The Idea of Family and Its Change

04.14.2010

I sometimes wonder what people’s attitude is going to be toward children and families in 150 to 200 years from now. Looking back that same amount of years, the meaning of children and family had a relatively different definition. Most people lived in small towns and/or ran a farm and so a family had may kids to have more hands on the farm to help out. Plus, the death rate for children was fairly high, so if you had 10 kids perhaps only 6 or 7 would survive. Having kids was more like an economic necessity and not out of a feeling of warmth or stability.

But when the Industrial Revolution took off after the Civil War so many things began to change and the family unit was no different. Women began marrying for love and choosing their partners instead of being paired off for, again, economic reasons or status reasons. With this choice now, women were having children later – still early according to our standards today, but women weren’t getting married and having kids at 13 or 14 anymore. They were waiting till their late teens, for example. Also, by living in the city, having children was no longer about an economic necessity and so you didn’t have 10 kids. You could get by with 2 or 3 depending on your social and financial status. I think this is where the cultural shift occurs in how society views children and families. Of course, we could break it down even more to socio-economic status, immigrant status, or race, but, for now, I’ll refrain from all of that.

We are such a crazed society for babies but I often think about how I feel like it’s all a mask. Our education sucks, for example. If we truly cared about our children, about the future of America, we’d invest in education. And yet, that always falls to the bottom. Even in private school. I’ll never forget my 2^nd year teaching and realizing at the end of the year that the history teacher was teaching from a book that was published in the 1980s! She was teaching them history that was based on old information AND, when doing geography, was using maps from that time period too. So, if you wanted to find Lithuania or another Baltic State on the map you couldn’t cause they were all under the Soviet Union map. Families were paying hundred of dollars a month for a supposedly excellent, private education, and yet, they were being taught with 10-year plus old information. Really? That’s thinking about our children?