The womb is the real weapon of mass detruction as it has been throughout history.
Posted on 09/15/2005 9:28:57 AM PDT by qam1
THE Australian family is under attack: not from an evil outside force intent on destroying a wholesome way of life, but from a none-too-subtle shift in values between generations.
Whereas the boomers were great supporters of mum, dad and the kids, later generations of Xers and now Ys are clearly less enamoured with family life, at least in youth. If there is a place for the traditional nuclear family in modern Australia it has been relegated to the late 30s and early 40s wasteland.
In 1991, 41 per cent of all Australian households featured a traditional nuclear family. This proportion would have exceeded 50 per cent in the 1960s. In this early manifestation of the traditional family, "the kids" numbered four and upwards.
Not like today: families have slimmed to two kids at best; a single child is common.
There is now a whole generation of Ys, and increasingly of Zs, growing up as lone kids in suburban houses. There are no brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles or aunties. These kids are quite alone.
The role of the family changed dramatically in the 90s. By 2001 only 33 per cent of all Australian households contained a traditional-styled family. In one devastating decade the family yielded 8 percentage points of market share to other, flashier, trendier, sexier households such as singles and couples.
Gen Xers didn't want to be stuck with a permanent partner and kids. They wanted to flit from relationship to relationship, job to job, home to apartment and then back to home, or from Australia to London and back.
Xers wanted to "discover themselves"; doing the daggy family thing just didn't sit well with Xer's plans for their 20s. Xers are incredulous at the suggestion they should pair up, bunker down and reproduce by 25.
"This is a no-brainer, right? The choice is either the pursuit of a cosmopolitan and funky 20- something lifestyle or spending this time cleaning up after a two-year-old? And the upside of the second choice is what exactly?"
Well, my dear little Xers, the upside of having kids in your 20s is that you grow as a person; you discover a wonderful sense of fulfilment in caring for and raising a well adjusted child who depends on you for everything.
"Bernard, please stop it. I can't take it any more. My sides are hurting. Tell me the real reason why we should forgo earning an income and having a good time in our 20s to have children.
"You mean that's it? That was for real? Look, if previous generations were dumb enough to waste their youth doing the kid thing, so be it. But don't lay any guilt trip on us just because we are exercising options that others were too stupid to grasp. And if I wanted a wonderful sense of fulfilment, then I'd go shopping."
And so the family shrivels.
By 2011 the traditional nuclear family will make up barely 28 per cent of all Australian households.
Singles and couples will account for 28 per cent of households. By the end of this decade the traditional nuclear family will no longer be the dominant social arrangement within Australia.
This is a very different world to the childhood of boomers 40 years earlier. In that world the family ruled. The family was reflected positively on television rather than in dysfunctional parody.
A suburban three-bedroom lair was designed specifically for families. No-one questioned the logic or the sanctity of the 1960s family.
The family is projected to continue on its current downward trajectory to make up just 24 per cent of all households by 2031. Single person households at this time are expected to make up 31 per cent of households.
What will Australia look like in 2031 when almost one in three households contains a single person? And this is not the young, sexy 20-something single that blossomed in the 1990s. No, the burgeoning market for singles during the 2020s will comprise sad old lonely baby boomers whose partner has died.
If we accept that there was a cultural impact from the baby boom in the 1950s that shaped consumer demand for 50 years, then we must also accept the confronting fact that there will be a "baby bust" 70 years later in the 2020s. The former delivered and deified the family; the latter will deliver a fatal blow to a social institution wounded by the shifting values of Xers and Ys 30 years earlier.
No need for sporting fields in Australian suburbia in the 2020s, but there will be a need for social and religious clubs to stem isolation within the burbs. It is an odd fact that as Australians get older and closer to death they also get closer to God. The 2020s will see a rise in religious fervour.
The bottom line is that the family is in transition, downwards. It is little wonder that political institutions are rallying behind its demise. The stark and brutal assessment is that within half a century we will have shifted from a situation where traditional families accounted for one in two households to one in four.
There will never be another decade like the 1990s when families conceded 8 percentage points in market share. After all, if we did this in the 2020s, then by the end of that decade traditional families would make up barely 17 per cent of all households. And at that level, you would have to question the basis upon which we as a nation bring up our kids. I don't think the Australian nation would ever be happy to have the majority of our children brought up in a social institution that does not contain a mother and a father living in cohabitation.
