Jim Watkins | May 17, 2024
Famed NFL kicker Harrison Butker told his class of graduates family is rightfully the center of everything else.
The and the Left went mad.
How many charts do I need to show you to expose the truth that family is dying in Western society and the consequences of this is shown in the growing instability of the United States, Europe and the United Kingdom. The reaction against Butker proves the point. Some even asked for his resignation from the Kansas City Chiefs, the team who won the most recent Super Bowl championship game.
In another age someone like Butker would be a hero.
Violent crime is up.
Student and young adult suicide rates are up
Births are declining
Marriage is declining
Kids are staying at home longer
Abortions are at an all time high
Addiction is up
At what point do we make the connection between broken (or non existent) homes and the social-ills we face today?
Public schools have taken on the repsonsibility of raising our young, and of late, are pushiing ideologies that actually harm families. Single mothers now out-number two-parent families by 3 to 1 in African American communities, which accounts for the highest incarceration rate among young black men who statistically are more likely to grow up without fathers, making them more susceptible to gang inclusion (where there is at least a sense of family).
Let’s look at family and why this institution is vital to civilization.
Two adults making a lifelong commitment to raising children produces fidelity, commitment, loyalty, self-sacrifice and a genuine dedication to sharing the enormous and invaluable experience of child-rearing.
There is no human activity that goes farther in building upon the better natures of human beings; where the home is has always been the center to family, and through family association, cousins, uncles, grandparents, generational experience moves forward; it is the family that allows culture to be passed from one generation to the next, preserving hard-learned and valuable cultural wisdom with an invisible string that links us to the past.
For offspring, the home is where the most important character traits are taught to children, who will one day provide for their own offspring, and in addition, become themselves cordial and keenly productive members of society. People who have children are undeniably happier, more fulfilled in life, and are less prone to emotional and mental illness often associated with loneliness.
The family also maintains stability through homebuilding. In a healthy family, kids learn to share, to show loyalty and tolerance, and learn respect for their parents and grandparents, and then later, respect among siblings. Love nurtures the soil of human personality and produces better emotional outcomes. Studies also show children with siblings tend to be slightly better adjusted emotionally than those who come from single-child households.
Parents also have a supreme responsibility to teach their children morals, ethics, and depending on the family, spiritual and religious principles that guide conduct throughout their entire lives. These essentials provide the quality of inheritance. Without them every society must learn anew what lost. Family provides the thread that weaves together the social fabric of society.
From 1945 to 1959 and fresh after a World War II victory, America’s middle class were anxious to begin anew and usher in a new era of prosperity. New engineering made it possible for suburbs to be born, a perfect incubator for a real baby-boom, which is exactly what happened. But by the mid-60’s, young people began liberating themselves from traditional mores as the homelife began to change. The drug culture exploded a decade or so later, and it became cool to “tune in and drop out.”
What changed?
Empahsis on individual career-bulding for both men and women is what promulgated the shift. Suddenely TV (and TV-dinners) and baysitters became the norm to accomodate two-income households. The dynamic changed because the home was empty of parents for 1/3rd of the day at least, leaving kids to be influenced by the world around them.
Culture supported this new-found freedom of women’s liberty from home and to the work pace. Uncle Sam liked it because it double the tax rolls, forgetting it came at the expense of the unrealized value of homelife and its contribution to a stable society.
In the 1990’s there was a phrase bantered about when women who did not work would call themselves “stay-at-home-moms,’ as if that was abormal for women to be managing moe affairs on a full-time basis.
For thousands of years mother was the guardian, protector and chief operating officer of the home. Homelife, with mother in chanrge, was the rule, not the exception.
This illustrates how the West shifted its stance on women’s value being more prized if she worked outside of the home diminishing the value of raising and rearing children into productive and happy adults.
Somewhere along the way the West decided raising the next generation was less important than pursuing careers goals as a show of power and independence.
And now we are paying for it.
Raising and rearing children is a supreme privilege, and children pay the price when no one is there when they come home from school alone, or when they spend two hours a day riding a bus to a school twenty miles away just because both parents are off to work at seven a.m.
Is it any wonder our children are lost?
WE CAN FIX THIS
The good news is not is all lost.
To steer this great ship back towards the more stable social environment requires only that we collectively agree family is paramount to all of our other efforts. Child-rearing must be held to the highest esteem. We owe this allegiance to our gardnchildren and to theirs.
A big first step is for education to support parents by working on curriculum that promotes two-parent families as ideal. Certain jurdisdictional provisions must be given to ensure parental authority prevails. Primary education should include relationship-training so that youung people, when older, are better prepared for family life.
Parents should have more engagement in the education their children, and today’s technology allows for both parents and educators to work in tandem much more effectively for the benefit of the child. It is irresponsible for a parent to be ignorant of what their child is learning – or isn’t learning.
Courses in child-rearing for secondary students should be mandatory and include replete study of child hygiene, disease prevention, and especially nutritional and behavioral education, so that young parents are better prepared.
If we took these first simple steps, in less than two generations we would see the benefits of this all-hands-on-deck approach to a First Family initiative. Least of all we would have produced a much happier and better prepared generation of children who can maintain the kind of stability that improves quality of life for all. When we commit to making sure the family is preserved as the bedrock unit of society, the fruits of our labor will be forthcoming sooner, rather than later. It is not too late.
JIM WATKINS 