1、1、The second Sunday of May is officially designated Mothers Day here in the United States. While Mothers Day is a happy occasion in most families, it is NOT happy in those where there is serious conflict between the mother and her children. Some scholars believe relationships between mothers and dau
2、ghters can be especially strained.Lynn Davidman, professor of womens studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, was 13 when her mother died of cancer. She has spent many years studying the immediate and long-term impact of a mothers premature death on those she leaves behind. The result of her res
3、earch is a book titled Motherloss . Lynn Davidman says over the years most of her samples, including herself, have constructed an idealized and culturally stereotyped view of their mothers? “Most of the people I interviewed told me that their mothers were the most perfect, the most wonderful, the mo
4、st loving, nurturing people that could have ever lived? Lynn Davidman says this is because people who lost their mothers during the early teens were old enough to remember her love and nurturing, but too young to experience some of the conflicts that come as children start growing up. Clinical psych
5、ologist Roni Cohen-Sandier who specializes in women and adolescent girls says mother-daughter conflicts start with the onset of the daughters puberty. She says at that age daughters often become critical of their mothers? “You know, they are trying to figure out who they are and they are looking at
6、their mothers who are supposed to be this role model and they are seeing what their mothers are doing and not doing and they are getting very critical. And oftentimes they think everything they are saying is so wrong, you know. So mothers end up feeling very rejected and very upset and take everythi
7、ng very personally and so thats where the challenge starts.“Roni Cohen-Sandier says when daughters go through adolescence, mothers usually remember their own and want their daughters to benefit from the mothers experience. Daughters typically reject that. Their common complaint is. “Mother is just n
8、ot listening to me.“Sociologist and author Victoria Secunda says she has never been able to have a cordial relationship with her mother. Ms Secunda, who wrote a book titled When You and Your Mother Cant Be Friends, says her research shows that conflicts between mothers and daughters are much more wi
9、de-spread than it is believed. Victoria Secunda says her research and her own experience show that many mother-daughter conflicts start much before the daughters puberty. They include the mothers early criticisms of the daughters looks, clothes, behavior, or friends.She says many mothers expect thei
10、r daughters to follow in their footsteps and a generation or two ago it meant getting married, having children and staying at home. “For many of the women I interviewed - this is mothers as well as daughters - it was a stake in the maternal heart if the daughter didnt follow the mothers domestic exa
11、mple, i.e. marriage, children, you know, food, meal planning. So that they felt in a sense betrayed - the mothers often did - because they felt as if their daughters, by living a very different kind of life, were somehow betraying the mother.“ According to Victoria Secunda, another factor in a mothe
12、r-daughter relationship is the role of the father. She says despite new trends, childcare and upbringing are still traditionally a mothers role in the United States as well as in many other countries. Roni Cohen-Sandier agrees that the fathers role is very important. Among other things, fathers can
13、diffuse some of the mother-daughter tension and serve as mediators. Both authors agree that as daughters mature, mothers have to learn to let go. Roni Cohen-Sandier says both mothers and daughters can benefit from viewing conflict as a good impetus for healthy change.2、Throughout history the basic u
14、nit of almost every human society has been the family. The members of the family live together under the same roof, they share the economic burdens of life as well as its affectionate joys, and it is the family which has primary responsibility for the important task of raising children to adulthood.
15、 The family is not a uniform concept in all societies. In many places it is an extended group which includes uncles, aunts, cousins and in-laws. The family head usually has considerable influence in arranging marriages, selecting careers and determining all important moves and purchases by any membe
16、r of the family. Particularly in conditions where society or the state does not give aid and where consequently the responsibilities of the family are greater, this larger group provides better protection in times of economic or other emergency. In many other societies, including most industrialized
17、 ones, the “nuclear family“ is the basic social unit. This term refers to a husband and wife united through marriage and their dependent children, whether natural or adopted. Industrialization and urbanization create many specialized jobs which tend to scatter family members among different employer
18、s and thus to separate residences as soon as they become wage earners. The small family, which has only one - or if the wife works also, two -employed members, is better able to adapt to rapid change and to move when the job moves. The nuclear family is almost universal and the nuclear group of fath
19、er, mother and their children is recognized even when it is part of an extended family. There are cases, however, which strain the definition. Polygamy, for example, brings several wives and their children into the picture. But polygamous households are not common in any society. More difficult to e
20、xplain are the cases of divided residence. Among the Ashanti people of Africa, where the wife and husband do not reside together, the child gets training and affection from the mothers brother and learns that his mothers husband is “not his family.“ An even stranger situation existed with the Nayar
21、of India before being changed by outside influence. There the household consisted of brothers and sisters and the sisters children. The sisters were not married and the brothers simply took care of whatever children their sisters had. Inheritance customs also have an influence on the structure of th
22、e family. In England the farm was passed on to the eldest son in order to keep the family land intact. Younger sons had to go out and start a new farm or join the army or move to town and take up a trade. They provided a large part of the labor supply during Englands industrialization process. In ma
23、ny areas of the European continent all of the sons shared equally in the inheritance and more extended households were common. Although the exact form varies from place to place and time to time, we can say that the family is the original and the most natural social group. The ties we develop by lon
24、g intimate association with the small group of persons who are biologically related to us cannot be matched in any of the forms of communal living which are tried every now and then.3、In many cultures, traditional families, that is, married couples with children, represent the core of their society.
