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American Families
   Good morning, everyone! Today’s lecture is about American families. (1) The traditional American family used to have a working father, a housewife mother, and two or three children. But since the last twenty or twenty-five years, the picture has changed. Now we have many different kinds of families and living situations besides this traditional one. For example, there are many single mothers and single fathers who are raising children by themselves. (2) There are married couples who decide that they don’t want any children. (3) Sometimes adult children who have been living alone for a long time come back and live with their parents again.
   Why has the traditional family changed so much? Well, the reasons are both social and economic. (4) First, as you know, the divorce rate is high in our culture: as a result, we have many single-parent families. (5) Second, there is unemployment among young adults. If they can’t find a job, many times they return home and live with their parents again. But of course, (6) the most important reason for the changes in American families is that most American women now work outside the home. This means that more than half of all American homes do not have a full-time homemaker anymore.
   However, with so many women working, our society has some difficult, new problems. For example, who will take care of the children and old people? Who will do the housework? Who will do the volunteer work?
   Some people might say that these are "women’s problems" , so women should be the ones to solve them. But more and more people understand that everybody in our society is responsible for trying to find answers to these problems. In fact, many companies are trying to help modern working parents by creating flexible new policies. Here are a few examples.
   (7) One example is that many companies now allow a woman to leave her job temporarily in order to have a baby. This is called maternity leave. The woman may receive part of her salary while she is not working. And of course her job will be waiting for her when she is ready to return to work.
   (8-1) Another example is that many companies now have something called "flextime". Flextime means that instead of working from 8:00 a. m. to 5:00 p. m. as most people do in this country, a worker can work from, say, 6:00 a. m. to 3:00 p. m., or from 10:00 a. m. to 7:00 p. m., etc. As you can imagine, (8-2) flextime is very useful for people with children.
   (9) Third, some companies allow their employees to work at home instead of coming in to the office every day. Working at home is easy for people in professions like computer programming and telephone sales.
   OK, I’ve given you three examples of new company policies that are supposed to make life a little easier for working mothers and fathers. (10) However, it’s important for you to understand that there are only a few large companies that can afford to help their employees with these kinds of programs. For most people, trying to work and take care of a family is still very, very difficult.
   OK, that’s all for today’s lecture. Thank you for your attention.