Australian Family Life

Essay # 45167

Asian Studies
Sociology

A look at how family life in Australia has changed over the last two hundred years.

2,884 words () | 12 sources | MLA | 2002 Australia

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how the history of the Australian family is a history of change in the economic and instrumental organization of family life and in patterns of authority and relationships. It analyzes how family life in Australia has changed over the last two hundred years. Since Australia was formerly a British colony, it also include details about the family life of original inhabitants and social as well as economic changes brought in by free settlers and immigrants.

Outline
What is a Family?
Introduction
Aboriginal Families
Colonial Australia ? Convicts Era and Early Immigrants
Early Twentieth Century - Urbanization and Industrialization
Suburbans and Families ? After World War II
Twentieth Century
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"By the 1970s, the prototypical nuclear family had yielded somewhat to modified structures including the one-parent family, stepfamilies and the childless family. One-parent families in the past were usually the result of the death of a spouse. Burns revealed that lone-parent families were rather common in the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century (Burns et al 1983, p.60). Now, however, most one-parent families are the result of divorce, although some are created when unmarried mothers bear children. In 1991, more than one out of four children lived with only one parent, usually the mother and most one-parent families, however, eventually became two-parent families through remarriage (Australian Bureau of Census and Statistics, 1991)."