Please post a good solid paragraph with some thoughts about the materials this week and respond to two other students in your group!

Stundent#1 (Stacey)

“One of the most interesting things I found from this weeks materials was the Household in America chart from 1970 and 2020. Just the fact that there were no reported households having single parents and no spouse in 1970 is super interesting because so many individuals do live with that sort of lifestyle today. The other number that totally shocked me was the amount of adults (ages 18-24) that still live with a parent today, amounting to 58% of this age group. I would guess a lot of this is due to not only the pandemic but also the maturity that has been declined in the past years such as handling money and the lack of prizing a family over work as it once was. On the other hand, it does show that our population has become stronger and able to accommodate without having an ideal family which was once expected. The whole concept of marrying later in life or not at all has become really interesting to me because I have always known I wanted a family and what not. It seems in our modern society so many individuals are more intrigued by living a “luxurious” lifestyle where they can “treat” themselves all while having minimal responsibility.

Student #2(elmer)

“For this week we didn’t have a textbook reading for information on the topic at hand. However, I spent my time looking over the presentation, the folder images, and the Beck Gernsheim article. It was within the Census folder that I found some astonishing and yet rather obvious information. I am talking about the interesting graphs that we in the folder that showed varying information over the years. Firstly, the “Changes in Household Size” chart shows a steady decrease in Family households from 1947 to 2020. This was a bit shocking to me because I was “plagued” by the ideal family concept, which only ever had few kids in the family so a family of four or three back in the day was usually what I was imagining. Yet, I was mistaken as the data shows the size of family households was on average greater in the mid 1900s than in the present 20th century. I think I was also shocked at this concept because my immediate family household is of 8 people.

Another graph that was interesting for me was the “Rise in Living Alone.” The graph shoes that since the 19th century the amount of households with one person living in them has increased a lot. Again this brings about a new household type far different from my own. Yet it pretty interesting to see an increase in people not getting married or not forming a family and it being totally normal and not wrong. I’m aware the graphs were pretty obvious in their depiction of the information, but I couldn’t help but discuss the fact that they simply show us the growth and the change and the variation found within what is viewed as a family as the years go by. I find it completely amazing to see in a descriptive image. “