family life in the us

There are many different kinds of houses in the U K. In the countryside you can see small, pretty ho uses, and in the towns and cities you can see larg e blocks of flats. More than half of the people in the UK own their homes. They like to make their homes and gardens look attractive. The building s in American cities are similar to those in British cities. A lot of Americans live in wooden houses w ith front and back gardens. Two thirds of America ns own their homes. Americans usually take good care of their hoy two parents and two children in a typical British family. In most British families both parents work. Very young children go to nursery school or stay at home with a child minder. Old people usually live in their own homes or a nursing home if they cannot look after themselves. British parents try to spend their free time with their children going to the cinema, museums or parks. During the week they usually have dinner together.
Britain has one of the highest divorce rates in Western Europe： approximately one in three marriages breaks up in divorce， half of them in the first ten years of marriage. As a result， more people are getting remarried and there are now over a million single parents looking after 1.6million children. In the United States，the divorce rate is also high. For the year 1995， for example，the number of marriages was about 2.3 million and that of divorce cases was over 1.1 million. Many households are single-parent families，mostly maintained by women. In 1994，there were 11.4million single parents， among whom 9.9 million were single mothers. Children from single-parent families have less access to adult attention， less help with homework and less time with both parents than those with two-parent families. They were likely to drop out of school and fail in their future career.
Americans often move from city to city or from st ate to state. For this reason American families live far away from their relatives. However, they keep in touch with each other by telephone or letter. During the holidays or at celebrations like Thanks giving, families often visit each other. A typical A merican family is the same as a British family. Bot h parents work. Like British family, parents try to spend time with their children at weekends. They often visit museums. They also go to the cinema or to the park.