African American Family Research Paper

Words: 684
Pages: 3

The family life in America is changing every day. In this address to you the United States Congress, I will explain how the family is changing and what the future holds for the American family. My focus will be on the rise of single parent families, cohabitation, and step families. Single parent families are definitely on the rise in America. The number of family households headed by one parent has risen for both African American families and white families. In fact childbearing outside of marriage has grown at a faster rate among whites in the recent decades. The reasons for the rise in single parent families come from a various amount circumstances. One of the major reasons is the role of the mother in the workplace. Today many women are the breadwinners in the family and therefore rely less on men then they used to in the past. Another huge reason especially in the African American family is the extremely high …show more content…
Today a majority of marriages are first preceded by cohabitation. Cohabiting relationships can be less stable than marriage, which can make it a bad setting for raising children. So why do couples choose to cohabitate? The best answers I can come up with is for financial reasons. It lessen the stress on a family when there are two incomes coming in, instead of one. Another reason is for convenience. Even though from the outside looking in it may not see like an ideal way to live, a lot of couples use cohabitating as a step before getting married. In the United States, there are states that are moving toward granting cohabiting couples some of the rights and responsibilities that married couples have. Cohabitation is here to stay and with cohabitation at least the couple can see how they work together and possibly end their relationship with less heartache and fewer complications then those couples who do get married (Cherlin