Non-Traditional Parenting The main point of the article, "Moms at Work and Dads at Home: Children's Evaluations of Parental Roles," is that when children are given a chance to express their opinions on traditional vs. non-traditional roles, they speak up. In this case, the children used in the survey (67 second-graders and 54 fifth-graders) saw it as "acceptable for both mothers and fathers to work full-time" (Sinno, et al., 2009). However, children found it not as acceptable for fathers to be stay-at-home parents as it is for mothers to be stay-at-home parents. Clearly, 2nd graders were "more likely to rely on ... stereotype knowledge of appropriate roles" (mom home, dad at work), and when dad was the key child-rearing parent it became a non-traditional family. http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=130760&page=1. (This is an ABC News report on the growing trend of fathers raising children.)

Another non-traditional family is the Foster Care family. According to the Journal of Child and Family Studies, more than 500,000 U.S. children are in foster homes " ... due to child abuse and neglect" (Tyler, et al., 2010). The sad part for these children is that once removed from the original home where they were abused " ... many continue to...

And sadder still is the fact that once many of foster care children leave their foster parenting situation, they encounter difficulties such as " ... drug use, homelessness, victimization, and/or arrests" (Tyler, 787). Homeless adults are five-to-seven times more apt to have been in a foster family, and youths that had lived in a foster family " ... find themselves ill-equipped for their emergence into society," and their chances of becoming homeless within the first year after "being discharged" from a foster family are quite high (Tyler, 788). The Website www.endhomelessness.org points out that those parents with a foster care background are more likely than the average parents to have their own children in foster care.
Child Maltreatment: The key point of the article in BMC Psychiatry (on child maltreatment) is that for male juvenile offenders, when they have suffered from neglect at a young age, they tend to continue the same criminal path (recidivism). And if the male juvenile offender was physically abused in a home as a young child, his situation is " ... uniquely related to violent recidivism, over and above dynamic risk factors for recidivism" (van der Put, et…