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1 Курс, папка № 1 Family life is changing – for better or worse

Years ago it was important to have large families. The best Victorian mother was the mother who had the most children. The proudest Victorian lather was the father who had the most sons. It was important to have many children so that the family remained strong. If you were rich you needed sons to inherit your property. If you were poor, you needed sons to help with your work and take it over when you were old. Rich or poor, you needed daughters to help with the running of a large household and to make good marriages with other families.

Not only children were important. Everybody in the family was important: grandmothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins of cousins. Even when branches of the family quarreled (and they often did) at least they were still there and that gave people a sense of stability and order.

Nowadays, things are quite different. Young people move away from the places where they were born, and they take their immediate family (wife, and children) with them. Slowly, they lose touch with their distant cousins and .their great-aunts. Their own family unit becomes more and more important, as they forget their other relations.

In Britain, families have been getting smaller and smaller, too. People have fewer children because children are expensive and they take up room. Who can afford food for more than three children when the cost of living is so high? And now, there is the problem of overpopulation, too. We are always being told in Britain that a family should have no more than two children. Britain is a small Island (93,026 sq. miles) and it has a population, of more than 55 million. Nearly 8 million of those live in London. People can't have big families when they are living in a small space. So they get more and more isolated. Sometimes they live very close to other people but they don't get to know each other. They have hundreds of neighbors but they are lonely. They only have each other to talk to, so they get bored and cross with each other. What is to be done?

Adapted from "Mosaika"

The changing American family

The American family unit is in the process of change. There used to be mainly two types of families: the extended and the nuclear. The extended family most often included mother, father, children, and some other relatives such as grandparents living in the same house or nearby. Then as job patterns changed and the economy progressed from agricultural to industrial, people were forced to move to different parts of the country for job opportunities. These moves split up the extended family. The nuclear family became more prevalent; this consisted of only the parents and the children. Now, besides these two types of traditional groupings, the word family is being extended to include a variety of other living arrangements.

Today's family can be made of diverse combinations. With the divorce rate nearly one in two, there's an increase in singleparent homes: a father or mother living with one or more children. "Blended families" occur when previously married men and women marry again and combine the children from former marriages into a new family. On the other hand, some couples are deciding not to have any children at all, so there is an increase in two-person childless families. There are also more people who live alone: single, widowed, divorced. Now, one in five Americans lives alone.

From “Mosaic” by Brend Wegmann