Is the family in decline? If so, why and what can be done about it?

the master is crafting his wisdom. behiold

There is nothing inherently good about family. Some people have shitty families.

Are you using the word “family” to represent a particular set of values? If so, what are they?

High divorce rate = Pressure to get married
Abortion = A little education can go a long way
Tolerance of Homosexuality = I still like girl parts, I don’t care if anyone is gay, it doesn’t change my preference.

I think people are fucked up and want to blame others for their shortcomings. I think the real problem plaguing our world is selfishness and greed.

Nikipedia is crafting her response, prepare for science.

I think the idea of “family” has been hijacked by people reading too many schmaltzy books. The reality is, families are no different than they’ve ever been. Human nature remains constant over time.

The nuclear family was part of a propaganda campaign during WWII to keep GIs hopes up with a promise of returning to a Norman Rockwell life. The reality is, parents have always been abusive, drinking problems, molestation, abandonment, etc. have always been there. Look at how prevalent orphanages were up until the 1960’s.

What is different, or has been different, is pressure for educated people to marry and have children. The people who should be having children are not.

I got news for you, there are no more gay people now than there were 50 years ago. People just talk about it openly now.

Family values conversations seem to ultimately get back to “be just like me” and the reality is, there is no one right way to be a family. If we went with the model of what’s most prevalent, then “family” is defined as household of divorced mother with three children.

I think bigotry in the guise of Christianity is the biggest threat to progress.

The “family”, as some sort of perpetual definitive, entity cannot be in decline because it has never existed. Women have been aborting babies since the beginning of history; in the past, instead of divorce, couples would just find alternative ways of getting their needs met, for the good and the bad; yes, there have always been homosexuals, now we just refuse to hide.

“Family values” is not a term with one definition. My family values—my dedication to my partner and her well-being, taking care of each other and all of the people that we love, not dismissing others’ families because they do not mirror my own—greatly offend some people. And those people are a threat to my family.

The threat to “family” comes with limiting it’s definition, and applying the term prejudicially.

Abortions & divorce still abound, yes. But my family & the friends I know are very family oriented. It’s important to us. We even talk about the importance of it a lot. The ones who are depressed about it are the ones who have a dysfunctional family or none at all. It’s sad.

If you are talking about the mafia, then I believe the answer is yes.

Yes, the world is a bad place filled with divorces, abortions, crime, war etc… but in my home, when we are all spending time together, all of this is miles away. It might only be for a couple of hours or a few minutes here or there. The time that we spend together is our time. We cherish the ability to spend time with our children, whether over dinner or playing a game together.

Are families in decline? They certainly seem to be. Why? My opinion differs from those listed.

Marriage The institution of marriage began as a transfer of property. Land, wealth, and the women themselves were treated as chattel and traded for political and social alliances. Divorce typically only happened when the wife was found deficient (by not producing heirs, often). It is only in very recent human history that women have been recognized as having rights, although that is still questionable in some parts of the world. And now celebrities (and plenty of others) get drunk, married and divorced all within a matter of a few days. What exactly is being protected when people talk of protecting the sanctity of marriage? (http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/ATLAS_EN/html/history_of_marriage_in_western.html)

Abortion I fail to see how bringing an unwanted child into a relationship protects a “family”. Is there some disaster looming that threatens the human race due to too few of us? Have we solved the problems of all of the orphaned and abandoned children, neglected and abused children, hungry and poverty stricken children all over the world?

Homosexuality Really? Please explain to me how my stable, committed, monogamous relationship has negatively affected your children. How has my very private life created strife and discord within your house? Because I professed my love to my partner, your child took drugs, stole a car, and beat up an old lady? Amazing.

I believe that we have become a victim of our own success. We no longer have to rely on the ability to have surviving offspring to supply labor for our farms, ranches and businesses to survive. Our kids no longer leave school early to help plant or harvest crops, bake bread and hunt for meat, work assembly lines and sweat shops to bring home enough money to survive. They no longer marry at age 13, 14, or 15 to begin their own families because their expected lifespan is 40 years of age. We no longer have nuclear families, where grandparents, parents and children all live and work together in the common goal of survival.

And we, as adults, are caught up in that eternal rat race of financial security and success. Mom and Dad work hard, and work late. They’re tired, so TV or video games become the babysitter, and somehow they’ve decided that teachers should be the ones to instill values, morals and manners in their kids. Some outside force must be the reason that their kids are bad, it’s never the fault of the parent!

We have no one to blame but ourselves.

