Seminar 15
Seminar 15: The Twenty-First Century Family Families have never been simple or uniform. Lower life expectancy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant that children could grow up with a lone parent or by other relatives or in care. While illegitimacy rates were relatively low, there were still many children brought up by unmarried mothers, by their grandmothers or adopted. War meant children grew up without fathers, some never returned. Lone parent families have been constantly seen as a problem, however, and in this seminar we will examine how and why this has occurred. Seminar/Essay Questions:
- Are step-families a late twentieth century development?
- How and why lave lone-parent families been stigmatised?
- Why have patterns of family life have changed so much in the last thirty years?