We tend to worry about the wrong things, and nowhere is this more prominent and prevalent than when it comes to identifying and focusing on the most critical problem facing humanity.
Contrary to the elite opinions served up across the nation’s major editorial pages and on television news programs, not to mention subtly and cleverly inserted into everything from children’s television, advertisements to major Hollywood releases, it’s not the climate — and not by a lot.
It’s the unraveling of the family, which has been happening little by little for years, and now suddenly, all at once.
That’s because across cultures and generations, the health and vitality of the culture and our communities almost exclusively correlates with the integrity and cohesiveness of home life. As goes the family, so goes the society. It’s that simple. Our problems are rooted in the dysfunction of the home.
It’s curious, then, that the climate, which is ever changing and historically always evolving, would somehow rise to code red level of concern. Looking at our declining birth rate, our troubling divorce rate, the regularity of children being deprived of two parents, and the fact that many families are failing to form at all, I can’t help but think of the ancient idiom, that the decadent emperor Nero “fiddled while Rome burned.”
At the outset, let me be clear that our crisis will not be solved at the polls or by politicians. Government, though, need not be a passive bystander to our culture’s collapse. Policies that encourage marriage and children will help — but they will not eradicate the problem.
Good things happen when the family is honored — and disturbing and devastating things creep in when you disregard it.
At the center of the war on the family and children is a determined effort to divorce sex from marriage, procreation, and parenting. There’s also been a multi-decades-long campaign to redefine marriage, as well as the reality of male and female. Polyamory, the practice of maintaining multiple romantic relationships at the same time, is now becoming enshrined into law in some liberal-leaning states.
Does anyone really think this is good for women and children, let alone society?
Bad policies may exacerbate bad times — but this rolling revolution is what’s at the heart of our cultural and family crisis.
Children are too often seen as a burden and not the blessing they are. Nearly a million children are aborted each year in the United States. Now, nearly a year following the much-welcomed reversal of Roe, abortion advocates are enthusiastically pledging and attempting to enshrine the right to kill children back into various state constitutions.
Indisputably, family breakdown is at the headwaters of so many ills of our culture. It is no respecter of race, though we know that the African-American community has been especially upended by the revolution. According to the most recent statistics, 77 percent of black babies today are born to unwed mothers.
But fatherlessness isn’t just a problem in the African-American community. Over 32 percent of Hispanic children and 21 percent of white children live without a father. According to recent research, 24 million children in the U.S. live apart from their biological father — that’s one out of every three kids. Only 46% of teens grow up with both their parents remaining married to each other.
The consequences are both individual and societal.
Contrast this with children who live with their own mother and father. They rarely live in any form of poverty, they are more likely to do better in school, graduate from high school and attend college. They are consistently more healthy physically and mentally in all measures. They are less likely to get in trouble with the law, do drugs, be sexually active, etc. Whatever the measure of child well-being, kids from married homes do better. This has become one of the most reliable truisms of social science.
This is the bottom line: The real storm bearing down is not weather — but whether we can beat back and stabilize the increasingly unstable nuclear family.
