Are Families Really Important?

[changed]

Well, I'm not sure that everyone should be having a dozen kids ...

And the Millinials do have a much lower divorce rate - so the next generation is doing marriage better than the older folks did it so...

Not sure there is too much to be worried about.

 

[pogi]

24 minutes ago, changed said:

And the Millinials do have a much lower divorce rate - so the next generation is doing marriage better than the older folks did it so...

I'm not sure that is a fair assessment.  The divorce rates for 18-34 year old's were less in the 50's, 60's and 70's according to this graph, so how can you say that millennial are doing it better?  All this graph shows is that the older we get, the more likely we are to divorce - that appears to be more true today than ever before - but overall, divorce rates are worse in EVERY category, so I wouldn't say that millennials are doing better, they are clearly doing worse in terms of divorce for their age group than earlier generations. 

Can we really assess generationally if people are "doing marriage better" based on divorce rates?  Not really.  This might be more indicative of the overall social acceptance of divorce today than anything else. 

[Maidservant]

17 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

Yes, some anarchists and neo-Marxists do say such things, but their estimate of reality is tainted by false history and ideology.  Chairman Mao and Joe Stalin killed millions for that false promise.

And Jesus.  Promised us a better one. 🙂  That's pretty much who I'm reading when I say such a thing (that our current society needs to fail).

[Maidservant]

7 hours ago, Storm Rider said:

To begin to get just a taste of what life was like for women, I suggest reading Memoirs, Mme. de Staal, or Letters by Mme. de Sevigne, or even Memoirs by Francois Duc de la Rochefoucauld. I recently read them and I was impressed by how active women were in politics and culture. They were just as active and had just as much influence, if not more, than most men of the time.

 I agree with this.

[Glenn101]

2 hours ago, changed said:

Well, I'm not sure that everyone should be having a dozen kids ...

And the Millinials do have a much lower divorce rate - so the next generation is doing marriage better than the older folks did it so...

Not sure there is too much to be worried about.

 

A downward trend in marriages seems to have began in the sixties and continues into our present circumstances. I can do a CFR if asked, but the information is readily available. The lower millennial divorce rate may be because fewer people are getting married today and those who are getting married do so because they have very strong feelings about the value of marriage and families. I do not have any data to back that last part up, just throwing it out as an opinion that I see as plausible.

Glenn

[pogi]

10 minutes ago, Glenn101 said:

The lower millennial divorce rate may be because fewer people are getting married today and those who are getting married do so because they have very strong feelings about the value of marriage and families. 

See my last post.  The divorce rates are actually higher for that age group today than they were in the past.

[Robert F. Smith]

2 hours ago, Maidservant said:

And Jesus.  Promised us a better one. 🙂  That's pretty much who I'm reading when I say such a thing (that our current society needs to fail).

Not sure what part Jesus plays in this sorry story.  However, just because society is likely to fail doesn't seem like justification for the notion that it needs to fail.  That is not the Mormon way.  Indeed, there is this story of St Peter taking a group of new arrivals on a tour of Heaven:

St Peter showed everyone the wonders of Heaven as they wandered among the clouds, and it was awesome.

He also offhandedly pointed down to Hell, when someone said to him: "Why is it so green and beautiful down there in Hell?"

St Peter quickly looked down, and said: "It's those damn Mormons again."  

[Hamba Tuhan]

16 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

"Why is it so green and beautiful down there in Hell?"

St Peter quickly looked down, and said: "It's those damn Mormons again."  

Joseph Smith:

Quote

I see no faults in the Church, and therefore let me be resurrected with the Saints, whether I ascend to heaven or descend to hell, or go to any other place. And if we go to hell, we will turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it.

One of my faves! (Not just the quote but the lived experience of it.)

[Duncan]

Something i've seen 3 or 4 times, among my male church member group, is the woman has a way, way better job than her boyfriend. That's fine until they get married and all of the guys moved into the house that his wife had. It becomes an issue when the wife gets pregnant, and now the question is can the husband sustain a wife, kid and a house on less than two incomes? (she would get maternity pay but for awhile anyways) you would be living on less than before. Of these couples some can do it but the wife is working and the husband is as well or less so or in one case they got divorced. I look at my younger sister and her husband, both have great educations, they dated while in university, graduated, found killer jobs, paid off all of their loans, then they had their kids and all my 30-which bucked the whole 'have kids,school, job, church calling all at the same time' scene that others did. Now, my sister and her husband have a great life, almost no debt and they are set for life(hopefully nothing bad happens)😮

[The Nehor]

1 hour ago, pogi said:

See my last post.  The divorce rates are actually higher for that age group today than they were in the past.

