I would like to let everyone who chooses to read an comment on these things that I am not writing anything to try and offend anyone nor to stir up the waters so to speak, but I will be writing from the perspective that I have which will most likely draw on my faith and religion, my life experiences, and my own opinions.
In class we have been taking about the family and what it is that defines a family, and I have been interested to listen and learn about it because we tend to talk about things for the most part as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints tend to say things and contrast it by the way things are going in the world. That has been a source of great fascination to me, not because I am learning anything new but to have it laid out so clearly is something I have never had nor done before.
This last week we were talking about how a traditional family of a man and woman who are married and having children is falling apart in the world. We talked a lot about an overview of the things that we will be learning in great detail as the semester progresses and to see how things tie together was interesting.
The general subject we talked about were:
Premarital
Sex: It is happening more than it has happened in the past.
- Delaying
marriage: The average of marriage for men is 28 and 26 for women
- Living
Alone: How many people are living alone or living together? (Roommates count as
living with someone)
- Unwed
families: Unwed Mothers,
- Employed
Mothers: Moms who have kids from ages 0-5 are working much more than in the
past.
- Cohabitation:
60-80% of Americans choose to live together.
- Birthrates:
They are going down. If you have two couples and one decided to have kids at 20
and the other decide to wait till 40 the first couples kids are already grown
enough to have kids before the s second couple even has kids.
- Household
size: Has shrunk in the last few years.
Divorce:
Not as many but possibly because there are not as many people who are getting
married.
We took it a step farther by tying everything together.
For example Since people were living together before marriage and having sex before marriage then what was the point of getting married at all since you can have all the benefits of marriage any way, but that would play directly into the lowered birth rate, unwed families, and household size. We talked about how because people are not married but living together sometimes they don't stay together even after kids are born because there is not the same level of commitment as generally comes with marriage and that would leave someone to be a single parent which would contribute to single mothers, and fathers and in many cases mothers who do not have jobs.
We were talking a lot more about the over all things that contributed to one another and honestly it occurred to me that in many ways this is a self destructive pattern that we have gotten ourselves into. Now I am not saying that as individuals we have done this, but as a whole of the country if we are doing this we are essentially killing ourselves slowly and we will disappear. That was something that our teacher mentioned that if a country does this and say another country or religion or race of people or whatever actually start to increase their population than they could actually work a people out of where they are.
It was something that gave me pause and really made me think. I mean how many times do we think about our population as a whole. I know that I never had.
I know that is an interesting post to start off the semester but I wanted to send out a little food for thought.
How do you feel about a subject like this?
What are your thoughts, or what do you think would have been good to talk about in class?
