Comments on: F is for the Family

By: CS Eric

CS Eric — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 19:49:58 +0000

I, too, was on the “menace” side of 25 when I married, and got the same grief for marrying “so old.” Since the age difference between me and Mrs CS is eight years, I just tell people that I was waiting for her to grow up so I could marry her. She tells people she was doing the same thing.

By: Andermom/Starfoxy

Andermom/Starfoxy — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 18:26:40 +0000

Fratello Giovanni, Possibly some of what people see with being wrong about being single in the mid to late 20's is the goal mentality. I read a post at mormon discussion the other day where she described the difference between a goal, and the act of getting married. A goal is something that you can put a timeline on, you can take concrete steps towards it, and it is completely within your control. When we refer to having marriage as a goal, we imply that we can treat it as a goal. We can't treat it as a goal. Meeting a person that we could be happy with is largely out of our control. All one can do is make ourselves desireable and available. If you're doing that then you're doing your best and no one has any right to judge you. My sister is in a situation not unlike the one you were in, and I keep trying to tell my mom to lay off of her. I blame the goal mentality, and I agree that it is *really* annoying and inappropriate.

By: Fratello Giovanni

Fratello Giovanni — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 16:35:37 +0000

Not to beat a dead horse here, but while the sort of thing President Faust said at that meeting (which you didn't find in the write-up in the Church News) gets repeated all-too-often among members, it doesn't seem to jive with other things he's said, or that you do find others saying in the Church News or Ensign. I never planned to stay single my whole life. Marriage was never something I didn't want. But too many members (and leaders) assumed, particularly when I was in my mid-to-late 20s, that because I happened to be single at the time that there must be something wrong with me.

By: Fratello Giovanni

Fratello Giovanni — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 04:23:15 +0000

In about a month, the Church will hold a worldwide leadership satelite broadcast. Those who are invited have been told that the primary topic wll be the proclamation on the family, and that we are all to study it beforehand.

Let me say that I have no arguments with anything in that document. But I’m not one of those LDS who feels incomplete unless I have it prominently displayed in my home so that I can worshuip it like some kind of icon. And in the ten years between when I returned from my mission and I married in the temple, that document was used as a weapeon against me many, many times by Church peers and, yes, leaders, simply to take me to task for being single. (And while marriage was never something I didn’t want, the verbal abuse, especially toward the end, got downright cruel.)

Two years ago at a similar broadcast, President James E. Faust made it clear (I was 31 and single then) that I wasn’t to feel welcome in the Church because of my status. Here are a couple of select quotes:

“The first event in establishing a family is to get married! The reluctance for some to marry seems to be increasing worldwide. . . . The major factors contributing to this decline are young people delaying marriage, increases in the proportion of adult population who have neaver married, and an increase in cohabitation.”

Maybe President Faust didn’t understand that some of us wanted to get it right the first time, seeing so much divorce among our peers and their parents. That’s the bad news, not people marrying later. Most of the divorced women I met online, no matter how long their marriage happened to last, married at age 18 or 19.

And here’s another gem: “More and more young people view marriage ‘as a couples relationship, designedto fulfill the emotional needs of adults, rather than an institution for bringing up children.’ The puropse of such ‘soul-mate relationship[s] may [well] weaken marriage as an instituion for rearing children.’”

And what about all those selfish parents who got divorced because they cared about themselves more than their children? I found my soul mate. I recongnize that not everyone will, but that bond has been our anchor. I hope it continues to be so.

By: Melinda

Melinda — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 03:15:35 +0000

I think there is a problem with focusing on the family too much. We only have three hours a week to preach to each other. When that ends up being an endless rehash of “how to have a perfect family” we don’t have time to talk about Christ. I think you minimize the exclusion felt by people in non-family situations. I pretty much quit one ward because they never talked about anything BUT family. Talk about Christ twice for every one time family gets mentioned. It would revolutionize Mormon meetings.

By: John C.

