Family
Ecuadorians place great importance on the family, both nuclear and extended. Unlike in much of the west, where the elderly are often placed in care facilities, elderly Ecuadorians will often live with one of their children. However, in recent years, the number of facilities to care for the elderly has grown significantly.
Godparents are also far more important in Ecuador than in other western countries, and they are expected to provide both financial and psychological support to their godchildren. Precisely for that reason, Ecuadorians with marital troubles will often ask their godparents for advice.
Families are formed in at least one of the following two ways: Civil Marriage (which is the legal form of formalizing a bond between a man and woman, which all married couples are required to undergo) and the Free Union (where a man and woman decide to form a family, without undergoing any official ceremony). The Ecuadorian Constitution accords the members of a Free Union family, the same rights and duties as any other legally constituted family.
There are many variations in family structure, as well as in the social and cultural structure in Ecuador, depending on the socioeconomic position in which people live. Generally, the upper classes adopt more American or European ways of life. This leads to great contrasts within the Ecuadorian people.
Read more about this topic: Ecuadorian Literature
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“In the U.S. for instance, the value of a homemaker’s productive work has been imputed mostly when she was maimed or killed and insurance companies and/or the courts had to calculate the amount to pay her family in damages. Even at that, the rates were mostly pink collar and the big number was attributed to the husband’s pain and suffering.”
—Gloria Steinem (20th century)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“If you have this enormous talent, it’s got you by the balls, it’s a demon. You can’t be a family man and a husband and a caring person and be that animal. Dickens wasn’t that nice a guy.”
—Dustin Hoffman (b. 1937)