Memorable Notes from The Expanded Family Life Cycle

textbookI loved the textbook for my Marital Life Cycle class. Many times I found myself saying "Wow" in the course of my reading. I like to share my wow moments with my friends.

My biggest disappointment with this text is that it has not been updated in many many years but the book is a compilation of different authors work so I guess updating would be very difficult. The text is an "industry standard" for this class. Universities across the nation use it. Moving on.

Keep in mind, what I'm going to write is just blips here and there throughout the text. One does not necessarily flow into the next. Oh yeah, and I'm not giving references on all this stuff. It's all taken straight from the text. On the off chance you're interested you may email me and I'll give you a page number. No one's going to care about that. LOL.

Family Structure Stats

Within a year after divorce, 50% of fathers have virtually lost contact with their children and this is more often true if the child is a girl.

On average men pay more for their car payments than they do for their child support payments

Important Parenting Note

Parents, pay close attention to your 9-12 year olds. It is your last chance to affirm support of your children's competence and abilities before teen struggles for independence begin. It is also the last chance for you to strongly influence your children's choice of peers and to widen the child's social circle by encouraging diversity.

Social Class

In 1960, the ratio of average CEO income to average worker income was 41:1. By 1996, it had soared to 209:1, by far the highest ratio in the industrialized world. As the income gap widens, the wealthy successfully lobby for huge tax breaks in personal and corporate income, capital gains, and estate taxes.

What really freaks me out about that is that the textbook has not been updated since 1999 so can you imagine how crazy the ratio is now.

Women and Work

Women have been in a double bind in this regard. Although the dominant belief has been that women belong in the home, participation in the labor force has been shown to be the most important determinant of a woman's psychological well-being. Women who work outside the home show fewer symptoms of psychological and physiological distress, and the evidence is that maternal employment is not harmful for children.

And then I read:

Women who are homemakers end up with a lower sense of self-esteem and personal competence, even regarding their child care and social skills, than do mothers in the paid workforce.

I'm sure there are many stay at home moms that love it but this paragraph really spoke to me. I've been out of the work force since October 2006 and I miss it terribly. I miss the daily sense of accomplishment that comes with completing tasks. A mother's job is never done!

I found another piece of information on this subject that was also very interesting to me.

Daughters appear to benefit most of all from having a working mother. They have been shown to be more self-confident, to get better grades, and to be more likely to pursue careers themselves than children of unemployed mothers.

I don't know about you but the thought of my daughter in a Girls Gone Wild video makes working on her self-confidence a very high priority for me.

Domestic Violence

Women are 10 times more likely than men to be abused by an intimate partner and 6 times more likely to be abused by an intimate partner than by a stranger.

The number of women murdered by their intimates in the United States during the years of the Vietnam War (51,000) approximated the number of soldiers killed in the war (58,000), yet we have heard virtually nothing about these tragic losses, and there are no memorials to these women.

I actually posted this to my facebook account a couple of months ago and got trashed by the wife of one of my "friends". There's a reason SHE isn't my friend. LOL. I didn't write it or make it fact I just shared it. Her chief complaint was that it wasn't a war. Yeah, that's the significant point here! Reading comprehension really paid off for her. :devil: We need emoticons badly!!!

Siblings

According to research conducted in the 40's the more sisters a man has the happiest he's going to be throughout his life.

In the Hennig and Jardin classic study of highly successful women in business, not a single woman in the study had a brother.

That particular statistic was very interesting to me. The obvious question is, ok, is that 10 women or 100 women? The info quoted is from a book The Managerial Woman by Margaret Hennig and Anne Jardin. Please look it up if you feel so inclined and share the information here. Digging in books goes beyond my commitment level.

There's more but this post has grown longer than I think it should so I'm going to close there. I hope you found something interesting among the tidbits of information.