True, but women in the 50s, 60s, and 70s were also often in an economic stranglehold and leaving their husband would be a very dangerous move. For better or worse (I would say better) women can escape marriage more easily. While some do it wrongly it has also allowed abused spouses to more easily seek safety.

[Storm Rider]

9 hours ago, USU78 said:

...  the practical nay inevitable conclusion of which is the extermination of black babies in America.

The problem of eugenics and abortion is swept under the rug by feminists - it is simply too harsh to have discussed in public and when discussed it must be couched in the most positive light possible. It is interesting to look at some of the people who were committed to Eugenics in the early part of the 20th century and their impact on the rest of the century.

Edited June 18, 2019 by Storm Rider

[Maidservant]

2 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Joseph Smith:

One of my faves! (Not just the quote but the lived experience of it.)

Also my favorite.

2 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

 fail

Semantics, I think, about whether or not one can use the word 'fail' to cover the ground one or the other or both of us is talking about, and the mechanics we will arrive there.  I will submit easily that there would be a better word.  But it was the one given in the discussion so I riffed off that (not you, I think it was brother Storm Rider).

I think we can agree (? I'll let you say) that the society we have now is not the one we are going to have.   

And in my opinion, we have thousands of years of paradigm to undo for that; and nowhere are we more blind than in the structure of union and family.

Quote

St Peter showed everyone the wonders of Heaven as they wandered among the clouds, and it was awesome.

He also offhandedly pointed down to Hell, when someone said to him: "Why is it so green and beautiful down there in Hell?"

St Peter quickly looked down, and said: "It's those damn Mormons again."  

Nice.  This and brother Tuhan's story--exactly MY point.  That we choose and create.  And if we arrived where there is still hell and not paradise, we have more choosing to do and it may not look like we thought it did, otherwise we would already be there.  ('Celestial' laws yielding a 'celestial' experience.)

Edited June 18, 2019 by Maidservant

[changed]

4 hours ago, pogi said:

See my last post.  The divorce rates are actually higher for that age group today than they were in the past.

Here are a few articles - the next generation has stronger marriages, by a long shot.  Things are getting better in the world!

The Coming Divorce Decline https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/h2sk6/  

Millennials Are Causing the U.S. Divorce Rate to Plummet
They’re waiting until all is secure before tying the knot. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-25/millennials-are-causing-the-u-s-divorce-rate-to-plummet

Add divorce to the list of things Millennials are killing :  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/26/millennials-blame-lower-us-divorce-rate-study/1429494002/

 from 2008 to 2016, the U.S. divorce rate dropped by 18 percent. What's causing this downward trend? "The overall drop has been driven entirely by younger women," Cohen writes. The study, which has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, has been submitted for presentation at the 2019 Population Association of America meeting, an annual conference for demographers and sociologists to present research. To measure the divorce rate, Cohen compared the number of divorces to married women. When controlling for other factors like an aging population, the results show only an 8 percent drop, "but the pattern is the same," Cohen notes.

Edited June 18, 2019 by changed

[pogi]

35 minutes ago, changed said:

Here are a few articles - the next generation has stronger marriages, by a long shot.  Things are getting better in the world!

I think that zooming in on one piece of data, such as divorce rates, causes one to miss the big picture of what is really going on in the world. 

35 minutes ago, changed said:

from 2008 to 2016, the U.S. divorce rate dropped by 18 percent. What's causing this downward trend? "The overall drop has been driven entirely by younger women," Cohen writes. 

I simply don't understand how Cohen can claim this when his own graph clearly demonstrates a fairly even downward trend from around 2010 - 2016 in divorce rates for EVERY single age group except for those aged 55+.  Not to mention, the divorce rates for the 18-34 year old age category appears to have remained fairly consistent since the early 1980's (between 11-13 divorces per 100 marriages)- not much has changed in that age group -so how can Cohen claim that lower divorce rates are primarily due to "younger women"?  I don't get it, the numbers simply don't show that.

Not to destroy your optimistic outlook on the world, but when you take these figures into perspective with the big picture of all relationships, things are not looking so good after all. 

