The Loss of the Family
From the beginning of time, the nuclear family has been the basic social unit. It was true in the Garden of Eden and it is true today. While the family has transcended time and space, its context has changed over time.
In the Hunter-Gatherer culture, the family was dependent on the interaction of the tribe. Hunting required the cooperation of all of the men in the tribe, while the gathering and preparation of food and clothing required the cooperation of the women. All that changed in the advent of the Agricultural Age, when the family farm was the context of the family. The size of the family was relative to the economics of the setting. A large family was good, for it increased the hands to do the work and made the family wealthier with the increased size of the family. In that setting, no one had the option of independence. Everyone had to contribute to the welfare of the whole. And no one could be dependent. Everyone had to pull their own weight and fill their role. All were a necessary part of a greater whole.
The relational model was not independence nor dependence, but interdependence. The unit (family) functioned as one organism, each part existing as the part of a common life. To some degree, there was a merging of identities into the greater whole: The family.
The industrial age began the process of reshaping the family. Dad no longer worked in the field with the boys, but went off to the factory by himself as the rest of the family learned to live at least 8 hours a day without him. The roles shifted to accommodate this change of context and humanity was moving surely toward a change in the individuals in the family and the family itself. Before long, war broke out and Dad was off to war and mom was summoned to the factory to produce the mechanism of war. Childhood changed dramatically in just a few years in our nation as the school became the primary stable social setting in many families. The influence of the male and female role models were being replaced by the peer group and by new social constructs. Children were no longer spending all their time with their parents but were venturing into the modern school system and its increased role in their lives and the peer group became increasingly important in the development of ideas, attitudes and influence.
Today, everything has changed from the family of the agricultural setting. In some sub-cultures in our world, there is no male father role model. The nuclear family is dead. Mom has the children alone, raises them as best she can while they are schooled, not by parents or even by teachers, but by street gangs and TV violence. The interdependence of the family members of the past has been replaced by an individualism, both in context and in the roles in our media.
Even in our normal greater culture, the family has changed. The children no longer play games with their siblings or neighbors in the back yard or in the streets. Their activities are organized into classes, leagues, and structured social systems outside of the family. Little League, Pop Warner, Karate, sports leagues, performance venues, dance classes, music classes, and a host of other items of personal development and individualized interests leave mom driving a thousand miles a week delivering and picking up the children, who no longer have mutual interests or family time. They are attending individualized classes in school and developing individualized interests outside of school. In their spare time, which is little, they are texting their peer group, talking on their personal cell phones and playing individual games on their personal computers. The family may live in the same house, but it is no longer interdependent, merged into a singular unit or relating as individuals who are part of a singular whole.
The end result is the emerging of official solutions to human problems to replace the relational solutions of the past. In the past, if the neighbors’ barn burned down, the entire community turned out to have a ‘barn raising.’ Today, we hear about it on the evening news, think it is sad and hope they had insurance. The insurance corporation hires the construction corporation who gets a government loan with a government mortgage insurance rider and everything is handled without community involvement at a relational level. We do not know our neighbors and if we did, we would probably have little common interests anyway.
The social contexts and interdependence of the past has been fractured into a million pieces and it will probably not go back anytime soon. So, we no longer take care of human problems and needs at a relational level. It is all at a structured governmental level. And that has become our greatest problem and challenge. The distant structured program has too little knowledge about the real individual problems to be effective or to have a heart in dealing with them. The more distant the relationship, the less effective is the help. The more structured the official program is, the more it costs. The less personal the program the greater is the possibility of scams, created dependence and ineffective waste.
It is in the family that we are forced, for the sake of survival, to give and take, merge our goals into a central relational motion. It is in the sanctity of marriage that we have to submit our individuality to the good of the greater whole and to become more in the union that we would be as the individual. Synergy is the phenomenon in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The family takes on an identity and energy in which the end result is worth the loss of individuality by the values gained from the relationships. It requires sharing, give and take, care and concern, not just for the ‘me’ but for the effect of ‘us.’ The family is still the best place to find the glue of social interaction, the power of united interdependence and the wonder of love. Its values are enormous.
The loss of the family has cost us a lot. Children from broken homes do not do as well in school, in work or in their adult social life. The learned independence and sense of selfishness predisposes one to see all relationships in terms of how they affect the ‘me.’ It is in the family that the ‘me’ gets to stand down, see the other individuals and accommodate life in its greater whole.
Family development requires that individuals lay aside their individual interests to include the interest of another. It is the merging of personalities, goals and desires into one, as is the Christian model – “These two shall become one.” Watching older couples who have been married for many years will emphasize this phenomenon as they seem to think together and in many cases even look alike. There is something transcendent in this merging and the resulting power of the relational unit.
Family structure may have variables, but inevitably the family will take on individual roles in the merged identity and a hierarchy will develop with an alpha figure, usually male as in most all of nature, and the nurturing female role of mother. A minister friend used to use the illustration of Johnny cutting his finger and coming into the house crying. Mother says, “Oh my poor baby. Come to mommy and I will kiss it and dress it and make it better.” Dad looks over the situation and realizes in is not life threatening and says, “Johnny, get a paper towel and wrap it up and stop bleeding on the carpet.”
