Family Effect Our Daily Lives

¶ … Family Effect Our Daily Lives

There is little doubt that families effect the daily life of each individual. What ever is going on within the family is going to manifest itself with each family member in both similar and different ways. For example, members in a family with an autistic child will each cope with the experience in different ways, depending on age and responsibility. Thus, daily life within a family will not only effect the family as a whole, but will also effect each member uniquely.

Families come in all shapes and sizes, and may include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, step-parents, step-children, etc. They may also include members with physical ailments or disabilities, addiction or mental illness. Or they may be distinguished for other reasons such as multiple births, sexual orientation, or race.

The daily life for a family with a toddler is going to be quite different from one with college age children. Babies and small children can leave parents exhausted by the end of the day. More importantly, life literally seems to revolve around the child. All activities, including meals, work, and recreation depend on the child's schedule. In other words, if the child wakes up at 6am, so do the parents, or at least one of them, whether he or she was ready to get up or not. A trip to the grocery store may likely as not end with the parent dragging the child out because he has thrown a temper tantrum over something, usually not getting his way. As Trisha Thompson writes in the magazine "Parenting," "Life with a toddler is sunny and stormy for all parents" (Thompson Pp). Daily life with a toddler consist of meal and snack times, play times, nap times, bath times, and bed times, not to mention the continuous interacting with the child who depends on the parent or caretaker for everything in his life, including safety, love, guidance, and discipline. Such a schedule often leaves parents exhausted by the end of the day. And when one adds the daily conflicts that arise with raising a toddler, family life can be extremely stressful. Beverly Kovach writes in "Childhood Education" that toddler conflict is a "natural part of life" and that most often the "level of adult anxiety during toddler conflict coincides with toddlers' rising emotions" (Kovach Pp). Family life that includes a toddler can "take an emotional toll on the adult" says Kovach (Kovach Pp).

Elizabeth and her husband John have been married for five years and they have fraternal boy - girl four-year-old twins, Adam and Carley. Daily life in her family has stressful effects. John, 41, is a construction worker who has just been placed on high blood pressure and anxiety medication. Moreover, he lost his business last year due to a bad business deal that resulted in the family filing bankruptcy. Elizabeth admits that money is very tight. She says that it seems as if they have been struggling to make ends meet their entire marriage. Her pregnancy was difficult, and she was forced to spend the last four months in bed, and when the babies were born, they required extra medical attention, thus placing extra financial burdens on the family. She has recently started selling Mary Kay cosmetics, trying to earn extra income for the family while still being available for the children and John. From the interview, it was easy to see that the stress of their life as a result of having the children. Until this past September when she enrolled the twins in pre-school and started her Mary Kay career, every waking moment of her life was spent with Adam and Carley. And even now, she only gets roughly three hours a day, that is if neither of them are sick and have to be kept home from school. And those hours are spent trying to catch up on errands and scheduling her cosmetic appointments. Moreover, since John's recent medical problems, Elizabeth feels she needs to take on more responsibility to ease his burden, for she confesses she secretly fears he may be a candidate for an early heart attack like her father. Furthermore, due to finance problems and lack of family support, John and Elizabeth have not had a vacation with or without the children since they have been married. One gets the feeling that this family is becoming a pressure cooker that will explode if solutions are not found to ease the burdens of their daily life.

Today more and more school aged children live with their grandparents, whether alone or with one or both parents. In fact according to recent statistics, more than five million children, or 7.7% live with their grandparents (Vanderkam Pp). These grandparent-headed households differ from traditional three-generation households because today, most of the grandparents are over sixty-five years old and few work (Vanderkam Pp). Moreover, many boomers are suddenly confronted with aging relatives who can no longer care for themselves (Kornblum Pp). According to Lynn Friss Feinberg, deputy director of the National Center on Caregiving at Family Caregiver Alliance in San Francisco, "It's an issue that's talked about at dinner tables and supermarkets...It affects everyone" (Kornblum Pp). The National Alliance for Caregiving reports that almost a quarter of U.S. households, twenty-two million, already are involved in caring for a relative or friend who is fifty years old or older, and the U.S. Census Bureau predicts that by 2050, the percentage of Americans sixty-five and over will grow to twenty-one percent of the population from the current twelve percent (Kornblum Pp). Feinberg states that "We are entering a tidal wave of the need for caregiving...and it's huge" (Kornblum Pp). Not only does caregiving take time and money, but it also takes a physical and emotional toll on the family (Kornblum Pp).