Life Styles and Meaningful Realtionships

Abstract

Lifestyles differ widely along socioeconomic, class, age, and ethnic lines, but each is internally consistent. “Straight” middle-aged, middle-class white parents believe and act in certain predictable ways. They can be distinguished from other groups—in dress, hair style, place and type of residence, fiscal habits, opinions on political, moral, and social questions, and language. People in this group follow values rooted in the American past—prudence, industriousness, conservatism (in its broader sense), independence, autonomy, stability, heterosexuality.

Dear Abby: I am heartsick about my daughter. She is 33 attractive popular well-educated but to gd to the point I am ashamed that she is living with a man. Whenever I ask her if she plans to marry him she insists that marriage is not important to her and she is very happy with things as they are. (Abby how can she be happy?)…I want to die when my friends ask me about her. And I’m a wreck trying to keep it from the relatives. She was raised in a good Christian home went to Sunday school and church regularly had good examples to follow. I don’t know where she got these loose immoral ideas. How do parents cope with a situation like this?— Sick at heart