The Importance of the Family

The topic of family has become a very interesting topic in todays’ world. This past week I have learned a couple things concerning this topic, and I thought I would share.
It seems to me that the family is under attack, and we have proof of this through today’s trends. A list of 10 trends that are “trendy” today (in no specific order)…

1.     Pre-marital Sex
2.     Births by unmarried women
3.     Living alone
4.     Cohabitation
5.     Delaying marriage
6.     Fewer extended families are living together
7.     Fewer children to couples
8.     Household size is decreasing
9.     Divorce is high
10.  Employed mother to children who are younger than six

So why would this list, affect families? Pre-marital sex can lead to an unwanted pregnancy, which can lead to a broken family. Cohabitation does not give individuals the opportunity to always want to be together. Research shows how cohabitation couples and or families is not the best way to live together. Especially if there are children involved- it is not a good environment for the children to be raised in. Fewer children that are born into families limits the number of children born (obviously), but it starts a trend- it causes their children to not have many children and so on generation after generation.

Now this is a pretty intense list, and I don’t want to say that these things damage a family- because there are some families that are in these situations and everything is fine and dandy for them. But I do think they can put an awkward kink into things- and make functioning like a “normal” family harder.

Let’s talk about birth rates declining. There are not many individuals who want or need to have children. It is becoming the not so “popular” thing to do. But do you realize what this means for our society?? According to “New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter” our birth rates are going down. And you’re probably thinking that’s good because we are “overpopulating” the earth. Well that is wrong. We do have a big older generation because of all the baby boomers. But since we (my generation) are not having children, we won’t be able to replace the baby boomers population. There won’t be very many of us! If the family is declining then that means that the fertility rates are going down. The Demographic Winter video talked a lot about how our children aren’t going to want to have a lot of children because we didn’t. And that is an issue because the less children we have the more economic issues we will run into. For example, there will still be a lot of jobs that need to get done, so with less of a population we will need to work harder for the same amount of pay. It was interesting to see that our economic future, relates to our family life. Family is SO important for many reasons and we can see the truth of that statement in the statistics.

I guess what I am trying to stress is that we need to take our family life seriously. Although the family is not the “trendiest” thing out there right now, we need to study the facts and see the importance of having a stable happy family. It affects us personally and our future.

Materials from this week:

New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter Part 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8XQjfG2wYc&t=23s

New Economic Reality: Demographic Winter Part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw3OQgFsHZI

Why You Are Being Invited to Fewer Weddings
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-28/why-you-re-being-invited-to-fewer-weddings?cmpId=flipboard

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 29, 2017 at 10:21 PM

    What research is there that cohabitation is bad?

    ReplyDelete

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