Marriage & Family

What would you like to get out of your time in this course? These are the questions, interests, and topics we came up with upon our first meeting:

• Course credit
• Application of information on marriage and family to real life experiences
• Understand differences in family dynamics
• Environmental effects on childhood development
• How does having a special needs child affect the family?
• Discuss racial/ethnic differences in family
• Sociological causes/correlates of divorce
• Coping skills with respect to crisis in families
• How do children affect familiy life?  Making the transition to parenthood
• Fertility/infertility
• Adoption
• What are the benefits of marriage?
• Why do people marry?
• Historical view of marriage and family

In conjunction with the above, we’ll draw from the following grab bag of topical goodies.  This list will serve as a general outline for our meetings, discussions, and readings:

• Emerging Adulthood (EA): EA as a new stage in the life course; EA as it relates to the history of marriage and family
• Dating: Hook-up culture, Interracial dating and relationships, Cohabitation
• The Marriage Market:  Mate selection; Should you wait for the right person or settle?
• Marriage:  Marital name change / identity politics; The marital life cycle; Marital conflict and communication, polygamy, polyandry, polygyny, arranged marriage
• Gender Roles: Domestic work: The second shift; Do moms who work outside home have negative effect on their kids?; Stay at home moms (SAHMS)/ dads
• Birth & Pregnancy: Family planning and contraception; Abortion; History of birth: natural, medicated, and medicalized birth; Breastfeeding
• Parenting & Childhood: Birth order and life outcomes; Socioeconomic status and childrearing, including discipline; Gender role socialization
• Sexuality: Sexual Orientation: homosexuality, heterosexuality, social construction of sexuality; STDs; Pornography; Same-sex marriage and adoption
• Divorce: How divorce effects kids; Understanding divorce rates and trends: rates, who initiates divorce, types (e.g. no fault), causes
• Extramarital Relationships: Are will built for monogamy?; Rates of and types of extramarital relationships; The closing gender gap