As nations around the world develop and change from traditional to modern lifestyles, more and more people live alone or with much smaller families. What are the causes of these trends and what kind of effects will they have on society?
In a century, the world has gone through countless changes and became better place to live. Now we can hardly find a place which is maintaining its original shape and as everything changed, people are living a different life compared to the past. One change in a lifestyle we went through is that we no more live in an extended family. Today, people prefer to live alone or in a nuclear family which is a family group only consisting of parents and their child. This lifestyle has become pervasive around the world and it is fitting well in most societies. There are few causes to this trend but recent technology development and job diversity had great effect on raising this trend.
To start with, the world had enormous technological development in a past few decades. We can't deny the fact that technological development had one of the greatest impacts on a phenomenon which made people to live in a nuclear family. In the past, the jobs were passed down to the children so it was easy to see an extended family taking their parts in a job. As jobs were passed down, people lived with their parents and formed an extended family. People helped their parents from early age because most jobs required more people compared to the modern world as there were no technology. For example, farming in the past required more people because everything was done by hand. But now we have technologies which help our job to be done much faster and easier. Due to these technologies, people no more needed take part in their parent's job and seek for independence
In addition, job diversity also had a significant impact on modern nuclear family lifestyle. There was only little diversity of jobs in the past and as jobs were passed down, people had no choice but to follow the job of their parents. Today the trends have changed and people are no more taking the jobs of their parents but find jobs that they want. Also people in the rural areas go to developed cities to search for more profitable jobs. Generally, agricultural jobs are harder but less profitable than jobs in the cities. So for this kind of reason, young people leave their home and settle in the cities forming a nuclear family or live alone.
The new trend of nuclear family had both good and bad impact on the society. On the positive side, the status of female has raised and the family has become democratic. In the extend family, female had lower status compared to male so female did all the housework and male had all of authorities to make decisions. However, female is considered same as male and decisions are made democratically in the nuclear family. On the other hand, there are also negative sides of the nuclear family on our society. As there are no one to mediate a dispute between husband and wife, the divorce rate has increased. Also, the alienation of the old people is becoming to be a serious problem in our new trend society.
To sum up, the rapid change of our society produced the new trend of nuclear family. Although there are some positive sides to this new trend, we should not forget about the negative sides of this trend. Change is always required for the development of our society but I think maintaining our tradition is also important.
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