If these are our values, then the attack on the family that started in earnest in the 1990s must slow down and grind to a halt in the 2020s. Such a shift will slow down the rate of household formation and, combined with the dying off of the baby boomers in this decade, will lead to a severe slowdown in the demand for residential property in the 2020s.
As a consequence, I reckon the property industry has one, perhaps two, boom periods to run before it hits the wall at some stage during the 2020s.
Bernard Salt is a partner with KPMG
bsalt@kpmg.com.au
Oh please, what utter crappola.
QFT.
I'll say it if Qam won't. The vast majority of childless 30 something and 40 something individuals I meet are bigger children than my children. And by children I don't mean charmingly playful or youthful. I mean self-centered prima-donnas with little or no maturity.
There are no illegitmate children. The very concept is ugly at its core.
At least here in the US there are two factor at work. Firstly tax policies still don't greatly favor having kids as much as they should. And secondly, the fear of how to deal with the indoctrination in the government schools puts a damper on procreation. If it was more financially appealling to have kids, and if the school situation was not so depressing, I think more people would be having kids.
I have said nothing at all different.
Women, standing the most to gain, initiate divorces at a rate far higher than men and they are granted custody in the overwhelming majority of cases.
I had the most to lose when I initiated divorce proceedings against my ex-husband, with no children of my own involved - yet I was going to be expected to pay my share of child support for his child from a previous marriage because the formula that calculated the amount he paid included my income.
Nothing California does surprises me any longer, so trying to equate the female rape victim paying the support to the assinine idea a male rape victim should do so is as ludicrous as the statute itself.
Drastically cutting Social Security benefits for the childless would be a good start.
Okay. I thought people today had children because they wanted them and wanted to experience the joy of raising them and loving them for the rest of their lives, much much moreso than having them fill a slot in anyone's retirement plans.
Anyhow, what I was trying to say is even if you have children it's not guaranteed they'll be taking care of you--lots of things can prevent that from happening.
Remember also that even if it comes about, your children & grandchildren will be so overtaxed by SS/Medicare/whatever gubmint welfare system that it'll be even harder for them to support you.
I have a better idea.
Let's grandfather out SS entirely.
BTW, using the federal gubmint to punish people for choosing to not have children is NOT conservative at all.
That bears repeating again.
Wow, you actually have it in for people who have children.
The womb is the real weapon of mass detruction as it has been throughout history.
Not a practical reality. It's hard enough to live with the person you're sleeping with. Take away that intimacy, and living with roomates or family becomes more of a hassle than it is worth for the average adult.
In another country, at another time, perhaps. The current reality is that eliminating Social Security is not politically feasible, so we might at least recognize the fact that parents contribute more, by raising future taxpayers.
Nope..
Quote "It just stands to reason that the bond of religion is protective of marriage, and I believe it is." But Mr. Barna's numbers appear to say something otherwise about some of the country's most fervent Christians. His letter addressed those Christians' most common defenses, point by point, and the cross-tabulations of his study responded to many of the scholarly objections. He rejected the idea that large numbers of divorced Christians left their marriages before they converted. He also found no reason in his 3,854-person national survey to believe that large numbers of Christian marriages broke up because the Christian partner was "unequally yoked" with a non-Christian.
He doesn't buy that Christians divorced more often because they married their romantic partners rather than merely living with them. He doesn't have co-habitation data, but, Mr. Barna said, "of more than 70 other moral behaviors we study, when we compare Christians to non-Christians we rarely find substantial differences and we have no reason to believe co-habitation would veer from that pattern."
And, as with most of these types of surveys, it doesn't attempt to separate out those who are committed to their Faith from the RINO (religion in name only) types.
I'm hearing bagpipes
but no, in all Barna surveys (Barna is an Evangelical Christian polling group BTW)the pollster first determines the religiousness of the person they are polling by asking specific questions
No. Rome became Christian, it was not replaced by Christians. Christian Rome fell to the barbarians.
Actually, physiologically speaking, your sperm is the most robust and healthiest between 16 and 20, so it's no different for men.
BRAVO.
I was wondering when the anti-public school comments were going to begin.....but I wanted to see if you responded before I commented upon that.
You have every right to take pride in what you are doing for yourself, your children, and your mother. You remind me of my sister-in-law, a woman I greatly admire for how she handled the adversity of life.
Her 2 daughters are now in their 20s and so on track as to be amazing to me.
Keep up the good work.
How is it, then, that children today are more unhappy (e.g., suicidal) than ever before? After all, we're much more open to "alternative family structure," much more non-judgmental, and yet children are less happy than in more traditional times.
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