Families

I thought this essay was pretty interesting. It is always interesting for me to look into or study the different views and opinions people have about the family, what the family unit is, and how it should operate or function in society. I lived in Denmark for a few years and most of the people over their looked at the family a little differently that we typically do here in st. George or even Utah for that matter. For them it is normal to live together and have kids before you even think about marriage. A lot of them didn't even get married, they just lived together as sort of a family unit, similar to the way we live in family units. I think that here, especially in a mormon culture, many people view it as pretty normal to get married first, and then start your family. So i could see that it varied a little even from our culture to theirs.

The research the author used was interesting to me. I thought it intriguing how within the different classes of families, there are different goals and ways of living of the families. For example, middle class families tend to share linearly (parent to child), rather then among extended family and close friends as it is in working class households. Just reading about the defferent ways each class lives fascinated me. Aulette used a lot of research in her essay. From a lot of different sources as well. She incorperated it into her essay very well i thought.

The Moynihan report was interesting. I don't agree with it. Maybe it was an excuse to get black males to join the army, i don't know. Aulette noted the Carol Stack research right after talking about it in her essay, and the research pretty much shot down the moynihan theory. So i think Aulette could have maybe disagreed with the theory because she put that right after, even though she didn't really take a standpoint herself. I don't know. Overall, i really enjoyed reading the essay.