What happend to the traditional family?

I've been learning a lot about families and their effect on society. Here's a little snippet of my brain thoughts about it. :)

HEY! A bit more about me.

Welcome to my very first blog post, EVER! I’m super new to this so just bear with me and my awful writing skills. I wanted to hop on here and just share some super cool things I have learned this week.

Before we dive on in, let me give you some background on who the heck I am and why I love the topic of family so much. I am the oldest of six kids. Yep, you read it right. SIX! Growing up, I was always the bossy older sister that would force her siblings into making music videos and cheating at our fairly intense games of monopoly. Life was good. Then my siblings started to grow up and now I have lost my throne of “boss lady.” We are always competing for mom’s favorite(which she claims she doesn’t have one but we all know she actually does)and loving every second. I seriously have adored growing up with so many siblings. There is never a dull moment. Whenever I feel like I have no friends, I can turn to my brothers and sister who I know will always be there for me.

Now I understand and acknowledge that not everybody grew up the way I did. All families have different circumstances and dynamics. My family by all means is not perfect nor will they ever be in this life. But something that really stood out to me this week that I learned about was that people are not even wanting families in the first place. Isn’t that crazy? Why do people not want children? What happens when fertility rates go down? How does that effect our mental happiness? What will happen to our economy? Today I’m going to attempt to answer some of these questions.

History Lesson.

Let’s jump back in time to the mid 1900’s. Soon after World War 2, everyone started to have more kids than usual. Some say it was because people were waiting until after the war was over to raise their children in a safer world, some have other ideas. Nonetheless, there were babies everywhere! Here’s some stats: From the year 1946-1964, in the U.S. alone, 77.3 million children were born and worldwide there were 450 billion. That blows my mind! Think about the impact these kids had on the world. As they started to grow up, they got jobs and had families of their own. Each generation, their posterity has had less and less children which we see now results in the population resulting in more grandparents than grandkids.

Why did that next generation have less kids? In 2007, studies show in interviews with young adults why they feel they shouldn't have a large traditional family for the following reasons:

-Individualism is more important and should be put first.

-Not modern anymore.

-Causes financial instability.

-Just not necessary.

-Worried of bringing children into a unsettled world.

Why does this matter?

This is so interesting to me. People are putting finances, social norms and themselves before having children. You may be thinking, well so what? People have the freedom to choose if they want a large family or not. You are completely right! Everyone can decide for themselves how many children they have but because people are choose to have small or no families but unfortunately this results in the human capital to decline. Jennifer Morse, a former professor of economics at Yale University said “Moral capital refers to the network of people around me that I can count on and that can count on me in to be there for them in various ways. The family is the cradle of moral and social capital. You can think of it as the family is the place where people learn their basic moral principles, but it is deeper than the moral principles. It’s inside the family that people learn to cooperate with each other, where they learn to trust, and really where the ground work for the conscience is laid in the first place.”

So how can the human moral capital be raised? Well, pretty much what Doctor Morse said. We basically learn how to be good people, how to trust, how to cooperate with each other in a family. We live in a crazy world and what we need is to be focused on building those skills. I truly believe that if people consider having families built on love and trust, our world can become better. We can get through anything together!

Conclusion!

I’m grateful for my crazy family and the moral and social skills they have taught me. I feel that it has benefited me in so many ways. I hope that this helped you understand a little more about why I feel families are important.