Marriage is the best thing that can happen to two people
but it takes everything you can give it and then it takes more. As one of the marriage ceremonies says, marriage is not to be entered into lightly. It will not always be a good time. It will wound and confuse and force you to grow.

Marriage—> families. If the people getting married are just in it for the attention, for getting on “Bridezillas”, those families are fucked. Fucked.

So:
what syz said.

Great question, better answers.

I tried answering this three times and deleted my answer before I realized there’s nothing I can say that won’t be moderated away.

Sorry.

I think that what people mean by “decline of the family” is the decline of the “Father Knows Best,” “Leave it to Beaver” kind of family. The kind where the father takes responsibility for his household and everyone else obeys him, people learn a lesson in each episode and all the children are above average.

You know what happened to this family? Besides it being a television fiction and cultural myth, life happened. War happened – messy, Vietnam war, that taught people that the Government (a national father figure if ever there was one) wasn’t always right. Women in general decided that they didn’t have to be only housewives – they could work outside the home and be as competant as any man, and soon it became necessary to have two incomes anyway. And kids, who used to afraid of authority, grew up with working or absent parents, learned that parents and cops weren’t always right, and that the world got much more complicated than the previous generation had really expected.

You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Women aren’t going to quit their jobs and go back to being Suzy Hausfrau – not only have they tasted independence, they need the money. Fathers aren’t always going to go to bat for their kids, because it’s hard, and Moms are strong now, too. We have also seen other cultures and how they behave – we’re not just snow-white suburbs any more, and we have to make room for the other ways people live, whether it’s the Indian extended family down the street, the single-mom raising her kid, or the elderly couple still together after fifty years.

Since we can never go “home” again, what we need to do to ensure a stable “family” is to accept the different “families” we have now. We need to give them the same respect, credence, and support that the “Father Knows Best” kind got fifty years ago. We need to not bust it up, saying that this particular couple is immoral, or that particular family needs to be deported. These ARE our families.

What is a family except a collection of people who care about each other and support each other? Where these exist, we need to acknowledge them, because there’s already too little support in the world for these domestic units. And THAT is why the family is falling apart.

I can not say anything that hasn’t already been said by Alfred, Syz and laureth.

I think the reason “the decline in family” is so talked about is because that opinion is coming from a dying breed. They know they’re dying so they scream as loud as possible about it. Evolution will eventually wipe those kinds of people off the face of the planet and I can’t say I care.

Yes, family is in decline. The reason: people can survive on their own and thus it is easier to become more and more individualistic, refusing to tolerate other people’s foibles and compromise. And this is what family life is: a series of compromises, what do you get for it? unconditional love – sometimes, devotion, maybe. Companionship – maybe.
Is it worth it – your guess is as good as mine.

“Homosexuality Really? Please explain to me how my stable, committed, monogamous relationship has negatively affected your children. How has my very private life created strife and discord within your house?”

The Church of LDS published a lengthy newsletter in support of Prop 8, which is a concise compendium of all the arguments alleging that homosexuality poses a danger to marriage. I’ve encountered all these arguments before from other Christians, who seem to believe that the family is the bedrock of society, insofar as it imparts character and moral values to its members (fair enough so far). By tolerating “immorality”—i.e., divorce, abortion or homosexuality—one somehow disrupts this socializing function of the family, creating people of low character and morals, who presumably drag the whole society down by their many immoral acts. However, there is also an undercurrent or subtext of “moral pollution,” in which people envision scenarios where “immoral” people turn the whole society wicked, and increase the likelihood of punishments from God.

I’m not saying that these arguments are rational. But they seem to arise from a central belief; namely, that any sex act that does not entail a chance at reproduction is immoral. In fact, the Catholics even regard masturbation as a mortal sin.

I think there have been profound changes in the family since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Families have gone from being self-sustaining units of economic production to units of economic consumption. Families have had to become smaller in order to be able to move to where the employment is. And, being smaller, they are no longer able to absorb the shocks of financial adversity, or provide a social safety net to one another. The shift toward consumerism and mass marketing has had a far greater impact on our values than can anything that can be explained in terms of sexual morality. In fact, alternative sexual lifestyles appear to be the effect of market society rather than a cause.

People now expect to have a fully accessorized lifestyle, to be catered to, and amused. The human psyche is being mined for needs, anxieties and strivings that can be transformed into a market for some commodity. People have a need for status, and so are sold all sorts of status symbols and prestige goods. Demographers have carved society up into lifestyles, through which people define their identities as soccer moms or urban adventurers, and buy the accoutrement’s marketed to each. Even religion has become a niche-marketed commodity.

