Developing an African-American Family Unit - Research Paper Example

? Psychology Psychology There are fundamental reasons regarding the decision to develop an African-American family unit. Amongst them, includes the lack of any formal training in schools regarding bringing up of a family, as the existing family curriculum directs its exertion towards human sexuality, decision-making, and value clarification. The teenage mother classes obtainable in high schools merely deals with the female students after becoming pregnant. It was until recently, that the program began dealing with teenage fathers. Developing this family unit will be useful towards supplementing the prospectus of family life, particularly because the focus bears a direct relation to the African-Americans. Some could content that students pick up how to bring up families from their guardians or parents. In numerous instances, that remains factual. Regrettably, certain black students study in poor residents and neighborhood surroundings (Page, 2011). This development does not seek to cure all the political, economic, and social ills, which confront the African American households. It is impossible owing to the distinctiveness in family arrangements, which are present within the black community. Nevertheless, the development aspires to provoke deliberations regarding the African American families in order for the understanding of the crisis, which threaten the African American families. Objective The development of this family unit will assist other black students be in terms with the environment of their homes. They need to know that when the family structure fails to model the ultimate American nuclear household does not imply that their household stays unstable or is shameful. Most of the African American families have two parents heading the households. This must not be the instance. There are considerable studies on the organization of black families. Practitioners continuously strive to size the knowledge base for services intervention in order to practice further efficiently with the African Americans. Most of the previous researches made use of the deficit model, centering primarily on the predicaments of the single-parent family units. In addition, they examined the various economic and social components of African American household lives. Even though, the researches demonstrate impressive selection of African American households, most of them failed in examining the modules together in one investigation. As such, in developing this family structure, the diverse family structure types of African American families and the degree to which these families affect psychological, economic, and social wellbeing projection were up for consideration (Gaylin, 2009). Methodology The recruitment of participant was principally through community-founded lead agencies for the task, through promotions in locality newspapers, targeted to the audiences of African Americans. Women who had participation interests in the study concerning healthy eating underwent screening for their eligibility. As such, the sample comprised of women filled with the motivation of making lifestyle transformations. Consequently, this was never a random African American women sample. The characterization of the cultural ethnocentric slant was through the typical belief that African American families are dysfunctional and unstable. Overall, families with absent fathers occupy the bottom stair of the economic ladder of the social order. Unwed mothers are also likely to be living under poor conditions. The African American families headed by females earn merely 36-percent as plentiful as households with both parents. Unmarried women have the tendency of earning relatively less, even though their families without a doubt have restrictions to sole breadwinners, thereby further broadening the income difference between households with sole parents and those with both parents. Effusively, 85-percent of all African American kids living under poverty are from households headed by single mothers (Henslin & Johnson, 2008). Quandary Whilst the general rate of black poverty stays superior to the poverty rate of white families, the aspect of black poverty has transformed radically in recent years. In the past, nearly every black family household was poor, despite the presence of either or both parents. Currently, the two-parent African American households are hardly poor. Amongst the African American families with both parents working full-time, the contemporary rate of poverty is a meager 2-percent. Furthermore, the relatively modest disparity of income between African American and white two-parent households wholly vanishes following the consideration of educational attainment, geographic area, age, comparative skills, and occupational choices (Gaylin, 2009). Teenage Crisis Teenagers in the single-parent families grow up experiencing social, psychological, and economic disadvantages. Case in point, they are prone to neglecting and abuses, much probable to experience challenges academically, prone to dropping out of schools, more probable to encompass behavioral predicaments, much further apt to experiencing emotional disorders, and far likely to encompass a weak of judgment. In addition, they are considerably less capable to delaying satisfaction and to controlling their sexual or violent impulses, tend to be sexually vigorous, probable to conceive kids out of wedlock, and could be on welfare program when they become adults. Furthermore, growing up minus a father stays as a farther superior determinant of boys’ future misconduct compared to either poverty or race. Despite the race factor, 70-percent of young persons in institutions of state reforms grew up in fatherless homes. This is because illegitimacy stands as a main influence in America’s crime predicament. The absence of married parents, and not poverty or race stays to be the primary influence in the rate of crime (Henslin & Johnson, 2008). Since the rate of illegitimacy of blacks is extremely high, such pathologies plague African Americans more than they influence the other demographics. Even if the white persons were to turn out morally invigorated tomorrow, it would not do anything for the predicaments plaguing a big section of the African American community. Family breakdown, fraudulent education, and illegitimacy are devastating predicaments, even though they are never civil rights predicaments. However, the establishment of civil rights paints an extremely dissimilar representation, characterizing such predicaments as nothing further than white racism by-products. That perception, through decades of continuous repetition has gained the minds of numerous African Americans. Rather than admit the decline of racism, African Americans contend even more that it persists and is further devious than before. This is because they maintain race up in order to safeguard themselves from whatever they do no desire to perceive in themselves (Page, 2011). During the previous 3-decades, there has been a swift decline in the proportion of solid married-partner households, even though the proportion of African American women aged between 15 and 44 years separated, widowed, or divorced also plunged. As such, it is the failure to espouse, which has resulted to such momentous transformations in the family patterns of African Americans. During the previous third of this century, marriage rates for African Americans have plummeted. Presently, an unblemished mainstream of African American women between the ages 15 and 44 have not been espoused, as likened with only a 1/3 of their white colleagues. Numerous less African American women are espousing, and still they carry on having children, which was never the instance in the earlier period. References Gaylin, W. (2009). Hatred: The Psychological Descent Into Violence. New York: PublicAffairs. Henslin, E. R., & Johnson, B. F. (2008). This is your brain on joy: A revolutionary program for balancing mood, restoring brain health, and nurturing spiritual growth. Nashville, Tenn: Thomas Nelson. Page, Thomas L., Dr. (2011). When Love Is Not Enough: Bringing Spirituality and Coping Back to Families and Homes. Iuniverse Inc. Read More