsequently experienced a great deal of racial prejudice.  I know nothing about my paternal great grandparents, and all I know about my paternal grandparents’ history is my grandfather was a salesman who was often on the road while my grandmother stayed home to care for my father and his siblings.  I was reluctant to pursue this line of questioning any further with my father, because it obviously made him uncomfortable.  This supports Stephanie Coontz’ assertion that, despite the many demographic changes to the American family, families are still quite similar to those of earlier times (Risman, 2010).  In the case of my family, I initially thought that they were a perfect and well-adjusted unit, but after a little bit of genealogical investigation, I’ve realized that my family contains some secrets that I’m not yet privy to.

The gender expectations and socialization of gender roles in my family leans towards a more traditional approach.  When I was growing up, it was expected that my sister and I would help our mother with domestic tasks, while our father took sole control of ‘masculine’ jobs like fixing the car and taking care of home maintenance.  It’s difficult to determine how gender roles might have played out differently had I had a brother, but my mother liked to dress my sister and I in traditional ‘girly’ clothes, and we always had a large supply of Barbie dolls and other ‘girl’ toys.  My mother notes that her own parents weren’t very encouraging when she decided to attend college after marrying my father straight out of high school.  My maternal grandmother backed this up, telling me that she believed it was inappropriate for a young married woman to attend school.  After my mother decided to drop out of college to start a family, she said that her parents treated the decision as if it was to be expected–like her college ambitions had been nothing but a silly whim.  This may explain why both of my parents have been supportive of my own college ambitions.  I learned from a young age, both implicitly and explicitly, that they had high educational aspirations for my sister and I.  Both of my parents attended many of my elementary and high school events, and got me extra tutoring to help with my SATs.  However, gender norms have still be reinforced through the behaviors and activities of my parents, teaching me that household duties fall to women and more physical labors fall to men.

The ethnic heritage of my maternal grandparents and the manner in which they’ve assimilated themselves into American society illustrates the role that emigration can have on shaping gender expectations.  As Benokraitis (2011) points out, traditional gender roles have a tendency to become diluted in subsequent generations in part due to the emigrant’s desire to assimilate appropriately into the new culture.  Although my maternal grandparents weren’t entirely in favor of my mother’s dreams of college, they also didn’t forbid her from attending.  And, unlike in my mother’s generation, where marriage straight out of high school was not uncommon, I have been taught to finish my education before entering into any serious relationships, a prioritizing of events that would have been utterly foreign to my maternal great grandmother.

I haven’t encountered any explicit rules about race or ethnic relations in my family.  However, by virtue of the neighborhood where I live, many of my primary friendships as a child were with other White children, solely because there weren’t any children of color at my school.  Florida tends to be more ethnically diverse than other countries, due to the close proximity of Mexico, so I did have the opportunity to see other cultures in action, mostly through social events that were held at my father’s place of employment, which is owned by a man of Mexican heritage.  I have never been told to choose a particular race or ethnicity when dating or forming friendships; any exclusion of other races has only been caused by a lack of exposure to other cultures.

My family’s reaction to the merging of cultures that has occurred through my cousin’s marriage to an African-American man and my other cousin’s decision to adopt two South American children has been largely positive.  However, I am unsurprised because my maternal grandparents are very open-minded people who are active in the community and have friends of many different ethnicities.  Although some of the families depicted in the readings (Benokraitis, 2011; Risman, 2010) met with resistance when they tried to ‘blend’ their families by marrying people of different religions, races, or ethnicities, I have encountered no such resistance in my own family.  Instead, our family looks at these new additions as a positive way for us to continue building the relationship with the United States that first began when my grandparents emigrated to this country.  I have also had the opportunity, through my college experiences, to meet people from very diverse backgrounds.  My parents and I recently attended a Rosh Hashana (a Jewish celebration) event at the home of a friend’s parents, and I found it interesting to note how similar Judaism and Christianity are in many of their basic tenets.  My parents got very involved in the religious readings and the preparation of new kinds of food, and afterwards commented that my maternal grandmother would have loved to have been present, as she embraces all new experiences.

I believe that the newest generation of my family–that which includes both myself and my sister and my cousins and their children–will continue the trend of becoming more open to cultural diversity and changing gender roles.  Already, I have noticed that my father will occasionally help out around the house more than he used to, and my mother recently completed a community college course on Do-It-Yourself home repair.  My cousin’s husband is also a good example of changing gender roles and expectations, as he stays at home with their adopted children while my cousin is the primary breadwinner.  I expect that my own eventual children will be even more comfortable in a myriad of roles within our family.  Eventually, the traditionalism of our family will likely become much more open to change, by virtue of the influence that my children and my children’s children will have on our family dynamics.

References

Benokraitis, N. (2011). Marriage and families: Changes, choices, and constraints. (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Risman, B, ed. (2010). Families as they really are. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.