You see it more and more often: disrupted families, derailed young people, divorced parents. It’s all related. What has changed in recent years? And how important is the family now considered?
The changing family
The parent-child relationship changes as the child grows older. Due to the intensive involvement with the changing child, parents are forced to continually reconsider their own attitude. The changing family also offers opportunities. Parents have the opportunity to continually realize different sides of themselves.
The family also changes due to changes in society. These factors are individualism, economics and social relations. There is more and more family individualism; the family becomes a closed family. The core is the rejection of any coercion other than that of one’s own conscience, reason and sense of life. The modern family is also a democratic family. The dominating father figure has been abolished. The predominance of the parents is of a more personal nature. Authority has been replaced by camaraderie. This increases the risk of family breakdown. The most important characteristic is that the family is a nurturing institution. The emphasis is on satisfying each other’s psychological-spiritual needs. If it succeeds, it will meet the greatest need of modern man, namely freedom in security. However, the more personal relationship between family members also increases the chance of disharmony (dissatisfaction).
The modern family is the nuclear family: man, woman and 1 or 2 children. Divorce has a major impact on children up to and including primary school age. Reactions do not always come to the surface.
The fundamental meaning of the family
The most important educational environment is and remains the family. Here the child acquires his first orientation schemes that enable him to organize experiences and which create a basic attitude towards fellow human beings. The family is never completely closed. Parents always pass on a certain view of life to their children; a view that they share with a certain group. Thus, despite all the rapids of modern life, there is continuity in culture.
The child is dependent on his social environment , initially on his primary environment, the family. Sociologists call this influence socialization and enculturation. A school-resistant child comes from a family in which the urge for exploration, curiosity and the like is linked to cultural-pedagogical responses from the parents. A school-resistant child can manage at any school. However, a vulnerable child at school is highly dependent on the teacher, method, group size and the like. Labov assumes that there are differences in language between lower and higher classes, but that they are both fully qualified compared to each other.
The parents
General opinion about parents is:
- love their children
- feed and clothe their children well
- teach them general rules regarding daily routine and interactions with others.
In the traditional family, the mother’s role in child rearing is greatest. Father is seen as the bearer of authority. Nowadays the mother image is mainly caring and for father general. There is no difference in authority anymore.