Family Trends and Research

 This week I learned a lot about the family. I thought I knew all about the family but after this week, I realize that I was missing a lot of information. Last week I learned that in the 1980s, a book was published that made a lot of people scared to have a family. It talked about how if we overpopulated the earth, we will run out of fossil fuels and the earth simply wouldn't be able to survive. At the time of the release of the book, the population of the earth was four to five billion people. It is crazy to think that someone wrote that book when the population was almost half of what it is now. Yes, these worries are still valid but we just have to have faith in the Lord and to not live our lives in fear.

    This topic of discussion leads to the world’s point of view of a family. Based on what we see in our own lives and based on studies, we can clearly see what the world thinks about the family. Some examples are you don’t have to marry your partner to live with them. The world shows that it is better to live with them first to see if you will still like them once you marry them. Studies show that you are actually more likely to get a divorce if you live with your partner before marriage. Divorce rates have already drastically gone up since the mid 1900s. Studies also show that divorce greatly effects the outcome of the children in the family by hurting there mental health, suicide rates, drug abuse, sexual abuse, education, and many more categories. If you go to familystructurestudies.com it shows the different outcomes on children based on single parents, homosexual relationships, heterosexual relationships, adoptions, divorce, and step families. Society also thinks that marriage doesn’t need to be between a man and a woman. In the past decade, it seems like this is the popular opinion and the other side is the minority if you will. 

With the ideas of the family changing so often, you will run into a lot of people that have different opinions on the family. There are so many studies that don’t look at the full picture. A lot of them have biased view points, convenient sampling, and small controll groups. All of these questions sprouted when the court said “not a single study has found children of homosexual parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heteroesexual parents.” When this statement was brought to the court, no one asked any questions. There are multiple studies that are very biased toward one side. Most of the research surveyed and looked at single moms. They didn’t even look at a family with a mom and a dad. Or worse they just didn;t liik at any control groups at all. Instead of looking at how it effected the children by asking the children, they asked the parents on how they parented and the emotional connection with their children. I know from personal experience that my mom and dad definitely have a different view point on how I was raised than me. If you want to know how the children were effected, ask the children, not the parents. 

I feel like all of this information is important because it can help all of us who are scared to have our own families and scared for what the future holds. A lot of these ideas can be controversial and I think that is the main reason everyone is scared to talk about them even though they are important.