25、 Until a decade ago, that was also the case in the United States. But the U.S. Bureau of Census reports people in more than three quarters of American households now live in some other arrangement. For the first time in history, the number of Americans living alone has surpassed the number of histor
26、ically dominant households - married couples with children. In 1960, 45 percent of American households consisted of married couples with children. Today it is less than 25 percent. In the past ten years, the number of non-family households has grown faster than the number of family households. But t
27、he statistics dont indicate that the American family life is disintegrating. Although the rate of married-with-children households is still declining, it is declining at a slower pace than during the 1960s and 1970s, and married couples with or without children still make up more than half of all Am
28、erican households. “What really should be noted is actually the remarkable stability in a lot of the numbers in the past ten years, compared to the structure of households 20 or 30 years before. And for example, in 1960, if we go back 40 years, about 75 percent of all households were married-couple
29、households. The number sharply dropped to 69 percent in 1970, and down to 60 percent in 1980. But then over the past two decades, the rate of decline has slowed down quite a bit: It went down to 55 percent in 1990, and 52 percent in 2000.“The number of married-with-children households is declining f
30、or several reasons. More than ever before, men and women are delaying both marriage and having children. Also the number of single-parent families is growing much faster than the number of married couples. The 2000 census shows that single fatherhood is a growing trend.First the aging of the America
31、n population and the growing number of both young and old people living alone are the main reasons the average American household hit a record low in 2000, just over two and a half people per household. Some sociologists fear that the growing number of one-person households means increasing social i
32、solation. Others see it as a sign of prosperity and an expression of American individualism.4、I am an identical twin and as children we looked exactly identical. So identical that we had to wear initials on our shirts so that teachers could tell us apart in school. And I think thats quite often the
33、case with identical twins - that when they are young children they tend to be more identical physically than when they grow up and I think that twins tend to diverge more as they get into adolescence and then into adulthood.And I think it reaches its climax when youre an adolescent because as an ado
34、lescent you are striving to be an individual but of course everybody looks upon you as one of a pair, so you have this real problem of identity. My theory is that twins actually look alike physically but often they complement each other when it comes to their personalities and natures, if you like.
35、And I think in our experience we complemented each other, we were the mirror image of each other. So my brother was more introvert, was more academic, schoolish. I was, perhaps, or still am, you know, extrovert, more extrovert than him. And I think thats what we carried through our childhood really.
36、 As children going through primary school we got on very well. We were, we always played together, we had common interests. Our parents actually encouraged that, so that when we were, you know, young children we had piano lessons and we did this and we did that together, and we were just like very,
37、very close friends. And it was natural for us to play together rather than to play with other children. When we got to adolescence, then thats where the truly competitive element came in and we found ourselves more likely to want not to be together. Not that we argued tremendously but that we just w
38、ere searching for our own identities and therefore we would clash more. Up until the age of eighteen we were always together, but when we left school I went to teach in France for a year, my brother went straight to university to read sciences - I was doing languages. So that when I came to go to un
39、iversity, he was a year ahead of me and by sheer chance we ended up in the same college in the same university, so the interesting factor was that we had deliberately aimed not to go to the same university . to be separate, but because I had this year off and he went straight in and through a quirk
40、of the selection process, we ended up in the same college. And this college, one of the Cambridge University colleges, seemed to specialize in twins because there were about half a dozen sets of twins in the college in that year and . but what we discovered was that we were very unlike them because
41、in virtually all cases those sets of twins in our college were reading the same subjects, lived in the same rooms, wore the same clothes, went to the same lectures and we actually felt quite different, because my brother was doing sciences, I was doing languages, we had different rooms, we had different friends in different years. So we realized that we were actually not anything like as close as other twins that we came into contact with.
