Families in the US and the UK

A nuclear family from the past

In the US and the UK, there is a traditional idea of a typical family, called a nuclear family, which consists of a mother, a father and children. Typically, the father goes out to work and the mother takes care of the home and the children. Although this type of family is often praised by politicians and often shown in advertisements, fewer and fewer real families are actually like this.
Most married women now have jobs, and there more one-parent families partly because of divorce and partly because some women have children without being married. Divorce also leads to more complicated families, if parents who are divorced then get married again and have more children.
There are also some families in which the partners are homosexual people living together as if they were married. As a result of these changes, there are now many different types of family. Another type of family, the extended family, a large family group all living together, including grandparents, cousins etc used to be common in former times but is now very unusual in the US and UK.