Barbara Walter’s television special was about the ten most fascinating people of 2013.
People magazine had a special edition of the25 most intriguing people of 2013. My husband and I were discussing the lists and wondered: were the definitions different or the same.
It turns out that intriguing is more interesting than fascinating. Merriam-Webster Dictionary on line defines intriguing as extremely interesting and fascinating as very interesting or appealing. Yet, People Magazine was able to find 25 more interesting than Barbara Walter’s 10..
It would be a safe bet to guess that this Grandma’s nominees for most fascinating and intriguing people of 2013 would include the four precious grandchildren. It does.
But, what would you say if this Grandma finds that the number of the most fascinating and intriguing people of 2013 is 317,334,000. This number is the population of the U. S. as of December 23, 2013 according to Wikipedia. (I wonder how often Wikipedia updates each statistic!).
We, American society and culture, are the most fascinating and intriguing in 2013. Most of us did not see or pay attention to the societal changes this year. We say time passes quickly. Our society moved quickly this year. We change drastically, very quickly. The New York Times noticed and said:
American households have never been more diverse, more surprising, more baffling. In this special issue of Science Times, Natalie Angier takes stock of our changing definition of family.
Natalie Angier, in her November 25, 2013 New York Times article spends 28 pages describing how fascinating and intriguing we Americans are in 2013:
The typical American family, if it ever lived anywhere but on Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving canvas, has become as multilayered and full of surprises as a holiday turducken – the all-American seasonal portmanteau of deboned turkey, duck and chicken.
Researchers who study the structure and evolution of the American family express unsullied astonishment at how rapidly the family has changed in recent years, the transformations often exceeding or capsizing those same experts’ predictions of just a few journal articles ago.
“This churning, this turnover in our intimate partnerships is creating complex families on a scale we’ve not seen before,” said Andrew J. Cherlin, a professor of public policy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s a mistake to think this is the endpoint of enormous change. We are still very much in the midst of it.”
Yet for all the restless shape-shifting of the American family, researchers who comb through census, survey and historical data and conduct field studies of ordinary home life have identified a number of key emerging themes.
The next paragraph shows why we Americans rise to the level of most fascinating and intriguing of 2013. I just had to bold it.
Families, they say, are becoming more socially egalitarian over all, even as economic disparities widen. Families are more ethnically, racially, religiously and stylistically diverse than half a generation ago – than even half a year ago.
We Americans strive for the American dream and we recreate ourselves in the process. Now we are doing it with such speed that the experts cannot keep up. Natalie Angier continues:
In increasing numbers, blacks marry whites, atheists marry Baptists, men marry men and women women, Democrats marry Republicans and start talk shows. Good friends join forces as part of the “voluntary kin” movement, sharing medical directives, wills, even adopting one another legally.
Single people live alone and proudly consider themselves families of one – more generous and civic-minded than so-called “greedy marrieds.”
“There are really good studies showing that single people are more likely than married couples to be in touch with friends, neighbors, siblings and parents,” said Bella DePaulo, author of “Singled Out” and a visiting professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
But that doesn’t mean they’ll be single forever. “There are not just more types of families and living arrangements than there used to be,” said Stephanie Coontz, author of the coming book “Intimate Revolutions,” and a social historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “Most people will move through several different types over the course of their lives.”
At the same time, the old-fashioned family plan of stably married parents residing with their children remains a source of considerable power in America – but one that is increasingly seen as out of reach to all but the educated elite.
“We’re seeing a class divide not only between the haves and the have-nots, but between the I do’s and the I do nots,” Dr. Coontz said. Those who are enjoying the perks of a good marriage “wouldn’t stand for any other kind,” she said, while those who would benefit most from marital stability “are the ones least likely to have the resources to sustain it.”
America started as a Puritan nation. The religious group from the 16th and 17th centuries set a standard that we have followed took to the 21st century for it to begin to change in fascinating and intriguing ways. For those of us who are far from the days of learning American history, Wikipedia assists again:
Puritans placed family at the center of their societies, as an organization to facilitate their devotion to God. Based on Biblical portrayals of Adam and Eve, Puritans believed that marriage represented one of the most fundamental human relationships rooted in procreation, love, and, most importantly, salvation. According to Puritans, husbands were the spiritual head of the household, while women were to demonstrate religious piety and obedience under male authority. Furthermore, marriage represented not only the relationship between husband and wife, but also the relationship between spouses and God. Puritan husbands commanded authority through family direction and prayer. The female relationship to her husband and to God was marked by submissiveness and humility.
Puritans believed wives to be spiritual equals to their husbands. . . . The paradox created by female inferiority in the public sphere and the spiritual equality of men and women in marriage, then, gave way to the informal authority of women concerning matters of the home and childrearing. With the consent of their husbands, Puritan wives made important decisions concerning the labour of their children, property, and the management of inns and taverns owned by their husbands.
