Americas Family

Through her look at various myths about the family, she addresses many problems facing today’s society. She looks at many issues being debated today such as drug abuse, violence, and sexually transmitted diseases. In reality, the problems people were facing in the past have always existed and have been caused by varying factors. Besides, problems people have are handled differently with each generation. Coontz adequately provides causes and effects to the problems being presented. She stated the evidence but doesn’t let us know at first that the problems as mentioned above such as drug abuse and violence are those struggles experienced during the 1950’s and not today. She does a good job of surprising the reader and indirectly blames the people of today (American families) for believing that things were much worse today than in the past. It is the people associated in these myth-believing situations in that are the ones to blame for and the reason why the problem exists. Now that the cause has been identified, the effect is that people are in denial and therefore, cannot be capable of working together in order to get rid of this myth and make American family life better instead of contemplating about “how great it was back then.” According to Baker, “If the causes of a problem can be recognize then perhaps a cure can be found (Baker, pg.5). American families need to recognize and understand that it.... “is not that our families have changed too much but that our institutions have changed too little”(Coontz, pg. 123). Coontz strengthens her adequacy by giving a reasonable suggestion as of how things can be changed for the better. She goes on by providing more examples of comparisons between the past and the present in order to disprove the myth. The article shows strength because it shows the three different kinds of statements about social problems that are discussed in Baker’s article. For example, by using American family relations as a factor, we can see that an example of empirical evidence demonstrated in her article is that according to Coontz “debates over social and cultural issued that had divided American for 150 years were silenced, suggesting a national consensus on family values and norms”( Coontz, pg. 118). The conceptual statement would be that American families today are more likely to believe that families in the U.S. have never been diverse and the realization that “what works for a family in one economic and cultural setting doesn’t work for a family in another” (Coontz, pg. 121). The American families of today are most likely, in other words are going to be in denial of how much things have changed through ought time, therefore, as an evaluative statement, Coontz expresses that these American families are the ones who “always have to play catch-up with a changing world,” because it we do not help each other, we wont help our families.

The author’s value assertions are sufficient enough to the extent in which she is able to provide enough examples she gives in her article due to the statistics and research experiments that have been tested. Additionally, in the process of researching Stephanie Coontz myself, I have found that she is greatly recognized as an authority leader on the history of American families due to her major accomplishments of having authored many writing based on her field. According to Baker, “in order to understand the bearing of values on controversies related to social problems, a person must be knowledgeable about various ideological perspectives” (Bakers, pg. 9). Therefore, it is important to know about Coontz as an author and why she should be considered as a credible and adequate author. Without a doubt, she is a credible author and her information is trustworthy. Her weakness seems to be that at times, she provides too much information, mainly statistics, which cause the reader to concentrate too much on the detail and lose the overall point of the article. Nevertheless, an example of an assumption that is made in Coontz’s article is when she states, “How a family functions on the inside is more important than how it looks from the outside” (Coontz, pg. 123). In Baker’s article, he mentions the way in which assumptions