How family life has changed in the past 20 years is amazing. Some of the things that happened in the past were that families lived in less space on average then they do now. Back in the day when my parents were young wiper snappers they lived in about 900 square feet for a family of six people. The other major things about the past is that they had one parent working and one staying at home with the kids and taking care of them. Then things changed over time parents started to both work to try and make more money with more people working the costs of keeping companies up were up so prices went up. This lead to become the norm all across the states even though it really was not that important for both to be working.

            This really leads me to the point that the way things were is really better then they are now in some areas. Now a day’s people have 2,300 square feet for 2.5 people in a home. This is sad because now we have more space but really no one for that space to be spent with. Families are smaller and with more space between everyone. This show how much we think we need but in reality how we really do not need as much as we think that we need.

            Now the other point that I really want to point out that I found out this week is that we really do not need to working parents to survive. This is something that my wife and I discovered as when we had a child. When we were first married both of us worked at the same time making more enough money for us to be able to have fun and save up for other things. Then we had our son and this made more things complicated. We sat down and did the math on if we were both to work at the same time how much a sitter or daycare would cost and if it was really worth it. We found out that really if we were to both be working at the same time with our son in day care that one of us would be just paying for daycare. So we found that we needed to put our work schedules on different times in order to make any money. This put a strain on our relationship because we really never got to see each other but we got enough money to make it through school and living on our own. This really showed us that after college that, really only one of us needs to work in order to make it because if we both worked we would be just paying for day care with the extra job. This is something that a lot of couples and families need to sit down and do the math to see if it is even worth trying to work at the same time. Now another sad part on my gender is that women tend to work at home 35% more then men even if they work the same amount of hours. Now this can lead to problems in the home and lead to unnecessary conflict in the couple. If more families worked towards having one person working and one staying at home this would really help families be more happy and healthy and show the world that love can keep going and that we families are important to society.

            This is really the best idea that families can have to help create a more functioning more involved family.