The New Age Household
Gone are the days of two-parent households. Gone are the days of one-working parent households. Fast-fleeting are the ideas of men as the breadwinners and women as the caregivers. As capitalism has controlled politics, it has infiltrated our personal lives. Our household structures are built on the premise of financial survival and socioeconomic gain. Every individual or household has used one of the following phrases:
I just want to make ends meet.
I want to be financially stable.
I want to be able to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle.
Therefore, many of us will do whatever we need to do to ensure that happens.
Some people will blame the dissolution of the two-parent households on the growing lack of morality or perhaps the rise of atheism. They will blame it on the practice of sex out of wedlock and the subsequent pregnancy. They will point to the increase in divorce rate. But rarely do people look at the true motivating factor, money. The reality of the past was that women were not afforded any rights to politics or property ownership. Once those rights were gained, women found it difficult to break into the workforce. It made it difficult to earn enough money to support a household. As women started making strides in the workplace, they finally had the option to support themselves. This is not a condemnation of feminism. If women were happy in their marriages, then they would have stayed even with the advent of these gains.
This next statement will be controversial, but it needs to be said nonetheless.The welfare system has become the baby daddy of many single parent households. Women are not being responsible with their decisions in mates because they know they will have the financial support of the government. I am not against the existence of welfare by any stretch of the imagination because I feel as though anyone can fall on hard times. But the availability of such aid promotes and creates a culture of single parent households.
We are also seeing an interesting trend in households that do have two parents. In many cases, both parents are forced to work. A $50,000-salary is no longer enough to realistically support an entire family. Inflation has caused mortgages to rise alongside the cost of gas and food. Most middle-class Americans live paycheck to paycheck. What you start to see is a generation of children who are not being raised by anyone. Daycares and schools watch your children and perhaps teach them what a combination of time and bureaucracy will allow them to teach. But the reality is that schools are pretty hands-off when it comes to discipline, life lessons, and morality. And higher education does not prepare you for the future, it cripples you for it. It provides you with a mediocre degree at a premium price tag.
We are also seeing the shift in power from men to women. Women are bearing the burden of finances while we are seeing more men taking on household chores and child-rearing duties. Personally, I welcome this exchange of power. Not because I am a woman, but because I believe that men should play an active role in their children's lives.
Now that we have examined the current status of household dynamics, let's look at the forward trend. I see arise of two-parent households in the future. More individuals are making the choice to stay together even if they are not choosing marriage. Parents are trying to be more active in raising their children. However, the future of one-working parent households is looking bleak. Corporations are not anymore willing to cover the rise in inflation than they were in the past.
The moral of the story is that we have the ability to create two-parent households and do a better job of raising our children. We just need to do it.
