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Family Essay: Defining the New American Family

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, family is defined as “a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head.”
While this is a rather vague way of defining what normally constitutes a family, widespread assumption at one time was that a family was made up of a married couple and children produced by the two of them.
With the changes in typical American families over the past fifty years or so comes the understanding that the old definition of a traditional family has arguably become a minority.

How, specifically, have families changed? Let’s take a brief at some of these common family changes.
Fifty years ago, divorce in America was very uncommon, and those who chose to get a divorce were often shunned as social outcasts. Today, more than half of of marriages in the US end in divorce. Unhappy couples don’t stay together for the kids anymore. In addition, is that women aren’t often limited to staying in an unhappy marriage since they have more opportunities to work and support themselves and their children. Also, divorce has become so common that it isn’t unexpected any more.
Today, many couples who divorce share custody of their children and the odds are that each will remarry. The second marriage of each person may produce children that are half-siblings to those from the first marriage. For any of these children from either marriage, there are numerous brothers and sisters, half-brothers and sisters, a mother, a father, a step-mother and a step-father. All of these people can be considered family since they are close relatives that spend time together as a family.
Adoption of children is also more common now and the adopted kids are considered a part of the family that has adopted them. Foster children may live in homes for a short period of time or indefinitely. Some couples have numerous children from different parents living under their roof at one time and may consider this to be their family.
There is also a whole new world that has opened up in society with the controversy involving same-sex marriage. Gay couples live openly in committed relationships and have children either through adoption or surrogates. These are as far from the traditional definition of family as you can get, yet they are growing in number and are considered by most people to be families.
It is also insufficient to define a family as “any group of people who live under one roof” since your close family members may live far away from you and you can share a roof with someone as a roommate that you aren’t even close friends with.
Perhaps the best way to define the word “family” is by naming the thing that it is not limited to. A family is not limited to those who share DNA. A family is not defined by its social status or name. A family is not limited to the number of people within its hold. It is not confined to certain religious beliefs, social acceptance, or similarity in interests or behaviors, similarity in color, or origin.
A family is made up of two or more people who have feelings towards each other that are based on what they have in common whether it is blood or respect or anything that matters to the people involved.

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