of Shmuley's advice is
again displayed!
Posted on 11/25/2005 1:20:38 AM PST by goldstategop
The American family is broken. It consists of constituent parts that do not cohere. It comprises husbands and wives who are not intimate. And it is producing children who are not secure.
In hosting the upcoming TLC Television series, "Shalom in the Home," and taping the episodes that will begin to air in 2006, I have come to understand the problems that are tearing the modern family asunder.
First, there is the work-too-hard burnout of the modern mother and wife. Working outside the home to provide the family with the all-important second income, and coming home to children who are domestically lazy and rarely help, she is overwhelmed with a deluge of responsibility that saps her energy and crushes her spirit.
In trying to simply keep up with her ever-mounting responsibilities, and making every effort not to fail her family, she slowly loses her soft edge as she becomes either a shouter – browbeating her children to do their chores – or a martyr, forever lecturing her kids about everything she does for them and how she receives no appreciation in return. She quickly forsakes the attempt to inspire her children to be actively involved in the home and is reduced to using guilt and pressure to get them to do simple chores. A broken record, she repeats herself constantly, while her children never internalize her instruction.
She develops resentment toward her husband because he works hard at the office,but not in the home. And as she drags her haggard frame from kitchen to bedroom, she is expected to look attractive, youthful and retain a trim figure, even as the woman inside has gone into hibernation. Something has to give, and it is usually a sense of self, as she slowly loses her individuality and morphs into a chauffeur, chef and sheriff. To add insult to injury, her husband will later use her devotion to the family against her by asserting that they have no time to be a couple and that she has lost a romantic impulse, obsessed as she is with domestic responsibilities.
Small wonder it is that, according to the Washington Post, one in three doctor-office visits by women involve a prescription for an antidepressant.
Next there are the children, exhibiting a lifelessness and numbness more redolent of those who have been through wars than those who ostensibly are innocent and have never suffered trauma. With their ears stuffed with Ipod headphones, and the culture pumping incessant decadence straight into their cerebral cortex, they are cut off from all that is natural and most of what is healthy.
Passivity, born of endless hours of sitting in front of a television, has become first habit, idleness, second nature. Childhood exuberance has been replaced with apathy, youthful innocence with a cynical weariness. Even if they are not on Ritalin – and one out of seven American kids is prescribed a stimulant drug – they are still addicts, with movies, video games and shopping being the drugs of choice.
With the home often an endless cacophony of noise, with parents tuning out in front of the television or the Internet, they develop a preference for the company of friends and find any excuse to abandon the home.
The decentralization of the home, whereby kids have replaced parents with friends, is among the greatest challenges to the modern American family. And rather than rising to the challenge, mother and fathers have capitulated, accepting that as parents they bear the mark of Cain, that it is natural for teenagers to feel ashamed of their parents, that it is healthy for teenagers to never want to be caught dead with their parents. And slowly the friends supplant the parents as the principal influence in the child's life.
In one of our TV episodes, in an inspired moment brought about by counseling, a mother turned with tears in her eyes to the teenage son from whom she felt estranged, hugged him, kissed him and told him that he was the best thing that ever happened to her. Utterly unmoved and with a blank expression on his face, his response was, "Come on Mom. This is getting corny." I was astonished at how any expression of love between parent and teenage child had become something to be ridiculed, corny. Here was a boy who would reject his mother's affection because it might humiliate him in front of his mates.
Not that we need worry that are screwing up our kids, seeing as there are precious few children left to screw up in the first place. In the United States, the birth rate of the more affluent white population is 1.83 babies per family, well below both the replacement rate of at least 2.1, and the black and Hispanic rates of 2.2 and 3.0 respectively. That this means that within a few generations America's white majority will diminish and disappear. Whiteness is inconsequential and meaningless. But as an indicator of how prosperity in America has led us to value big cars over cute infants, and plasma TV screens over baby pictures, our own soul-lessness is exposed.
Along with whites, liberals are also disappearing – quite literally – less due the efforts of Rush Limbaugh and more to the effects of a lost appreciation for children. The magazine The Week recently reported that
... people who describe themselves as socially conservative are having far more babies than those who consider themselves liberals ... differences in fertility rates accounted for 70 percent of the decline in mainline Protestant church membership ... and the simultaneous rise in conservative church membership.
How ironic that we in America have bred a culture whereby the more ostensibly enlightened the individual, the less they value children, and the more progressive their political ideology, the more they tend to find purpose through career rather than family.
Broken things can be fixed, and the American family can be mended. It will begin with the understanding that success in life is measured not by the quantity of our bank accounts but the quality of our relationships, that to be human is not to acquire, but to connect.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
When confronted with all those consequences, that second income doesn't look very "all-important", does it? Families with children are not meant to be two-income families unless one of those earners works full-time at home. Do anything else and you're extremely lucky if all the consequences described in the article do not visit your home.
Yep, all those girls need is a high school education, then marry them off and right straight into the kitchen, the nursery and the church. How dare they even think of any other life!
Come on, boys and girls, this is the crap we heard in the 1950s when they told us girls had no business being anything but teachers, nurses, mommies and -- if we were ugly and stupid -- secretaries, because anything else was 'taking bread out of a family's mouth' and would turn us into something "no man would want to marry" -- the oiginal Fate Worse Than Death.
If you are a woman who CHOOSES to have children (and this IS a choice), then I agree that youand your husband and/or the father of those children ought to plan ahead for you to stay home and bring them up, and you ought to agree beforehand on how this will be done. In fact, you should have agreed on this before you ever got married -- while you were concentrating on how great the sex was and how your 'hottie' made you look in front of your friends at the bar or in the office.
HOWEVER, it is not therefore anxiomatic that all girls be forced back into the home and commanded to forego higher education and devote their lives to having babies and keeping house.
Focus your attention on those who have already chosen to have children -- males and females alike -- and get them to change their lives accordingly. Teach the next generation that when you choose to have children your life must change dramatically and you will no longer have independence or free choice; you must devote yourselves to those children because that is now your career. This may not result in a dramatic increase in births, but it will certainly make the people who do CHOOSE to give birth a much better idea of what they are sigining up for and how to get it done.
bttt
How's the cat?
I can't stand the man, he's anti- Christian.
Good advice.
Happy and healthy and waiting for my pickup at the end of the month - I can't wait.
End of November? Only another week, then.
End of December =( I wish it were this month.
Oh, too bad.
I did get a couple of new pictures of the kitty family that are to die for... I'll ping you when I post 'em up.
Thanks! I love cats, although we're currently without one, and not planning on another at the moment (with the baby expected, and all :-).
Awwwww! How many babies in the litter?
Six... three boys, three girls. The big cat on the right is the mother, the other two are related females. I've got pictures of the dad and mom on their own that I ought to post too... the dad in particular is quite a character.
Good color!
Yeah that's the signature color of the Korat breed... part of the reason I chose one. I'm told it makes the cat look like it has an "aura" in natural light.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.