marriage and families

There are three critical social institutions in every society. In the same way a three legged stool will not stand if one of the legs is broken, sociologists have stated that without the economy, religion, and the family, a society will not survive. If you think about this for a bit, you will realize that tasks of the rest of the social institutions we have – education, politics, medicine, the law – can be done by these three. But of these three key institutions, one rises above the other two: the family. The family, for a long time, was primarily an economic unit. It was responsible for teaching all a person needed to know, caring for sick family members, instructing in right and wrong and handling disputes, deciding what the values were and acting upon them, even entertaining one another. No wonder every society is concerned with its families.

As your text outlines, the family has undergone many dramatic changes since industrialization. Some of these shifts have caused new social institutions to coalesce, since the family could no longer be counted on to teach family members or care for them. These shifts have also loosened the expectations placed on families, leading to the trends we see today:

there is now a growing variety of family types
there are more women not having children
more people are cohabiting
more unmarried couples are raising children
there is more acceptance of the gay lifestyle
the divorce rate is nearing 50%
first marriages occur at a later age
there are more single parent households
more mothers of young children are working

There is another trend, even more recent, worth noting: divorce among millennials is decreasing. Millennials are causing the US divorce rate to decline Specifically, millennials marry later and tend to be more educated when they do marry. This means they are in a better position financially, and emotionally, and this means their marriages last – if they marry, that is.

Prompt:

So your assignment in this forum is to take a position. Do you believe the changes in marriage and family present a problem for our society? Is the institution of marriage and family in trouble, or is the institution of marriage and family resilient? Why do you think so, and what support can you use from the text to defend your position?