Is Family Trending?

Week one: 

Societal Trends and the Family

     
        Wow what a week! You know, I’ve not need disappointed by the material that I have been reading regarding the family this last week. My teacher has started our class out with our first topic which goes into the background of societal trends around marriage and family. The documentaries I watched and the articles I have read regarding this have properly blown my mind and led me to question the fabric of our current society regarding marriage and family. This week we have been learning an exorbitant amount of information that I never even knew was out there!     
         
         I learned that there are indeed specific trends that are surfacing in our society that are going to have a profound effect on our future generations. A lot of these trends are not unheard of, actually in a daily conversation many of these trends have been partially identified. But there is much more beneath truth beneath the surface. Having a clear understanding of these trends has opened my eyes on the statistical reality of our current society.
        
         Out of all the resources that I studied I found a particular book named ‘Marriage and Family: The Quest for Intimacy’ by Lauer & Lauer to be the most interesting and informative. The first part of the book covers the material surrounding trends in America and is aptly named ‘Marriage and Family in America’. I wish to explain and share some of my insights around the sub section of this chapter called changing patterns of intimate relationship where it discusses current marital trends.
        
          The first trend that the author picked out was the increase of premarital sex. Apparently, since the 1960’s the approval of, and proportion of young adults participating has gone up a lot, but it has declined a small bit. There is even a national survey that is cited that explains that forty-eight percent of high-school teenagers have had sex at least once. That is a huge ratio and at such a young age it’s easy to see how this trend can have adverse side effects into other areas of intimacy as these young teens age into adulthood. Even in my own life, this has been a noticeable trend as people are more or less accepting of the sexual openness that many unmarried people participate in. I don’t know if this will honestly ever change, but if could reverse many unwanted issues could possibly reside.
        
          Then there is the next trend that almost always is connected to the prior. As people participate in unmarried sex, then there inevitably will be children born to unmarried mothers. This trend has gone up like crazy to the point that out of all women in their twenties, sixty one percent of these women will have a child out of wedlock, and even out of women forty-one years and older, twenty one percent will have a child out of wedlock.
         
          As these trends change and people become more relaxed in their commitment to marriage and family the resulting effects start to domino in an unwanted way. Like cohabitation, in my small LDS world I would never consider the idea of living together with a member of the opposite sex, but the world as a whole is beginning to find no issue with this. The people that participate in this behavior think they are getting around some of the possible consequences of marriage, like divorce, but actually suffer more in the long run.
        
          It’s interesting to that all these trends affect one another, birth rates, cohabitation, divorce, all are products of poor understanding of the purpose of marriage, or a lack of respect for marriage. But there are some groups and areas of the world that are working to reverse these issues and help improve family and marriage life.
        
          This is the whole goal of my church, to defend the family and perpetuate good morals and love amongst the human race. When society is going in another way it’s tempting and easy to go with the flow, but conscience was never the best choice. So, I personally as a saint, hope to help reverse some of these poor trends, and increase the better ones. It may be a small drop in the bucket, but it’s a start.
   

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