by Tristan Taylor

Created on: January 21, 2012   Last Updated: January 28, 2012

Just how exactly societies can work to encourage family formation is, quite possibly, the most important question that our society needs to answer.  Although there are more than enough troublesome issues such as our lifeless economy, our poisoned environment, our immense national debt, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide, the question of what to do about the family seems just as important and is, in many ways, perhaps more so.

Out of all the potential problems that we have in our nation and worldwide there are few things that lead to the needless suffering of children like the complete breakdown of the nuclear family.  Whether it is children living in poverty who will never come close to their full potential, children being ignored and verbally abused by their parents and other assorted guardians, or whether it is the very worst - children being physically and sexually abused by sick souls, often those whom they should be able to trust and count on. 

While some of these aforementioned problems can, admittedly, occur within families, we know that these problems begin to increase exponentially when families break down.  However, the question of how societies can encourage family formation is probably best answered with a response that really answers the opposite question, "What have societies done to discourage family formation?"

Families represent a very natural entity in society.  As humans, there is something deep down inside all of us that knows that family is where we belong.  While we readily acknowledge that mothers tend to have a special connection with their children, fathers also have a natural urge to protect and provide for their children and their children’s mother.  Now, anyone with a pulse has surely observed that too many of our current generation of young, unmarried parents, especially the "baby daddies", seem to have a dangerously low degree of concern and commitment to their children.  For far too many young people today, the concept of a stable nuclear family based on a devoted, lifelong relationship with one person is nothing more than a strange, distant vestige of the past. 

I would have to argue most forcefully that this crumbled state of the family is not some new natural state of the postmodern world.  It is not as if technology, that force which brings perpetual change to humanity, is scripting a future of complete individualization where there will cease to be such

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