But have we changed completely? According to Natalie Angier, not so much!
Yet across the divide runs a white picket fence, our unshakable star-spangled belief in the value of marriage and family. We marry, divorce and remarry at rates not seen anywhere else in the developed world. We lavish $70 billion a year on weddings, more than we spend on pets, coffee, toothpaste and toilet paper combined.
We’re sappy family romantics. When an informal sample of 52 Americans of different ages, professions and hometowns were asked the first thought that came to mind on hearing the word “family,” the answers varied hardly at all. Love! Kids! Mom! Dinner!
How we view and have children is distinctly different in 2013. We are having less children.
In charting the differences between today’s families and those of the past, demographers start with the kids – or rather the lack of them.
The nation’s birthrate today is half what it was in 1960, and last year hit its lowest point ever. At the end of the baby boom, in 1964, 36 percent of all Americans were under 18 years old; last year, children accounted for just 23.5 percent of the population, and the proportion is dropping, to a projected 21 percent by 2050. Fewer women are becoming mothers – about 80 percent of those of childbearing age today versus 90 percent in the 1970s – and those who reproduce do so more sparingly, averaging two children apiece now, compared with three in the 1970s.
One big reason is the soaring cost of ushering offspring to functional independence. According to the Department of Agriculture, the average middle-class couple will spend $241,080 to raise a child to age 18. Factor in four years of college and maybe graduate school, or a parentally subsidized internship with the local theater company, and say hello to your million-dollar bundle of oh joy.
We are living together without the benefit of marriage. When we have children, it is more likely to be out of wedlock than in the past. The explosion of children born out of wedlock in the U.S. seems to go back to 2008, but continues stable – at a very high rate of 41% of all children born out of wedlock annually since then.
As steep as the fertility decline has been, the marriage rate has fallen more sharply, particularly among young women, who do most of the nation’s childbearing. The trend is not demographically uniform, instead tracking the nation’s widening gap in income and opportunity. Among women with a bachelor’s degrees or higher, 90 percent adhere to the old playground song and put marriage before a baby carriage. For everybody else, maternity is often decoupled from matrimony: 40 percent of women with some college but no degree, and 57 percent of women with high school diplomas or less, are unmarried when they give birth to their first child.
More than one-quarter of these unwed mothers are living with a partner who may or may not be their child’s biological father. The rise of the cohabiting couple is another striking feature of the evolving American family: From 1996 to 2012, the number jumped almost 170 percent, to 7.8 million from 2.9 million.
Nor are unmarried mothers typically in their teens; contrary to all the talk of an epidemic of teenage motherhood, the birthrate among adolescent girls has dropped by nearly half since 1991 and last year hit an all-time low, a public health triumph that experts attribute to better sex education and birth-control methods. Most unmarried mothers today, demographers say, are in their 20s and early 30s. . . . .
We are marrying, but later. We are not waiting to have children in a marriage. We are living together – cohabiting — in great numbers.
Of the many changes to the design, packaging and content of family life over the past generation, researchers cite two as especially significant.
One is the sharp increase in out-of-wedlock births among all but the most highly educated women. The second is the repositioning of marriage from cornerstone to capstone, from a foundational act of early adulthood to a crowning event of later adulthood – an event that follows such previous achievements as finishing college, starting a career and owning furniture not made from fruit crates.
The two trends are interrelated, researchers say, but for reasons that are often misunderstood. Unmarried parents are not necessarily the careless and shortsighted hedonists of stereotype. Instead, a growing number of Americans are simply intimidated by the whole idea of marriage: It has assumed ever greater cultural status, becoming the mark of established winners rather than of modestly optimistic beginners (while weddings have become extravagant pageants where doves and butterflies are released but still, nobody gets the bridesmaid dresses right).
Childbearing, on the other hand, happens naturally, and offers what marriage all too often does not: lifelong bonds of love.
“For many cohabiting couples, there’s a high bar for marriage, high expectations of where they should be at economically or emotionally, and if they don’t meet that bar they’ll put off getting married,” said Kelly Musick, an associate professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, who has studied cohabitation patterns.
“But if they’re reasonably pleased with the relationship and happen to find themselves pregnant,” she continued, “they may realize they’re not in a great place financially to become parents but they’re still happy to have the child.” They find “a sense of purpose and fulfillment in parenthood” even when the rest of life is withholding the goods.
Kathryn Edin, a professor of public policy and management at Harvard University, has interviewed hundreds of low-income Americans. In her latest book, “Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City,” which she wrote with her colleague Timothy J. Nelson, Dr. Edin describes the enormous instability of family life among the working class and the poor.
