Nuclear devastation in American society today June 28, 2007
Posted by reformedville in : culture, Uncategorized , trackbackAmerican has never been hit with a nuclear weapon you say! We bombed Hiroshima (link) and Nagasaki (link) on August 6 and August 9, 1945 bringing about the unconditional surrender of the Japanese in World War II.
That is correct, we have never had a nuclear bomb dropped on the United States but we are experiencing nuclear devastation in American society today and it is having a greater effect on us as a people than the two nuclear weapons we dropped on Japan over 62 years ago.
In my second semester of college, I took my first college sociology course, called ” Marriage and the family”. One of the first concepts that we began to study was that of the nuclear family. (link) We studied how progressive the conjugal family structure was, as we evolved from the extended family (consanguinal family) (link) and kindred approach to the family unit.
But harvest time has come for the nuclear family, as it has not only brought destruction of the extended family in american culture, but it is breaking down itself, with only an estimated 1/4 of american households fitting into the pattern. Bittman asks why do sociologists promote the idea of the nuclear family when “so few have any practical attachment to a nuclear family?” The decline of the nuclear family is highlighted by:
- Increase in sole occupancy dwellings and smaller family sizes
- Average age of marriage being older
- Average number of children decreasing and first birth at later age
- The historical pattern of fertility. From baby boom to baby bust (instability)
- The aging population. The trend towards greater life expectancy.
- Rising divorce rates and people who will never marry.
In The United States nuclear families now constitute a minority of households with rising prevalence of other family arrangement such as blended families, binuclear families, single-parent families. Today nuclear families constitute roughly 24.1% of households, compared 40.3% in 1970. ”The nuclear family… is the idealized version of what most people think when they think of “family…” The “old definition of what a family is… the nuclear family”- no longer seems adequate to cover the wide diversity of household arrangements we see today, according to many social scientists (Edwards 1991; Stacey 1996). Thus has arisen the term postmodern family, which is meant to describe the great variability in family forms, including single-parent families and child-free couples.”-(1)
So as we have pared the family down to it’s smallest unit, we have noticed , generally, a loss of the extended family overall. In the nuclear family, too many children become burdensome and “stupid”, even advised against by church leaders. Our parents, aunts and uncles as they become elderly are no longer viewed as the matriarch or the patriarch in society but as a bother, ones who should have prepared better for their twilight years (while they were investing their time, money and energy into their children and grandchildren many times).
The breakdown of the American family into its smallest possible unit has had nuclear effects on the fabric of American society with the shockwaves and effects leaving almost no stone unturned in its devastation.
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