First Post: Family

This is my first post on family. Its not an essay, just a long winded opinion piece.

To what extent is a stable family vital for a successful society?

I think that a stable family is very vital for a successful society. This is because the family is the basis of a community and the community is the basis of society.

A stable family would be a family that has its members at peace with each other. It is where family members can trust one another and support each other. Finally, should there be children in the family, older members of earlier generations should ensure the proper development and the provision of food, shelter and love to the children.

What is a successful society? I believe a successful society is one that is virtually crime free, has no internal strife, and can thus pave the way for economical and lifestyle improvements. A successful society is like the ideal state of life whereby everyone lives in harmony with each other and share meaningful experiences in nation building.

Now, I feel that such a society cannot exist without a stable family, and I shall attempt to link these two aspects here.

A family is very important because children first learn about the world through their parents and family. The words they speak, the perception of the world, and how they relate to relatives or strangers are all affected by how much their parents have taught them. When these children grow up, they carry with them what they have learnt from childhood, their, outlook and thus their behavior are images of their experiences as a child. Since a family has the greatest impact on a person during his/her earliest years, a stable family is very important. One cannot expect a broken family or a family where each and every of its members quarrel everyday to leave a positive impact on the children. As statistics show, many parent child abusers were abused as a child themselves. As you can see, the family does have a large impact in moulding a person into what he/she is today.

If there are many individuals that come from unstable families, they are likely to act and behave in a manner that is beyond social norm. And this sort of behavior is often undesirable and casts a bad light on society. Such ‘social problems’ include drinking and smoking and even consumption of drugs. These problems arise when children become adolescents and try to exercise their independence from the family, especially their parents. The result is that they become bound to peer pressure, which essentially means that they have not achieved independence at all.
The social problems as mentioned earlier may include crime, as some people who come from families that are not stable may not ‘grow up’ and shed their tainted perceptions of life. They may be uneducated and thus, most likely unemployed and may resort to crime such as robbery in order to feed their hunger.

If the number of such cases should spiral upwards due to a lack of stable families, this would have detrimental effects on our society. Violence and crime can present huge losses to a country’s economy by scaring away potential investors to the country. People become poor when the country has no money, and ultimately the society gets caught in the vicious cycle of poverty.