Broken Homes and Shattered Dreams: A Paper about family units in the 21st century

Essay by adj12345High School, 11th gradeA+, June 2004

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Broken Homes and Shattered Dreams

A family is a group of people living together and functioning as a single household, usually consisting of parents and their children. There are many types of families such as nuclear and single-parent. When people think of families, they usually think of two parents, one male and one female, and a child birthed from the mother. This is an example of a nuclear family. Up until recently, nuclear families were the majority of types of families in the United States. In recent times, this is not the case. Due to inconveniences such as divorce and domestic violence in the home, the amount of households and families has decreased the past few decades showing that the American family is falling apart.

The growth rate in the number of households has been slowing since the 1970's. There are 1.1 million households currently in America, opposed to the 1.7

million in 1970. Conventionally, family households have accounted for a large majority of all households but by 2000, only 69% percent were families. This shows that full functioning families are becoming scarcer than ever before. The reasons for this are not unknown. One main reason is domestic violence, which are physically or emotionally harmful acts between husbands and wives or between other individuals in intimate relationships. Statistics show each year; at least 1 million women suffer

from non-fatal violence in their home. 4 million women experience a serious assault by an intimate partner during one year. Even worse, 3.3 million children are exposed to violence by family members against their mothers or female caretakers. Children of abused mothers are 1,500 times more likely to be abused. 40-60% of men, who abuse women, also abuse the children and nearly have the men who beat their wives, physically assault them...