The minister asks which response is the right one. The answer is, both. Each role is needed to make a rational whole. The child needs both the emotional support and the rational direction to become fully human. And in both cases, the parent needs to be the parent. Without the structures of authority in the home, Johnny will have to learn them later from the official authority and the cost will be greater. In some settings, the only father role model is the police, and that is totally inadequate. The police should never have to do for the family what the father should have done. It is not fair to the police and it is certainly not fair to the child.
Homeostasis (or relational equilibrium) refers to the continuity of a system, a steady internal state of a system that is maintained through regulation, the use of family norms, and mutually reinforcing communications. In the family of the past, roles were determined by gender. That is yet true in most of nature, but in our modern individualized world, that is not popular. The emergence of the women’s rights movements and the breakup of the family have led to the sissyfication of the modern male and the emergence of the sufficient female who seems to need to prove that she can take on the world without the weight of a wimpy guy to tow around. Yes, we have lost the traditional family model, but we have lost much more. We have lost the equilibrium of the basic unit of social strength, the family.
Family resources have traditionally been the strength of our society. People are most likely to turn to their families for support when in crisis and in need. With the absence of the family system to support the individual in crisis, we have to appeal to some official governmental resource, which, even if available, has no heart and no soul. It is official not relational. It can stuff us into the system and give us the end result, but it cannot care and cannot see the undercurrents of emotions and causes that are exposed in the relational family setting.
The family also creates meaning. It defines the greater sense of what the world is, who we are and what we can expect in life. It provides the basic construct of identity for the individual in the discovery of skills, talents and life’s roles. It engenders trust, love, and compassion and envisions the realities of God, honor, truth and responsibility. It is the best place to discover and relate to the ethics of relationships, the morality of personal dignity and the truthfulness of trust.
• From 1901 to 1970, the divorce rate increased by 700%. In 1900, there were 56,000 divorces in America; in 1992, 1.2 million, a 700% increase, adjusted for population growth (Insight 6/17/96, p. 14)
• From 1970 to 1992, the divorce rate increased 279%; the number of children with a divorced parent increased 352%, the cohabitation population increased 533%, which means 2.7 million unmarried households, 40% of them containing children. (Stanton, pp. 2-3)
• Within six months of their marriage, 50% of newlyweds begin to doubt the marriage will last, 39% report “big fights” at least once a week and 4% had already separated for at least one night. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1994)
• “Between 1970 and 1995, . . . the percentage of married couples with children dropped by a third, but single-parent families nearly doubled.” (Larry Witham, “New data on American family offer few hopeful signs,” WT National Edition, March 11-17, 1996, p. 1)
• In 1960, 243,000 children were living with a single parent who had never married; by 1993 this figure had risen to 6.3 million.
• 1.2 million children per year are born into fatherless homes. America has 1.8 million “latchkey” kids. (Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, p. 118)
• 20 years ago, 17% of American children grow up without a father; today, 36% do.
• In 1960, 8 million children living only with their mother; in 1995, 23 million.
• Three fastest growing forms of the family in the US, 1980-95: 1. Single mother families; 2. Blended families (step-parents); 3. Divorced families (the family left over after divorce). (Stanton, p. 1)
• Follow along with some more statistics: Research has now established a clear link between the breakdown of the family and the major problems plaguing our society. Consider the following facts:
• Divorce is the leading cause of childhood depression. (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development)
• 75% of adolescent patients at chemical abuse centers are from single-parent families. (Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA)
• 63% of youth suicides are single-parent children. (Center for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA)
• 70% of teen-age pregnancies are single-parent children. (“Children in Need: Investment Strategies for the Educationally Disadvantaged” – Committee for Economic Development)
• 75% of juveniles in youth correction facilities are from single-parent families. (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1988)
• Children of divorce are 5 times more likely to be suspended from school; 3 times as likely to need psychological counseling; 2 times as likely to repeat a grade; are absent from school more, late to school more often; show more health problems.( . Dr. Gene Brody – Study of Competence in Children and Families; Gormely, Newburgh, NY)
The question is, are people happier now that we live in an age in which divorce is easy, quick and socially acceptable? Does the fact that divorce was not an option to our parents and grandparents mean that they were unhappy in their marriage and that we are better off in our individualized world? Is the end result of the carnage to our children and their world an acceptable cost for our not learning to submit our individuality into the context of the greater whole of the family?
As goes the family, so goes the community. As goes the community, so goes the nation. We are experiencing serious challenges to our national structures, our economics and our continued existence as a culture. At the foundation of all of these issues is the loss of our family structure and the individualization of our world. If we cannot regain the sanctity of marriage and the family values of our traditions, we are doomed. If we cannot assimilate the structures of the relational setting of the home, then we will not be able to cope with the official structures of government. When individualization moves to its illegitimate extreme, it will find the crisis of a clash with the law and both will lose. If we cannot build the home and the family then we will have to build more jails, more programs and confiscate more taxes. There is tremendous cost to the nation for our loss of the family.
The family is the mirror through which our identity is formed and that reflection, if absent, will result in the confusion of role, goal, even gender identity. The value of this sacred and historic unit cannot be over emphasized. It is the basic currency of life.
