The Ideas of Families has Changed, but Not Very Good

 

Throughout the first couple of weeks in one of my college courses, we talked a lot about families in general. There was a lot of ideas that we talked about regarding families back then and families now in our time. We focused a lot on family research and science involving the different kinds of families that there are in the world. For example, one of the things we focused a lot on was a writer named Paul R. Ehrlich. He has written a book called, “The Population Bomb.” In his book, he talked a lot about we needed to decrease the population to make sure there were enough resources in the world to survive.

By doing that, in his book, he suggested for people to have fewer children. Even though this writer sounds like the same villain from the Marvel movie, “Infinity War,” his reason for doing and sharing that was that he had the belief that children and families that are higher in number of members in the family were stealing the resources from our world, to solve that, he suggested that if they have fewer children, we will not run out of resources, that it would be better for the environment. The surprising part about what he shared is that, people eventually started to believe him, they were on board with what he was sharing and were acting on it. Our population is decreasing and being affected negatively by this. Unfortunately, the sizes of families were later decreasing and to this day it is still continuing to happen, but for other reasons as well.

The impact that is happening on this is the fertility rate is decreasing, from the 60’s to the 80’s, the fertility rate decreased from 3.65 percent to 1.84 percent. From the 1980’s to now, that rate has increased and decreased, currently the rate is now at 1.74 percent, which is not good. There are other countries that are trying to get people to have fewer children, other countries such as China and Japan, their governments and leaders are willing to pay its citizens to have more children to help them increase their birth rate since it is low. The rates of people having families from back then to know has been on a declining slope. Since I mentioned other reasons, let me share one or some of them here.

The other reasons why people are not having families is because people have experienced traumatic experiences involving their families. Such experiences may include abandonment, divorce, abuse, or other kinds of experiences. Those young children were not able to overcome those experiences, they were either taught or figured out to not talk about it and to conceal it rather than sharing it to receive help. Those experiences can be unpredictable in shaping the way the child grows up to be. There are times that those children overcome those trials and become better or different than what their parents have done, there are other times where those children may become addicts, traumatized, or stuck in those times when they experienced those trials.

Even though there are children that went through experiences like that, the basic truth is that the person that they looked up to or were supposed to trust that brought those trials to them, has failed them and let them down. Besides that, we must acknowledge that the world has been changing every day, meaning that knowledge out there is always coming out and different studies and facts are coming out as well. Our world today looks a lot different than it did back then. There are many ideas involving family that isn’t positive about it anymore, but there are benefits to having families in this world, and those should stay open to everyone.