Reshaping the Family in the World

In the world we live in today, the word family has derived a stigma to it that causes people to dread the idea of starting one. The idea of a family used to be one that sparked happiness and joy, but now factors such as children, double parent incomes, and divorce all come into play before the idea of family can be considered. Since I was a child, my societal view on the United States is one that includes many different ideas of family. For example, the course of life for people, go to school, go to college, get married, get a job, have kids. To me, that seemed to be the “norm route of life”. Now-a-days, people stay in school longer in hopes they will get a better job, women are engaging in safer-sex and post-poning child birth until much later, and women have realized that they have an equal if not more important role in society as the male population does. Such is the case in western cultures such as China and Korea. Women have come to realize that they are fully capable of living on their own and raising a family by themselves without a husband in the picture. With this in mind I do feel as though that the modernization in these regions of the world is causing families to change/decline.

The first reason I feel that these changes are occurring is because it is the women that are changing as mentioned in the BBC news article. Men still want the authority and control over their wives. However, women are beginning to realize how strong and important they actually are in their respective cultures. I think this is very important for women to begin to realize. An article from the Washington post talked about a divorcee and our willingness to ask for nothing from her husband during their divorce, despite China law stating spouses receive 50/50 of all assets. Wu Meiffen wanted to make it on her own and with that mindset she learned to drive, borrowed money from a sister and now owns a successful tile business. I think this idea looks for intriguing to women who have hesitations about divorce due to financial matters and loss of stability that they have whether the marriage is good or bad. When women in western cultures see that they can make it on their own, many individualistic mentalities start to arise and dependence for men and marriage will decrease.

The second reason I feel as though family ideals in western cultures are changing is because for the longest time marriages were fixed by the families and were of no emotional value and feelings were more forced than say if a relationship were to be built. In this circumstance, people would marry and have no idea really who they were marrying and entering into a relationship with. When this is a cultural norm in a society, a generation is bound to see sooner or later an upheaval, and in this case it would be the booming divorce rate, which is only second the United States now. In China, families were pressured to stay together by other family members who lived in close proximity to one another. Now, the growing individualistic mentality of a lot of people in western cultures is allowing them not to worry about remaining unhappy and escape. An attempt to counteract the increase in divorce and certainly a change in the normal behavior has been cohabitation between men and women. In this case, couples get more of a chance to know each other by living with one another for two and sometimes even three years. Divorce