ANSWERS: 4
  • I personally think the family structure has become fragmented and the bonds weakened. Many families are still tradtionally set up and many others are unconventional but still dedicated (granparents as guardians, same sex couples, etc.) But a disturbing trend has gained momentum whereby couples who have not married and do not form a truly dedicated bond have children, usually unplanned. The baby-daddy syndrome. It can hardly be surprising when the people involved, who have little sense of personal responsibility and no plan for the future, decide to call it quite without having put any honest work into the relationship and family growth. You end up with single moms and children without parents or a sense of real family.
  • The family structure has changed dramatically over the years. The real traditional (and natural human) family consisted of an extended family with very close, virtually familial relations with the most of the rest of the people in one's community. The nuclear family, consistenting of two parents and their children, and maybe a grandparent or uncle/aunt here and there every now and again, is a fairly recent social experiment. It was held together mostly by the unfortunate facts of a patriarchal society where women effectively had no political independence or social mobility, for the better part of a century in the Western world, specifically in the U.S. Although there are the isolated examples of this family structure leading to more or less positive results, these examples are the exception rather than the rule. The reasons for this are rather easy to grasp - in an extended family, the acquiring of positive social skills will be less forced and more successful, and the extended family will also act as a buffer in the inevitable cases where marital disharmony, one or more abusive parents, or simply unready parents, could otherwise cause psychological or physical harm to children. With the nuclear family, socialization must be forced on children through arranged friendships with others in the community, and by being sprung in a traumatic manner into large scale socialization with strangers when first going to school. All of this is even more true the more urban the community. The nuclear family is eroding now, and is on its last legs, being kept alive on life support by those that for some historically misguided reason think of it as the symbol of "traditional family values", that are worth defending at the cost of the freedoms of dissenters (including homosexuals and those that simply choose to live a different lifestyle, or those who wish to divorce). Women can now be anything they choose to be - doctors, lawyers, high powered CEOs, and although they are still largely brainwashed into the sick belief that marriage and motherhood is the ultimate act of being a woman, more and more women are breaking away and being independent. It's not a coincidence (or a bad thing!) that divorce rates have increased in correlation to the amount of independence and social mobility allowed to women, boosted by the fact that divorce is seen increasingly as normal, if undesirable, rather than as a huge social sin. I guess I'm saying the family has changed, but it changed for the worse a long time ago, not just recently, and that's in large part because the world is changing. Humans will adapt. Our children aren't delicate flowers; they will adapt too. I think we're starting to realize, even if not consciously or as a society yet, that the social experiment of the nuclear family was an abyssmal failure, and nearly any alternative to it constitutes improvement. We're getting there. More people, including more couples, are deciding not to have children at all, to live childfree. The ultimate desirable conclusion is that society as a whole decides to bring new humans into the world only as they are needed and only if they can be guaranteed amazing, beautiful, lives with love and education in abundance. The time has come for parents to stop having children because they feel "the biological clock ticking", or because they want to feel needed by a child, but for less selfish purposes. The signs of change, a big social paradigm shift in our thinking of the family and parenthood, are coming. It couldn't come any sooner.
  • Yes, unfortunately. Parents have placed their children in day care centers to be raised (although for some this is needed). Single parents are common place, so many children are raised without the benefit of having a mother or father. Despite the best efforts of the parent, they do not know about raising a child of the opposite sex (what it means to be a man or a woman). Everyone has to just do their best (which is all any ONE can do). Discipline is lacking, kids are given too much and have come to expect it. This results in more kids running into trouble with the law. Any action seems to be tolerated in today's permissive society, as moral values are being lost.
  • I agree with your comment gideon loves halloween, however what about when the women decide to leave... we are in a society fixated on blaming the male figure for doing all the wrong in the relationship. single parents are becoming more popular. we need to think fairly in this world. it is not just males to blame. I am female however. My mother walked out on me when i was 14 and my father brought me up amazingly well. yet still males get little to no recognistion for the work they do when the female decides to up pack and go.

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