It seems that everywhere around the world, people are spending more time at work or alone and less time with their families and friends. People are busier than ever before!

In the past in many countries, the father worked and the mother stayed home, took care of the children, and did the food, shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Nowadays in many families, both parents work, so they both have to do the shopping, cooking, and cleaning in their free time. Parents, therefore, don’t have as much time with their children as they used to have in the past. There are also many single‐parent families. In these families, the single parent has to do everything.  

These days, many children come home from school to an empty apartment or house. A lot of children spend many hours each day in front of the television. Even when families are together, it is common for family members to do things by themselves. For example, they watch programs on separate TVs in different rooms, they use the Internet, they talk with friends on the telephone, and they do other individual activities.

Isn’t strange? Thanks to technology, people are able to communicate so easily with people far away, but sometimes they don’t communicate as well as before with people in their own homes.

_{(Side by Side, third edition, book 2, Steven J. Molinsky and Bill Bliss. Longman, New York, 2001. Adapted)}

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