The Family Structure Of The African American Family

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Problem Statement
With the advancing lifestyles and further developments in personal mobility that defines today’s society, the family still plays a crucial role of contemporary life. Families offer many benefits such as companionship, protection, security, encouragement and other relative social components. The term family has been changed over the past few decades. The total number of households in the United States increased from 63 million in 1970 to 113 million in 2008 (Weeks, 2012). The traditional structure of the family (nuclear family) began branching to other structures especially in the United States follow World War II. The structures for families vary depending on certain scenarios. Some of the structures include the nuclear family, the extended family, single-parent family and many more.

With that being said, the family structures affect multitudes of people in terms of ethnicity and background. The ideas of family for African Americans families have changed over the course of time and it has tremendously impacted the black communities. E. Franklin Frazier has described the African-American family structure as having two models, one in which the father is viewed as a patriarch and sole breadwinner, and one where the mother takes on a matriarchal role in the place of a broken household (Frazier, 1930). James Stewart exhibits the African-American family structure as “an institution that interacts with other institution forming a social network” (Stewart,

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