Divorce and Poverty

As major contemporaneous issues affecting the United States, those of divorce and poverty come to highlight the complex relationships between man and women in a society of permanent, diverse and developing changes. Divorce increasingly is affecting women and children especially, although at times men as well can be victims of this issue. Divorce often leads people into to poverty. Society promotes marriage. Marriage is a socially shared conception of something good, a value (Parrillo pg 24). Little girls play with dolls to someday become mothers, little boys are encouraged to do well in school to someday become professionals and support their families as excellent fathers. However increasingly divorce is becoming more acceptable and creating issues affecting all the parties involved in the subject and the American society.
The issue could be analyzed through the ‘functional theory’ because “this perspective emphasizes that society is a structure of beliefs and traditional ways of doing things. A society contains values, status positions and institutions” (Parrillo pg 9). In this case the functional theory is that the American society has the tradition of marriage, and holds values that men should work meanwhile women should take care of the children due to the institution of marriage. People usually marry forever and for love, consequently divorce does not fall as an option but much too often it is becoming a reality.
Over one million married couples are divorced each year in the United States, and this not only brings about social, psychological but also economical consequences. The income of single parent families drops by more than one third within several months after separation. Thus marital dysfunction frequently leads to a latent dysfunction; poverty for divorced women and children (Peck, and Dolch). According to the functional theory, the manifest functions, or obvious result, would be the separation of the two people. The latent function or hidden and unexpected result would be that due to divorce many women and children fall into poverty. Surprisingly, divorce is the number one cause of poverty for women and children in the United States.
Some divorce people chose to re-marry, and for women sometimes this is good because it is a way to pull themselves out of poverty, two incomes are better than one, but this is not always an option and it is also rarely a fast solution. For men, sometimes they continue to pay child support, but others chose to discontinue paying for child support which makes it even more difficult for divorced women. Our culture has a clear mode of norms regarding marriage, but lacks a strong mode of behavior for divorce, which more than often result in unforgiving consequences.
Divorce affects men and women differently. While men do not usually change jobs after divorce, most divorced women do and if they did not work when married, divorced women find a job out of necessity to cover their needs, even if they had been married for decades.
In many ways the divorce phenomenon can also be observed in the conflict theory because “the pattern is usually that of those with power, men, seeking to protect their privileges and those lower on the socioeconomic level, women, struggling to gain a greater share than they have” (Parrillo pg 11).
A common ideology in many societies including the American society is that it is a female role to take care of children and therefore many women sacrifice their professional goals in other to sustain this ideology. However, due to our ever growing and evolving society and some may argue that due to globalization as well, women are becoming more educated, acquiring high position jobs that were once considered only acceptable for men and as a result women are becoming less dependent of their husbands income. “Through cultural transmission, each generation transmits its culture to the next generation, which learns those cultural definitions at an early age” (Parrillo pg 37) hopefully women will teach future generations this positive habit to learn to become more independent.


Sources:
Parrillo, Vincent N. (2008). Understanding Race and Ethnic Relations. Boston: Pearson.

Peck, Dennis, and Norman Dolch. "Extraordinary behavior: a case study approach to understanding social problems." (2001): n. pag. Web. 8 February 2010. .