John C. — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 00:15:31 +0000

Beijing,
Christ wasn’t saying what the publicans did was bad. I agree that taking care of one’s own family is probably among the bare minimums that we owe humanity and yet quite a few people don’t even manage that. Technically, it is for this purpose that the church involves itself in home-teaching, visiting teaching, MIA and so forth (I know these may not be effective in every case, but it is at least part of the reason they exist). Nor does the church limit itself to only helping church members, as tsunami and Katrina victims might point out.

The problem is that parenting is self-sacrifice. People who refuse to give up some of themselves and some of their dreams are bad parents. It is as selfless as any other act of human kindness, perhaps moreso than some. Saying otherwise renders “selfishness” meaningless. Describe to me exactly how a mother, risking her own life to produce a child, is engaged in a selfish act. Please tell me that what she is thinking about in labor is how the child will take care of her in her old age. It would be ridiculous to argue this sort of thing, yet it is the logical conclusion of Hellmut’s argument.

For that matter, the same evolutionary psychologists who argue for the hardwiring of family love argue for the genetic hardwiring of all altruism. How that would make altruism toward non-kin more moral than altruism toward kin escapes me. If it is only our genes in either case, there is nothing commendable in either act.

For the most part, it seems to me that Hellmut is arguing that it is immoral for you to donate your car to kidney research because cancer causes so many more deaths a year. Thank you but I will spend my limited time and resources where I think they will be the most help.

By: Beijing

Beijing — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 21:47:16 +0000

I think I see Hellmut’s point. It seems to be along the same lines as what Jesus said here: “For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so?”

If the focus on one’s own children is so all-consuming that one has no time or energy to reach out to the children of God in the larger sense, then something important is lost. Some people don’t have families who care for them properly; who will care for them if no one regularly and lovingly reaches deeply into their lives…stretching far beyond the boundaries of their own little family in the process? People are hardwired to care for their offspring; and that’s a good thing. But it’s not the only thing. If you only love and serve those whom you’re hardwired to love and serve, what reward have ye?

By: Andermom

Andermom — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:23:58 +0000

I think a major way in which so much emphasis on the traditional nuclear family can be negetive is in the emphasis on behaviors that are listed as the ideal. A mother is nurturing, and always at home and always emotionally and physically available for her family. A Father is the breadwinner, and works hard to provide a steady income etc. Any behavior that even seems to not reflect those ideals, i.e. a father who is in some unstable line of work like a freelance writer, or a mother who takes night classes in criminal justice, or automotive mechanics, is seen as unsavory. And any unsavory behavior borders on sin, and should be discouraged, and looked down on.
We forget that the qualities desireable in a family aren’t the result of a single pattern of behavior. I have a friend whose loving mother rode around the state once a month on a Harley with all of her friends. My friend had a wonderful family that taught her the gospel of Jesus Christ. But her mother’s unorthodoxy was a point of embarrassment for her, where it shouldn’t have been.

By: bbell

bbell — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 16:30:40 +0000

Wow,

Just checked in. Am I to believe my lyin eyes? The LDS focus on the nuclear family is misplaced?

Do I attend a different church then y’all?

By: John Remy

John Remy — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 15:36:33 +0000

I think that it is easy to forget how culturally-bound the definition of ‘family’ is. The discussion so far uses the word ‘family’ in fairly narrow terms defined by suburban American ideals (and promoted within greater Church discourse). Contrast Chinese concepts of the ideal family unit with the American suburban model (or frontier America in the 1830s with Utah in the 1870s!).

I’m not trying to devalue the two-parent nuclear family, but I think that we have much to gain by valuing alternatives to the mainstream. For example, I think we could learn a lot from African-American families with strong matriarchs, or the vital role which grandparents play in many traditional East-Asian families. Id like to think that this wouldn’t be too tough, given Mormonism’s historical experimentation with family alternatives (which makes the above examples seem pretty conservative) and the unique emphasis (among Christians) on ancestral family ties.