Read the Book(Uploaded) and write about the questions(each 1150~200 words)

families are not leisurely lolling through their days as huge paychecks flow in, so if parents are spending more time with their children, just where is the time coming from?

Today’s parents are squeezing out more hours for their children by spending less time on social activities and by participating less in organizations. But this accounts for only some of the time. Look again at Figure 10.2, but this time focus on the hours that husbands and wives spend doing housework. Although men are doing more housework than they used to, women are spending so much less time on housework that the total hours that husbands and wives spend on housework have dropped from 38.9 to 29.1 hours a week. This leaves a lot more time to spend with the children.

Does this mean that today’s parents aren’t as fussy about housework as their parents were, and today’s houses are dirtier and messier? That is one possibility. Or technology could be the explanation. Perhaps microwaves, dishwashers, more efficient washing ma- chines and clothes dryers, and wrinkle-free clothing have saved hours of drudgery, leav- ing home hygiene about the same as before (Bianchi et al. 2006). The time savings from the “McDonaldization” we discussed in Chapter 7, with people eating more “fast foods,” is also substantial. It is likely that both explanations are true.

Finally, from Figure 10.2, you can see that husbands and wives spend their time dif- ferently. In what sociologists call a gendered division of labor, husbands still take the pri- mary responsibility for earning the income and wives the primary responsibility for taking care of the house and children. You can also see that a shift is taking place in this tradi- tional gender orientation: Wives are spending more time earning the family income, while husbands are spending more time on housework and child care. In light of these trends and with changing ideas of gender—of what is considered appropriate for husbands and wives—we can anticipate greater marital equality in the future.

The Family Life Cycle We have seen how the forms of marriage and family vary widely, looked at marriage and family theoretically, and examined major changes in family relationships. Now let’s dis- cuss love, courtship, and the family life cycle.

Love and Courtship in Global Perspective Until recently, social scientists thought that romantic love originated in western Europe during the medieval period (Mount 1992). This is strange, for ancient accounts, such as Genesis and 1 Samuel in the Old Testament, record stories of romantic love. When an- thropologists William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer (1992) surveyed the data available on 166 societies around the world, they found that romantic love—people being sexu- ally attracted to one another and idealizing each other—showed up in 88 percent (147) of these groups. Ideas of love, however, can differ dramatically from one society to another. As the Cultural Diversity box on the next page details, for example, Indians don’t expect love to occur until after marriage.

Because love plays such a significant role in Western life—and often is regarded as the only proper basis for marriage—social scientists have probed this concept with the tools of the trade: experiments, questionnaires, interviews, and observations. In a fascinating ex- periment, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron discovered that fear can produce romantic love (Rubin 1985). Here’s what they did.

About 230 feet above the Capilano River in North Vancouver, British Columbia, a rickety footbridge sways in the wind. It makes you feel like you might fall into the rocky gorge below. A more solid footbridge crosses only ten feet above the shallow stream.

The experimenters had an attractive woman approach men who were crossing these bridges. She told them she was studying “the effects of exposure to scenic attractions on creative expression.” She showed them a picture, and they wrote down their associations. The sexual imagery in their stories showed that the men on the unsteady, frightening bridge were more sexually aroused than were the men on the solid bridge. More of these men also called the young woman afterward—supposedly to get information about the study.

308 C h a p t e r 1 0 M A R R I A G E A N D F A M I L Y

romantic love feelings of sexual attraction accompanied by an idealization of the other