“In the middle class, the divorce rate has gone down, and family life is in many ways simpler than it used to be,” she said in an interview. “There’s far more complexity and churning of households among the poor, a turnover of partnerships, lots of half-siblings.”
Yet Dr. Edin also punctures the myth of the low-income father as a deadbeat who deposits his sperm and runs. Instead, the young men in her study were eager to establish their paternity.
“They’re showing up at the hospital and signing birth certificates in droves,” she said. “They’re doing all this voluntarily, even though they know that by having their name on the certificate they’ll be liable for child support and could go to jail if they don’t pay.”
The fathers also proved to be more involved in their children’s lives than previously believed. “Even five years in, about two-thirds of fathers are seeing their kids at least monthly, and just under half are seeing their kids several times a week,” Dr. Edin said.
The next reason we Americans are the most fascinating and intriguing people of 2013 is the rise of the woman. Too bad, Puritans.
Also démodé is the old debate over whether mothers of dependent children should work outside the home. The facts have voted, the issue is settled, and Paycheck Mommy is now a central organizing principle of the modern American family.
The share of mothers employed full or part time has quadrupled since the 1950s and today
accounts for nearly three-quarters of women with children at home. The number of women who are their families’ sole or primary breadwinner also has soared, to 40 percent today from 11 percent in 1960. .
Marriages have changed too. Now the best marriages are egalitarian, with both partners participating in household chores and childrearing. Too bad, Puritans.
Cultural attitudes are adapting accordingly. Sixty-two percent of the public, and 72 percent of adults under 30, view the ideal marriage as one in which husband and wife both work and share child care and household duties; back when Jimmy Carter was president, less than half of the population approved of the dual-income family, and less than half of 1 percent of husbands knew how to operate a sponge mop.
And, it seems, we want the mothers of our grandchildren to be educated and to work, as the quality of their lives improves! Again, too bad, Puritans.
Mothers are bringing home more of the bacon, and of the mortarboards, too. While most couples are an even match scholastically, 28 percent of married women are better educated than their mates; that is true of just 19 percent of married men. Forty years ago, the asymmetry went the other way.
Some experts argue that the growing legion of mothers with advanced degrees has helped sharpen the already brutal competition for admission to the nation’s elite universities, which stress the importance of extracurricular activities. Nothing predicts the breadth and busyness of a child’s after-school schedule better, it turns out, than the mother’s level of education.
U.S. divorce rates grew rapidly in the 1970s and have hovered around 50%. Not anymore, except for us Boomers. We are never satisfied:
One change that caught many family researchers by surprise was the recent dip in the divorce rate. After many decades of upward march, followed by a long, stubborn stay at the familiar 50 percent mark that made every nuptial feel like a coin flip, the rate began falling in 1996 and is now just above 40 percent for first-time marriages.
The decline has been even more striking among middle- and upper-middle-income couples with college degrees. For them, fewer than one in three marriages is expected to end in divorce, a degree of stability that allows elite couples to merge their resources with confidence, maximally invest in their children and otherwise widen the gap between themselves and the struggling masses.
There are exceptions, of course. Among baby boomers, the rate of marriage failure has surged 50 percent in the past 20 years – perhaps out of an irritable nostalgia, researchers said, for the days of free love, better love, anything but this love. Nor do divorce rates appear to have fallen among those who take the old Samuel Johnson quip as a prescription, allowing hope to triumph over experience, and marrying again and again.
In 2013, U.S. gay couples have made significant headway in their goal of marriage and family equality.
“There’s a gayby boom, that’s for sure,” Mr. Wayser said. “So many of our friends are having kids.”
Some critics have expressed concern that the children of gay parents may suffer from social stigma and the lack of conventional adult role models, or that same-sex couples are not suited to the monotonous rigors of family life. Earlier studies, often invoked in the culture wars over same-sex marriage, suggested that children who lived with gay parents were prone to lower grades, conduct disorders and a heightened risk of drug and alcohol problems.
But new research suggests that such fears are misplaced. Through a preliminary analysis of census data and other sources, Michael J. Rosenfeld of Stanford University has found that whatever problems their children may display are more likely to stem from other factors, like the rupture of the heterosexual marriage that produced the children in the first place.
Once these factors are taken into account, said Dr. Rosenfeld, author of “The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-sex Unions, and the Changing American Family,” the children of same-sex parents are academically and emotionally indistinguishable from those of heterosexual parents.
And two-father couples, in defiance of stereotype, turn out to be exemplars of domesticity. In her long-term studies of unconventional families, Judith Stacey, a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, found that the most stable of all were those headed by gay men who’d had their children together.
