Two American Families Essay

788 Words2 Pages

While watching the documentary “Two American Families” there was three aspects I noticed within the two families. The first being how there was a shift in the social class of the families due to economic problems. The second being the role reversal of the male and the female. The third being the effect of the families’ financial instability on the children and their decisions into adulthood. There was a shift in both families’ social standing. The Neumanns and the Stanleys started out as middle-class families, for example, they both had a comfortable income with benefits from their factory jobs in Milwaukee. However, their jobs did not last because the factories started to search for cheap labor overseas. This caused the Neumanns and the …show more content…

For example, with the Neumanns, the children started to come to the house alone without their mother caring for them like she used to. As the children reach their teenage years their moods started to change and so did their grades. In adulthood, the boys started to work odds jobs because they had children at young ages, which cause them to drop out of high school. The daughter decided to get a stable job with benefits because she wanted to avoid dealing with the same struggles her family had. The Stanleys children had a different outcome. When the children took notice of the mother and father financial problems the boys decided to get a job in landscaping to help out. The eldest son graduated from high school and proceeded to go to college, which took all the families income and left the other kids without support. Cherlin describes this effect as the limits of kin networks meaning that the induvial income must be shared with the other family members. The mother and father paying for the son’s education cannot give money to the other kids. So the other kids looked for odd jobs or joined the military. In adulthood, the daughters have kids and struggle to make money. The son goes overseas for a job to avoid financial instability that his parents had in the U.S. The college son works at a good job with benefits but is still afraid that he might end up like his mother father, so he decides to work odd jobs

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