A friend recently told me: "If you think about it, everything that used to define a family is now gone. They just don’t make sense." I’m sure there are better articles on this than the one below, but it got me thinking….
Link: The Good Enough Family.
In some countries, people still subscribe to ideologies which promote the family as a pillar of society, the basic cell of the national organism, a hothouse in which to breed children for the army, and so on. These collective ideologies call for personal contributions and sacrifices. They have a strong emotional dimension and provide impetus to a host of behavior patterns.
But the emotional investment in today’s individualistic-capitalist ideologies is no smaller than it was in yesterday’s nationalistic ones. True, technological developments rendered past thinking obsolete and dysfunctional but did not quench Man’s thirst for guidance and a worldview.
Still, as technology evolved, it became more and more disruptive to the family. Increased mobility, a decentralization of information sources, the transfers of the traditional functions of the family to societal and private sector establishments, the increased incidence of interpersonal interactions, safer sex with lesser or no consequences – all fostered the disintegration of the traditional, extended and nuclear family.