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

Blended Families The blended family, one whose members were once part of other families, is an increas- ingly significant type of family in the United States. Two divorced people who marry and each bring their children into a new family unit form a blended family. With di- vorce common, millions of children spend some of their childhood in blended families. I’ve never seen a better description of how blended families complicate family relation- ships than what one of my freshman students wrote:

I live with my dad. I should say that I live with my dad, my brother (whose mother and fa- ther are also my mother and father), my half sister (whose father is my dad, but whose mother is my father’s last wife), and two stepbrothers and stepsisters (children of my father’s current wife). My father’s wife (my current stepmother, not to be confused with his second wife who, I guess, is no longer my stepmother) is pregnant, and soon we all will have a new brother or sister. Or will it be a half brother or half sister?

If you can’t figure this out, I don’t blame you. I have trouble myself. It gets very complicated around Christmas. Should we all stay together? Split up and go to several other homes? Who do we buy gifts for, anyway?

Gay and Lesbian Families Although a handful of U.S. states allow people of the same sex to marry, 40 states have laws that do not allow same-sex marriages (McKinley and Goostein 2008). Walking a fine conceptual tightrope, some states recognize “registered domestic partnerships,” giv- ing legal status to same-sex unions but avoiding the term marriage. The result is that most gay and lesbian couples lack both legal marriage and the legal protection of registered “partnerships.”

Gay and lesbian couples live throughout the United States, but about half live in just twenty cities, with the greatest concentrations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York City, and Washington, D.C. About one-fifth of gay and lesbian couples were previously married to heterosexuals. Twenty-two percent of female couples and 5 percent of male couples have children from their earlier heterosexual marriages (Bianchi and Casper 2000).

What are same-sex relationships like? Like everything else in life, these couples cannot be painted with a single brush stroke. Social class, as it does for opposite-sex couples, sig-

nificantly shapes orientations to life. Sociol- ogists Philip Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz (1985), who interviewed same- sex couples, found their main struggles to be housework, money, careers, problems with relatives, and sexual adjustment. If these sound familiar, they should be, as they are precisely the same problems that hetero- sexual couples face. Some find that their sexual orientation brings discrimination, which can add stress to their relationship (Todosijevic et al. 2005). The children they rear have about the same adjustment as children reared by heterosexual parents and are no more likely to have a gay or lesbian sexual orientation (Perrin 2002; “Lesbian and Gay Parenting” 2005). Same-sex cou- ples are more likely to break up, and one argument for legalizing gay marriages is that this will make these relationships more stable. Where same-sex marriages are legal, like opposite-sex marriages, to break them requires negotiating around legal obstacles.

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Being fought in U.S. courts is whether or not marriage should be limited to heterosexual couples. This lesbian couple was married in San Francisco, California, in 2008 but later that year California voters passed Proposition 8, which limits marriage to men and women.

blended family a family whose members were once part of other families