Alternative Family Structures

1. The nuclear and alternative family structure

There is changing nature of family from the traditional nuclear family to the alternative family structure. In this essay the topic nuclear family versus the alternative family structures will be discussed and analysed. Firstly family will be defined, then the nuclear and alternative family structures will be explained in more detail and lastly there will be an overview of advantages and disadvantages of these family structures.

According to Talcott (1955:35) family is a social group characterized by common residence economic co-operation, and reproduction. It includes adults of both sexes at least two of whom maintain a socially approved sexual relationship, and at least one or more children,

Financial stability also allows parents to provide additional after school activities like music and swimming for their children, nuclear family household is more likely to have a higher consistency with raising their children by reaching agreements on discipline and modeling appropriate behavior, parents act as a team to strengthen and reinforce child behavior, parents that live together tend to be more stable than a single parent or multi-generation

single parent tend to be stressed about financial problems because there will be pile of bills to pay alone, there are lot of household tasks that over load a single parent. divorced parents can cause conflict on the child’s life negatively because the child grow up and got used to have two parents in the house it can be hard for a child to adjust to having one parent and the research has shown that children who are raised by parents of the same sex tend to have a problem in their future life because they do not know how to act around the opposite sex and what is expected from them. Some research have demonstrated that children of alternative families do worse, on average than children in the traditional nuclear family (Wassil & Claudette,