Originally Posted by
globby_823
Everyone is separated today... But I was one of those few lucky ones that grew up in an extended family..., and I'm very thankful to God about this.
In 1994, American feminist Camille Paglia wrote that the reason behind the collapse of the nuclear family was precisely because the nuclear family doesn't work. According to her, what works is the extended family, the one you mentioned.
The predominant fact of modern sexual history is not patriarchy but
the collapse of the old extended family into the nuclear family, an isolated unit that, in its present form,
is claustrophic and psychologically unstable. The nuclear family can work only in a pioneer situation, where the punishing physicality of farmwork keeps everyone occupied and spent from dawn to dusk. The middle-class nuclear family, where the parents are white-collar professionals who do brainwork, is seething with frustrations and tensions. Words are charged, and real authority lies elsewhere, in bosses on the job. Marooned in the suburbs or in barricaded urban apartments, upwardly mobile families are frantically overschedule and geographically transient, with few ties to neighbors and little sustained contact with relatives.
Two parents alone cannot transmit all the wisdom of life to a child. Clan elders—grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins—performed this function once. Today, poor inner-city or rural children are more likely to benefit from the old extended family or from the surrogate family of long-trusted neighbors, since working-class people are less likely to make repeated moves for job promotions. The urban child sees the harshness of the street; the rural child witnesses the frightening operations of nature. Both have contact with an eternal reality denied the suburban middle-class child, who is cushioned from risk and fear and who is expected to conform to a code of genteel good manners and repressed body language that has changed startingly little since the Victorian era.
[Camille Paglia, Vamps & Tramps: New Essays, 1994]
Originally Posted by
fufuangeli
The lack of family turns (most) people surprisingly anti-social and distrustful of those around them, since they lacked the company of parents when they were children, however, this does not mean society is completely lost. Yes, it's going to be difficult, but not everyone who grows up without a family turns out to be a fucked-up psychopath without morals.
When I witness youths who grow up in broken families, I see some of them trying to socialize with random people to compensate the lack of 'family love' they need... So no, the collapse of nuclear families in the West doesn't necessarily mean a rise in 'distrustful sociopaths without morals'...
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