I wonder if the arranged marriage is simply a symptom if you will of the cause - parents that plan/coach their children into adulthood. There’s a term for this type of parent that escapes me at the moment, but parents who practice this approach with their children get very good results and close families.
The children grow up feeling that their parents are loving counselors. The level of involvement in schooling and life choices is very high. Compare this to single mother households. Many Indian wives are not particularly well educated and not near as much, but they are practitioners of this kind of child rearing.
Perhaps it could be called traditional families?
When considering the behavior of Indians, or anyone in the developing world, we have to look at their circumstances and how they grew up. As the article says, Indians in America are tremendously successful, because they are especially driven to succeed.
This generation of Indians is only one generation out of crippling poverty. In India, if you fall, you fall much farther down than in the US. Every Indian, no matter how successful in the US, still in the back of their minds is walking on a tightrope, where falling means living in a shantytown back in India. Indians do not have the luxury of getting married and then getting divorced because they were too young and just weren't ready and go off to find themselves in a commune somewhere. That idea is so alien to an Indian that Americans might as well have come from a different planet, with antennae coming out of their heads. Indians get married to share expenses, pool incomes and lower the risk of unemployment, and raise children.
Just like the other bubbles we have blown, we have had an immaturity bubble in personal behavior with fathers abandoning children, broken families maintaining two homes, and low regard for education and personal responsibility. I'd vote for the peak of this bubble to be that guy that fathered thirty children by eleven mothers who wants a break on his child support payments from his minimum wage job.
Eventually we will have little money for welfare or other social support. When this happens, what will replace it is the same social structures that worked well for thousands of years.
[ I wonder if the arranged marriage is simply a symptom if you will of the cause - parents that plan/coach their children into adulthood. There’s a term for this type of parent that escapes me at the moment, but parents who practice this approach with their children get very good results and close families.
The children grow up feeling that their parents are loving counselors. The level of involvement in schooling and life choices is very high. Compare this to single mother households. Many Indian wives are not particularly well educated and not near as much, but they are practitioners of this kind of child rearing.
Perhaps it could be called traditional families? ]
Yes that, and a good dollop of common sense chil rearing and a lack of the despicable “Dr. Spock” mentality.