Family Lessons From The U.S - Watchman Research Media

Advances in technology are driving cultural change throughout the world. Historically, new advances have been made slowly and rarely, allowing people time to adapt to them. However, the current pace of change is unsettling established patterns of life, and further technological developments are likely to transform cultures to an even greater extent.

In the face of radical cultural change, parents will have to identify likeminded families who share their values and their philosophy of family life, with whom they can associate. No matter where people stand on the moral spectrum, this is a human need. We shall all need to find our communities of faith, values or life orientation in order to raise our children in line with our convictions.

As life becomes more frenetic, setting aside time for family and community is going to become a major issue. One of the biggest deficits or negatives of the technological culture is that it has driven out time. We have more labour-saving devices than ever before, and yet we all complain that we have less time. The machines that we have created have taken over and we are struggling to keep up with them.

Time is essential to build relationships: marriage needs time for conversation, and parents need to spend time with their children in order to establish a relationship with them and influence them. We need to protect time in order to protect our relationships.

The Major Institutions

Historically, there have been five major institutions in society that fulfil five basic tasks: the family, the marketplace, government, the school, and religion. (Even those who do not subscribe to a religious faith still have the task of working out a philosophy of life.) Each of these institutions developed over time and all began in the family. In our own lifetime, healthcare has emerged as a sixth institution, as medicine has become specialised. But each institution is rooted in the family.

Each of these institutions taps into a different capacity. The government, for example, specialises in force (e.g. the police, courts, prisons, the armed forces), and education specialises in intelligence, but the family is the institution that specialises in sexuality. It is only through the complementarity of the sexes that children can be conceived and born. A father is therefore entitled to say to the teacher, ‘Since I am the man who brought this boy into existence through the sexual act, I am uniquely equipped to educate him in the area of sexuality.’

Where fathers speak to their sons about sexual matters, and mothers their daughters, they can have a huge impact. Public policy is secondary to the input that parents should have into the lives of their own children in the privacy and sacredness of the home. Children will learn more about sexuality from observing how their mother and father relate to each other, without a word being spoken.

We need to teach our sons to respect women because they have the capacity for motherhood. If a man is going to be a good lover of his wife in adult life, he needs to learn self-control over the sexual advances. Pornography presents a serious threat to the sexuality of boys and their future marriages, and the use of pornography is increasing among girls and women too.

Change Through Relationship

Three of the major institutions are deeply relational: the family, the school and religion. Government and the market-place are more instrumental. During my time as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the family and social policy at the US Department of Health and Human Services, where I had access to the largest depository of evaluation data on government social problems, I observed that there is not a single government social behaviour-changing programme in the United States that works.

At the local level, there are micro programmes that have some measure of success, though they rise and fall depending on staff, leadership and needs. But where they work, they do so in an idiosyncratic way. Cookie-cutting a programme doesn’t work. The success of social programmes is dependent on the love of the giver for the receiver. The person in need must be in receipt of a dedicated service.

In a therapeutic context, it is essential that the patient clicks with the therapist. The relationship between them is the vehicle through which change occurs. But you don’t go to the government for relationships. You go to the government for justice. The main function of the government is to protect the different institutions, not to grow them. It is a massive strategic mistake for the government to try to operate behaviour-changing programmes.

The government has completely failed in the realm of sex education. Not a single programme has delivered what it is supposed to deliver. The same is true of marriage programmes. At a national level they are not working. The real change will take place in the relational spheres of family, school and religion.

The primary role of the government is to protect and to punish violation. The campaign group Mothers Against Drunk Driving was very effective in reducing rates of drunk-driving, not through social programmes, but by getting the law enforced.

Social science has established beyond any doubt that marriage is the foundational relationship in society. Yet we face the ill-will of people who have no interest in the truth and refuse to accept the facts. In academia, many social scientists are closing their minds to data that do not fulfil their presuppositions, but any social scientist worth his salt will grapple with the data that doesn’t fit his view of things.

Effects of The Sexual Revolution

There has been a considerable rise in divorces and out-of-wedlock births since the 1950s. In the United States, only 46 per cent of 17 year-olds are living with their biological mother and father. (Among African-American 17 year-olds the percentage is as low as 17 per cent.)

There has been a marked increase in the number of fatherless families, where girls often have the model of a mother who is doing her best for her children, but boys have no role model. Girls are now out-stripping boys in all areas of education. This is bad news for marriage, because girls do not generally marry down.

The 1994 Family Education Trust (FET) report, Broken Homes and Battered Children, demonstrated that the intact married family is the least likely family structure to witness child abuse. The incidence of serious child abuse is 33 times greater in a home where the biological mother is cohabiting with her boyfriend than in a home with married biological parents. The United States National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect had not previously measured child abuse by family structure until it was persuaded to do so on the basis of the findings of the FET study in the UK.

The American study found that rates of sexual abuse are 19.8 times higher in homes headed by a biological mother and her boyfriend compared with a home headed by married biological parents, and five times higher in an intact cohabiting family. Rates of physical abuse were also 10 times and 4.3 times higher respectively than in a natural married family.

The feminist lobby doesn’t like to admit it, but statistics demonstrate that the traditional intact married family is the safest place for women too.

Religious Observance

The United States is the only country in the world with survey data that measures the effects of religious observance as well as family structure, and the evidence shows a positive association between weekly attendance at a place of worship and beneficial outcomes in terms of academic achievement, family mealtimes and abstinence from sex outside marriage. Religion has a protective effect in the areas of sex, alcohol and drugs.

These findings have public policy implications. At a time when religious liberties are under threat, we need to press for religious observance to be included in the key population surveys, so that the benefits associated with it can be brought into the public debate. In view of the positive outcomes, the government should be in the business of protecting marriage and religious freedom.

The government has lost sight of its chief purpose, with the result that more and more people are becoming fearful of an intrusive state. The fundamental role of the government is to keep the bad guys out and leave the others free to do the good. The social science data can assist us in making the case for being allowed the freedom to have a positive impact on society through our families and religious communities.