Society and the Role of Morality
Every collection of people depends on the glue of a common morality to hold them together. The thread they share… their unity of beliefs… is what binds them to each other, prevents chaos from taking over, and supports the perpetuation their society.
While morals can be learned from - and taught by - people outside the family unit, the immediate family accounts for most of this education… and it generally occurs naturally during the initial years of a child’s life. Whether consciously or not, our mothers and fathers conveyed the fundamental beliefs that most of us hold to this day, instilling them at a very basic level within our being. Whether good or bad, these beliefs are firmly implanted. If they can be altered, and many cannot, a significant amount of energy (and often motivation) is required.
It is challenging enough to raise children into well-rounded, responsible adults when there is a cohesive family surrounding them… and it becomes a much more difficult task to do so when there is not. In the past few decades, the mix of two-parent and one-parent families has changed:
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
I added the percentages in the middle section to make it easier to see what has happened with regard to the mix of one- and two- parent families in the U.S. over the past few decades.
On the whole, about one-third of families are being headed by a single parent. I believe this contributes to some of the problems we have today. No matter how good that one parent might be, he/she simply can’t do as good a job as two parents. As with any big job, it is unreasonable to expect it to get done as well with one worker as with two workers… the quality will not be the same.
More significantly, in most cases it is the single mother raising the kids… which mean they grow up without a positive male influence in the household… the absence of a fatherly role model… perhaps the lack of a disciplinarian. And it works the other way around, too, when the genders are the opposite. Sadly, this type of situation is probably self-perpetuating… children raised in such environments will carry on the same attitudes about parenting and families that they experienced.
What is most shocking about the figures above is the fact that, when broken out by race, the current ratio of one- and two- parent families is reversed for blacks… a situation that has evolved over the past 35 years or so. For all the advances made in race relations, and I believe there have been significant strides forward, what has happened during that time that has caused this relatively rapid switch?
These are just surface observations… and the real implications on our society go deep. We’ll have to discuss them separately to explore why they came about, the impact they are having, and how we might influence their evolution in a more positive direction.
