Critical Essay

Critical Analyze Paper
Families have changed dramatically within the past decade. Before the nuclear family consisted of working father, a stay at home mother and their children. However this concept has been taking for granted. At the present, families are recreating themselves. They are no longer following the traditional way of the family life; rather they are made of different groups with various roles. In this paper, I will be reviewing the work of Bonnie J. Fox and Doreen Fumia titled Pathbreakers: Some Unconventional Families of the Nineties to analyze how the make-up of the family changed.   I will also be go over Fox and Fumia’s piece of writing to distinguish the reliability of their study.
In the article, Fox and Fumia interviewed several families that would not be considered the typical nuclear family. In an ideal family, the father would be the one working and taking care of all the financial needs; while the mother would look after the children and household duties. However, this was not the case with the families Fox and Fumia interviewed. These groups of people created their own families, opposite of the social norm. Some the families interviewed consisted of a male homemaker and a female breadwinner. The man was content to take the role of the woman, because she was the one who was making more income. Another family were made up of 2 same sex couples and a child. They wanted to have a child because they believed that they can provide the child with a loving home. These families believed that they were living an egalitarian way of life, where everything was balanced among them. Fox and Fumia wrote that the main theme most of the families talked about was “the balance between individual autonomy and the needs of the family as a unit, but especially of the young children in it (and their seemingly infinite needs for caregiver’s time)” (pg.459).
Moreover, Fox and Fumia suggested that reasons the make-up of the family altered are due to change of...