Indeed, I think sexual moralists are simply trying to find scapegoats that they can blame for societal shifts toward materialism and narcissism instead of addressing the true economic causes. In other words, they are caught up in a kind of witch-burning mentality, in they are trying to lay off the blame for everything that is wrong in society on people they regard as “sinful” and “wicked.” This is, I think, another intrusion of irrationality into public life.

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I think the greatest decline in the family is the introduction of the cell phone, computers, and video games.
(Believe me I have them all.) I just think that it creates a disconnect. People don’t really talk to one another anymore face to face. We are always texting, IMing, emailing etc.

@Adina
Let me make sure I’m getting this: new channels of communication dictate the breakdown of communication?

Growing up in the ‘50’s, I know FKB and LITB were just as fictitious as I Love Lucy and The Life of Riley. Families had more problems than whether Lucy got into the show, Riley got to go bowling, Beaver sat in a tree or Kitten had a date.

In my neighborhood one father went to jail for DUI, other families were shaken by infidelity, another dealt with the problem of mental retardadation without social service support, one child was crippled by polio, another died of leukemia, there was an elderly man who exposed himself, there were families that could sometimes not pay their bills, there were parents who drank and took pills.

This was a solidly middle class neighborhood with Doctors, teachers, well paid union workers most of whom had been in WWII and came from all over the country to live the dream in California. The houses and lawns were well-kept and most of the moms stayed at home. From the outside it looked like any TV neighborhood.

I think the big difference over the decades is that we are less likely to keep the family secrets behind closed doors. The problems are still there so it is more about being open than declining.

I think that there are many reasons for it, all that you mentioned and those that are contributed to society in general. Parents not knowing how to parent, kids growing up by the age of 10, drugs, the gangster type attitudes that many people have, the morals that they have, parents are rather lax with kids now, it’s easier to give them something rather than teach them how to do things to get what they want.
So many kids out there that would rather sell drugs than get a job. There really isn’t a great value put on the emphasis of family anymore. Granted, there are people out there that do value family, but the numbers are declining rapidly.
How can one compete with society and keep the values in place? Sticking together as parents, is a great thing for the family. Kids see that, and understand that it really is easier to cooperate as parents, and the odds of that child/ren, being more dedicated to family goes up greatly. Hope this helps.

Adina—let me add TV to your list, which Robert Putnam
linked to the decline of community in America. I believe failure of families was second on his list.

This is a really interesting issue. I used to disregard it, as I think a lot of people do, and there’s no denying that there were plenty of problems with families in the past. We never had that idyllic time we think we did. On the other hand, more than fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Given that lots of things (financial stability, raising kids, etc.) are much easier in a partnership, and if we want marriage to be treated as a lifelong institution, then I would say it is undergoing a crisis.

The traditional family values arguments are pretty clearly specious. Homosexuality has nothing to do with marriage at all. Neither does abortion, except insofar as shotgun weddings are more likely to fall apart. In general, “red” states have higher divorce rates than “blue.”

Syz, you make an interesting point about us being victims of our own success. It does seem like the ability to make it without the kind of strong partnerships/families/marriages/communities that we’ve essentially been forced to have to survive in the past makes it easier for us to let them fail in moments when they are weak. Certainly most third world countries have much stronger families, and much more of an emphasis on taking care of children, grandparents, etc.

The positive outlook is that we’re in a period of realizing, as a culture, how hard marriage is, and understanding it as involving the positives and negatives that it does. Divorce is accepted now, so people don’t have to stay in impossible situations anymore. On the other hand, people are more willing to leave situations that maybe could be worked out if they were more willing to stick it through. I think that if people went into it with a more realistic outlook on what it takes, and less of a fantasy notion of marriage, we’d see more success.

“Happy” Families are lessening.I really think families will never die out completely. They will probable get more encompassing.

@aidje
I’m not sure if this is what Adina was getting at but people now seem to live completely encased in electronic cocoons. They can set things up so that they only receive information that conforms to their preconceptions or ideologies, so that they tend become strangely insulated, while at the same time becoming strangely socialized. People relate to one another on the Internet in ways they would never do in real life. Which makes you wonder about kids who are raised on the Internet not having any core experiences with others in their culture, and not being able to really trust any source of information, etc. All these electronic devices amount to weird feedback loops which can make people quirky and possibly dysfunctional.