Over 14 years, she said, “I was shocked to find that none of the male couples with children had broken up, not one.” Dr. Stacey, author of “Unhitched: Love, Marriage and Family Values From West Hollywood to Western China,” attributed that success to self-selection. “For men to become parents without women is very difficult,” she said. “Only a small percentage are willing and able to make the commitment.”
There’s no maybe about the gayby boom. According to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the number of gay couples with children has doubled in the past decade, and today well over 100,000 same-sex couples are raising children. Other estimates put the number of children living with gay parents – couples and singletons combined – at close to two million, or one out of 37 children under age 18.
Driving the rise in same-sex parenthood is the resonant success of the marriage equality movement, which has led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in 16 states and has helped ease adoption policies elsewhere. In 2009, 19 percent of same-sex couples raising children reported having an adopted child, up from just 10 percent in 2000. Gay parents are four times as likely as straight ones to be raising adoptees, and six times as likely to be caring for foster children, whom they often end up adopting.
Some crave the fetters of DNA, and here women have an advantage. Many of the children of lesbian couples are the biological offspring of one of the women and a semen donor – who may be anonymous, a friend, the brother of the nongestating woman, or Mark Ruffalo.
This is surely fascinating and intriguing!
We are still a nation of immigrants. But I bet you cannot guess where the most immigrants are coming from now:
Though much of the immigration debate has focused on Latinos, the fastest-growing immigrant groups are not Hispanic but Asian. The Asian-American population soared by 46 percent from 2000 to 2010, compared with 43 percent for Hispanics and 1 percent for non-Hispanic whites, and the Asian share of new immigrants nearly doubled, to 36 percent from 19 percent.
The 1950s stereotype of the ideal American family, of Dick, Jane and Wonder Bread homogeneity, arose at a time when the immigration rate was near historic lows. Today, the best place to find a traditional, G-rated American family may be in an immigrant community. Asian-American families, in particular, are exceptionally stable. They are half as likely to be divorced as Americans in general; only 16 percent of Asian-American infants are born out of wedlock, compared with 41 percent over all; and 80 percent of Asian-American children are raised by two married parents, versus 63 percent over all, according to Pew Research data.
Many of the new Asian immigrants come from solidly middle-class backgrounds, and many, though by no means all, do as well or better after moving to the United States. Fifty-one percent hold college degrees, compared with 31 percent of all adults. According to recent studies, Asian-Americans have the highest average household income of any racial group, roughly $68,000 a year, compared with $55,000 for whites and $34,000 for African-Americans.
At the front edge of the Asian-American boom are immigrants from South Asia, including India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. . . .It is no secret that many Asian-American students excel academically; their average SAT scores, for example, are the highest of any ethnic group.
So, what do we Americans want in 2014:
“Marriage as an institution lost much of its power over our lives, but marriage as a relationship became more powerful than ever,” said the social historian Stephanie Coontz.
The trend has only intensified with time. “The less we need marriage,” she said, “the more we expect from it.”
And we are still recreating ourselves in America. The definition of family is changing still. Now, it seems, we are simply making our friends are family, simply deciding to be related.
Circumstances can lead to friendships becoming something more. . . . Relationships like these – independent of biology but closer and more enduring than friendship – have been documented in various cultures throughout history. In the United States, they are particularly common within African-American and immigrant communities, as well as gay and lesbian social networks. Anthropologists have traditionally used the term “fictive kin” to separate such relationships from “true” kinship based on blood or law, but many researchers have recently pushed back against that distinction, arguing that self-constructed families are no less real or meaningful than conventional ones.
“They see these folks as family, and so I’m going to honor that,” said Dawn O. Braithwaite, head of communication studies at the University of Nebraska. “We want to think about it more as a continuum from friendship to family, and I don’t know when the bell rings. But definitely, for these people, nobody had a doubt that it was a family to them.”
Dr. Braithwaite and her colleagues have termed such families “voluntary kin.” For a study published in 2010, they interviewed 110 people in such relationships; they found that for some people, voluntary kinship filled a void left by death or estrangement from biological family, while for others the relationships were supplemental or temporary.
One thing that distinguishes these relationships from friendship, Dr. Braithwaite said, is that they often become central to one’s identity. And many serve important life functions: They may provide a sense of belonging, as well as financial and emotional relief.
Aha! We are still striving for a sense of family, a sense of belonging, which assists us through life and brings us financial and emotional relief.
We grandmas are the glue that keep families close and together. That’s what the article missed! We Boomers are still one of the largest groups of U.S. society and we have great impact on America. We look back on our more simpler lives and now complex society and bring balance and perspective. Wisdom. We will bring lots of it to 2014.
So, Mily Cyrus or Jennifer Lawrence or all of us. This Grandma knows she votes for all
317,334,000 of us in 2013 with
Joy,
Mema
Komentarze