Family Life and Social Causes

The American family has run out of time. Working parents are weary and frantic; even children have no moment to spare. On the surface, families are coping by teaching children to put the roast in the oven after school, enrolling them in day care, hiring nannies, making play dates, sending out laundry and ordering pizza. “We spend a lot of time buying time,” observes an economist. “What we’re doing is contracting out for family care,” notes a parent, “but there’s a limit.

If you contract out everything, you have an enterprise, not a family. ” Like the ever expanding white-collar workday, this stage of family evolution defies all the expectations of a generation ago. For many years, stress research tended to focus on men, and so the office or factory floor was viewed as the primary source of tension. The home, on the other hand, was a sanctuary a benign environment in which one recuperated from problems at work. The experts know better now (Davidson & Moore,1992).

Listen to this family: “The most precious commodity to us is time,: agree architect Don and his wife Candy, both 41 and parents of a 4 year old son Jonathan. “We have tried to simplify our lives as much as possible. ” Candy believes she and her husband are living “better lives than our parents. More hectic. But fuller. ” Don wonders about that. “It’s dangerous to use the word fuller. Where is that sense of spirituality that we talked about in the 1980`s? Where is the time to go up to the mountaintop? Technology is a diversion from life. You can be transfixed.

I’m not sure that technology does not remove us from each other, isolate us. In architecture we’re seeing demands for media rooms. What ever happened to the kitchen as a gathering place? ” No combination of innovations, inventions or timely hints will restore the American family to its imagined bygone tranquility. Only a dramatic change in both attitudes and economics would offer a genuine respite (Zimmerman, 1995). And, anyway, who has not felt the exhilaration of running this race, which many might actually missed it if these slowed to a trot.

But at some point individuals must find their time to consider the price of their preoccupation and the toll on the spirit exacted by exhaustion. With too little sleep there are too few dreams. And for children, especially, being eight years old should include some long, ice-creamy afternoons of favorites stories and grassy feet. Some things are just worth the time. The survey method is chosen in this study as surveys are particularly well suited to studying what investigators cannot observe directly, such as the family life.

Further, it is a descriptive research as the subjects’ responses painted a picture of the issue of interest, “How American family life has run out of time”. Hence parents are the population of my study but I used only a sample of the population to represent the whole American family. In this survey research, I employed the interview technique where series of questions were personally asked by the researcher to the respondents. Specifically, it is an open-ended interview as it allows the researcher to ask follow-up questions that probe and clarify the subject’s responses.

However, the sociological causes underlying the issue of family time is too complex to predict precisely and hence it is very difficult to make a conclusion of the study.

References Davidson, J. K. Sr. and Moore, N. B. (1992). Marriage and Family. Iowa: Wm C. Brown Publishers. Lamanna, M. & Riedmann, A. (2005). Marriages & Families (9TH Ed. ) Wadsworth Publishing Company. Zimmerman, S. L. (1995). Understanding Family Policy: Theories and Applications. 2nd Ed. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Inc.

Sample Essay of AssignmentExpert.com