Quote

The Not-So-Great Reason Divorce Rates Are Declining

So, looking at married couples alone doesn’t capture the true nature of American partnerships today. “If you were to include cohabiting relationships [in addition to marriages], the breakup rates for young adults have probably not been going down,” 

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/09/millennials-divorce-baby-boomers/571282/

Quote

The Divorce Rate Is Dropping. That May Not Actually Be Good News

Cohabiting is becoming a norm in most Westernized countries. In 2018, 15% of folks ages 25 to 34 lived with an unmarried partner, up from 12% a decade earlier. More Americans under 25 cohabit with a partner (9%) than are married to one (7%). Two decades ago, those figures weren’t even close: 5% were cohabiting and 14% were married.

...A Brookings Institute analysis found that there’s a 50-50 chance that a child born to a cohabiting couple was not planned. And according to Pew Research, more than one of every two children born to cohabiting parents will endure a parental breakup by age 9, as opposed to only one-in-five born within a marriage. 

https://time.com/5434949/divorce-rate-children-marriage-benefits/

I certainly wouldn't claim that things are getting better in the world of marriage/cohabitation, nor would I give millennials credit for saving marriage. 

Edited June 18, 2019 by pogi

[Glenn101]

17 hours ago, pogi said:

See my last post.  The divorce rates are actually higher for that age group today than they were in the past.

Thanks for the heads up. But I did have a plausible explanation until you blew the whole thing out of water with a factual analysis. Sometimes I need to be more diligent.

Glenn

[pogi]

16 hours ago, The Nehor said:

True, but women in the 50s, 60s, and 70s were also often in an economic stranglehold and leaving their husband would be a very dangerous move. For better or worse (I would say better) women can escape marriage more easily. While some do it wrongly it has also allowed abused spouses to more easily seek safety.

It would have been dangerous both economically and socially - that kind of thing was simply not socially acceptable.  I agree that it is not all bad. 

[Mystery Meat]

On 6/16/2019 at 12:43 AM, The Nehor said:

There are several problems. We have made it so that most families cannot survive on one income unless one of the two in the marriage is a wealthy worker. We have vastly increased the incentives and in many cases requirement for women to work and increased the labor force which naturally drives down wages. The economic and social incentives to have children are disappearing. We have stripped away the dignity of labor by magnifying the social and economic scorn on those with menial jobs so that they are ostracized to poverty. The man who cannot provide (and only the educated, smart, lucky, gifted, or clever will be able to pull it off) are of course shunned or shamed out of marriage. The rising costs of education place vast mortgages on their futures but a degree is becoming more and more worthless as their ubiquity lowers their value. Add in the porn pandemic and guys are left with little to feed their soul and sense of worth. Women face similar problems as men who cannot help them leave them to try to parent alone or they grow so frustrated they flee the marriage to seek something better.

We are also facing a looming crisis. Soon the growing automation of labor and information processing will start to cull jobs from the workplace en masse as unnecessary. We will need to face some economic realities. If jobs vanish then people will find themselves unable to buy goods which hits those that create them. Grapes of Wrath style depression may force wages lower then what people need to survive and then people labor for a pittance. This leads to unrest or revolution. We also need to rebuild the dignity of employment so that those who labor honestly can feel like they are a part of a secure society and are not endlessly on the verge of financial ruin.

I am not sure what the answer but something has got to give.

I agree with this but I have not heard or seen a proposal by anyone that solves the underlying problems.

[Mystery Meat]

On 6/16/2019 at 9:19 PM, The Nehor said:

I think one of the big problems is the student loan crisis. I would like to see laws passed making student loans dischargeable by bankruptcy under conditions where a strong salary is never realized. We would have fewer people studying Polisci and French Poetry if the lender needed them to make money to get their tuition back.

I like this but on one condition: the Government can't be in the student loan business at all.

[The Nehor]

46 minutes ago, Mystery Meat said:

I agree with this but I have not heard or seen a proposal by anyone that solves the underlying problems.

We could all decide to repent and live the gospel.

[Mystery Meat]

On 6/18/2019 at 2:25 PM, The Nehor said:

We could all decide to repent and live the gospel.

I stand corrected.

[Scott Lloyd]

On 6/16/2019 at 6:06 PM, strappinglad said:

There definitely been a huge increase in expectations for lifestyle in the last 50 years. Families of 8 used to live in 1000 square ft , now families of 3 need 3000 sqft/  and all the goodies our society offers:  TVs, phones, computers , 3 cars etc. It comes with a price , literally and figuratively. 

