Posted on 03/30/2021 10:11:59 AM PDT by PoliticallyShort
Conservatives are failing to preserve marriage and family. Fewer people in each generation are marrying, and, though fewer are having children, an increasing number of children are born out of wedlock. To fix this, we need to take an honest look at the shortcomings of the conservative movement. Marriage is at the heart of family. Intact families are more likely to raise children to honorable, productive adulthood. Married people are “happier, healthier, and better off financially,” as one recent book on the topic argues. Nevertheless, more and more people are forgoing family life or watching the opportunity slip by.
Men and women may have different priorities in a world where feminism and sexual liberation theory are powerful and popular. These cultural trends can seem immovable and irreversible. Even defenders of the family and marriage tacitly accept these ideologies, which undermine our essential institutions. Conservatives have therefore tried to accommodate family policy and analysis to the dominant cultural ideologies. For two generations we have sung comforting lullabies to ourselves, believing we can defend marriage and family without challenging the ideological hegemony of feminism and the sexual revolution.
Here are the top five comforting lies we tell ourselves. Though each is premised on a partial truth, in the aggregate they obscure the big picture: people aren’t abandoning marriage because of money, and we can’t bribe them into getting married. No progress can be made unless we face up to the ideological reasons why more people choose to forgo family life.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanmind.org ...
hat does politics have to do with this? Education, culture and morality are not political. How people were raised and the examples given by parents?
It’s not so simple buddy.
Feminism is behind a lot of this, but feminism could never have gained a foothold if we hadn’t, as a society, largely abandoned our Christian beliefs. If we had held firm to Christ, then feminism’s lures would not be very appealing, but since we abandoned Christ, the promises of easy sex, freedom, and life with fewer responsibilities was too strong a temptation for most people.
Maybe that is not what the Republican Party is selling hard enough, but should. You can’t ‘out-hollywood’ the democrats.
Money?
Child-rearing costs?
Uncertainty?
Sounds like such juvenile and trivial reasons to not have children.
Rule #1: No matter how much money you make, it will never be enough.
Rule #2: If one partner isn’t fully invested in, the entire marriage will fall apart regardless of the intentions and actions of the other.
This subject has many angles to it.
No one has mentioned that it many parts of the country, it takes two middle class paychecks to afford the mortgage on a modest house, whereas in the old days, the dad made enough to buy a Levittown type house and mom could be a stay at home mom. Nowadays most middle class mothers work to pay the bills, at mundane jobs, not spectacular careers where they occupy the corner office.
Yes, the equation changes if people want to buy a McMansion type house.
Yeah, not so much.
There is this thing that people used to talk about in the 70's and 80's called the "Demographic Transition", i.e. as countries went from impoverished to rich the fertility rates tanked invariably. This was true whether or not the country was a "Christian" one.
In a poor country children are a net financial benefit. In a rich country children are a net financial deficit. In a poor country women tend to have traditional roles taking care of the financially beneficial children. In a rich country women have access to birth control, abortion, and jobs that take them away from childcare duties. Also, in rich countries there are more laws limiting what children can do to generate income, and fewer opportunities to support family farms and similar.
It would be nice if we could put a moral spin on this, but unfortunately it appears to be all about the Benjamins.
There are quite a few young people who are hedonistic in their outlook on life. Many people simply don’t want to take on the job of having children.
Government policies have an impact. Welfarism, subsidizing of alley cat behaviors, pornography indulgence, discouragement of waiting until marriage, and the redefinition of what marriage is
Having it be all about the Benjamin’s is actually a moral spin.
I like money too but it’s just a tool. Those of a serious faith will generally have more kids. Ironically the percentage of the secular reduces this way.
The reason why we have too many out of wedlock births (or divorced single-parent households headed by women) is quite simple.
We give women too much, and we give men too little.
It's not just that welfare subsidizes unwed motherhood, and that tax and legal policy reward divorced mothers with tax breaks, welfare and a good chunk of the ex's property if they can get it.
It's that younger men cannot find work that pays enough for them to start a family or to keep one if they do. Women will not settle down with any man who cannot provide and many will not stay if their expectations of an improved standard of living are not met.
Yes, it's that simple.
The solution is also quite simple, but almost impossible politically: slam the doors shut to imports, eliminate immigration, change tax and regulatory policies to attract capital to the US.
Right there with you. Generally when there is a will there is a way.
There is massive marriage penalty.
If a couple has a kid, and the mother does not work, the state pays a good portion of the costs. If the parents are married, they pay most of it.
You get what you pay for.
Conservatives wanted government to define marriage. So it did.
How do you like it so far?
L
What was really happening in Christian, Muslim, Hindu, etc. countries was that people were having lots of kids because a lot of them died in childbirth and the ones that lived were a net economic benefit. They were cheap labor for a family farm or small business. They were cheap nursing for aging parents. They carried on the family name which is more about genetics and nationality than religion.
It is true that those folks who have a propensity to procreate will outpopulate those that don't. But some of the people with large broods are hedonistic gang members and Hollywood celebs. There it's more about macho than a mandate from God.
Sure.
Eliminate marriage (already done) and sow chaos in the culture (done) as a bunch of children grow up with no idea of how to be functional adults (ongoing).
But you can have all three partners live together.
I agree that previously the decision was often more economic, or helpless, or just because it was normal.
Western modern culture though I don’t think so.
As for Hollywood celebs they are adopting designer kids (poor kids) not having many of their own.
“ as expected, women for whom religion is most important have the highest fertility, followed by women for whom religion is somewhat important, with women for whom religion is not important having the lowest birth rates. Women experiencing the fertility rates observed among very religious women between 1997 and 2002 throughout their lifetime would have on average 2.3 children, half a child more than women for whom religion is not important”
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