 

To cite an example, where I live (Salt Lake Valley), a moderate sized house can be adequately cooled in summer with an evaporative cooler. Yet more and more householders have come to view central air conditioning (significantly more expensive for both product and operation) as a necessity rather than the luxury it was once regarded as. 

Edited June 24, 2019 by Scott Lloyd

[Kenngo1969]

On 6/23/2019 at 10:02 PM, Scott Lloyd said:

To cite an example, where I live (Salt Lake Valley), a moderate sized house can be adequately cooled in summer with an evaporative cooler. Yet more and more householders have come to view central air conditioning (significantly more expensive for both product and operation) as a necessity rather than the luxury it was once regarded as. 

I agree with this, except you ended the sentence with a preposition.  C'mon, Lloyd!  You're better than this!

(Sorry.   Couldn't resist! )

[poptart]

As a non-Mormon from a dysfunctional, violent family I have my own take.  First off, I do think that so far you guys are really one of the last groups of people left who understand just how important family is.  I've read the Proclamation to the world the LDS church put out there, that thing is amazing.   That thing should be plastered to walls in schools and public buildings, if I had my way it would. 

I’m living proof as to why families are important, the horrible alcohol infused violence I had to grow up around altered me in bad ways.  Thing is, people like me are the norm now, it’s rather foolish I think to expect someone who’s had a pretty bad life to just man up and contribute to a society that never has nor ever will care about them.  They’re angry and resentful and now that is affecting those with families.  To use a phrase I used to hate but is so applicable now, here we are.  Families are now having to move half way across the country hoping for places that are child friendly.  Where my cousin lives the population has skyrocket from 2,000 to 20,000 in the past few years, mostly California transplants.  What's interesting is while states like WA are still a top destination for people, it's mostly single people.  CO still gets mostly families, apparently outside of the state people still think we're this super wholesome place that's great to raise kids, not so much.  Some of the complaints my cousin gets from his new neighbors are how people here don't seem to care about children, esp. the single people.  They sold their home and moved thinking at least Northern Colorado is still family oriented, instead it's being filled with single hipster types (Yes that’s kinda me....) who do not like having children around them nor seeing their taxes go up over it all.  Point of all this is I think society has played a big part in all this.  It's so expensive to raise a family now, wages aren't what they used to be in a lot of fields and competition is ridiculous.  Also, peoples own family values have changed so much that as someone here pointed out its like families here are destined to fail. People like my father have a big share of the blame, people from his generation had it made.  His parents let him stay at home well into his 30s, he assaulted his father which resulted in him being punched in the gut and tossed out, and they still let him come home.  With me he wanted me gone by 18 and spent most of his life trying to ruin me.  Took a restraining order against him and his death from COPD to make it stop.  How do you think the likes of me are going to react when some transplant with an entitlement complex gripes about the likes of me not wanting to pander to them because they have children?  Don’t think I have to answer that, pretty sure everyone here already knows.

People and families need to take responsibility for their lives again and stop living selfish consumerist lifestyles.  Why it is immigrant families from E. Asia tend to do so well?  You can go to just about any Buddhist temple downtown and not only do they do a ton of community outreach, family is # 1.  The elders are often Sensei who pass on traditions to the kids.  The families tend to be quite active in temple life and everyone tends to be looked after.  When I see and hear people IRL gripe about how tough it is, in the back of my head I always wonder just how selfish and entitled they are.  Have to admit, I don’t feel sorry for them at all.

 

 

 

[poptart]

On 6/18/2019 at 2:25 PM, The Nehor said:

We could all decide to repent and live the gospel.

Cool, i'd like to see those with money go first.

[poptart]

On 6/18/2019 at 11:25 AM, pogi said:

It would have been dangerous both economically and socially - that kind of thing was simply not socially acceptable.  I agree that it is not all bad. 

Even then it can be difficult.  My own father was a legal mastermind, where they lived it was a community property state, after I was old enough to where he couldn't use me as a pawn against mom he threatened to ruin her 401k.  His alcoholism was terrifying, never forget the 2 weeks before i finally died he threatened to clean out the bank account if mom didn't buy him a bottle of booze, he was in a skilled nursing facility at the time recovering from what was his 2nd to last bout with the affects of COPD.  There are some really scary people out there....