One of the main characteristics of the today’s society is its constantly changing shape and features. The modern world is developing at such rate that it can easily be called inconsistent. Such an inconsistency can be quite challenging and one of the last resorts we can find is a family.
There is a ton of investigations on the subject. Some of them argue that the conception of the family is obsolete and there is no place for it in the future. Others say that it is still strong and will be so in the predictable prospect, despite all the factors indicating the opposite.
The strongest argument against it is a constantly decreasing birth rate, which is often the main reason for creating and keeping the family. However, a family is still a basic conception of our society and one way or another is still a universal institution.
It may considerably deviate from its classic form: mother, father, and a child/children, but it still contains its main features.
Even those social groups that appear to be the furthest opposite to the family eventually show the relations that are inherent in a family. At the same time, the conception significantly evolved and today there are numerous variations of coexistence.
The family can be matrifocal, conjugal, blended, monogamous, polygamous, or to be a family of choice. It can take different shapes and give different roles to its members, but it’s still a place we call home and it is still a group of the closest people.
The importance of family in our life remains great, as it is a basic educational group where a child receives necessary skills for the social integration. It is still parents who teach the child the first instruments to interact with the world: language, hygiene, politeness. The values the child is taught are inherent in the society its parents live in, which facilitates the infant integration in it.
Moreover, a family is a group where the rules are essential conditions of coexistence. Those rules are the base for the successful integration and interaction with the society based on such principles. In this sense, a family is also an institution that teaches us such basic things as property, respect to other, especially to elderly people, etc.
Another way to see this importance is to look at the attitude of the society to those who do not have a family, they still object to prejudice and social discrimination. To have a fully functional family is still a factor of success, the importance of which can hardly be overestimated.
On the other hand, the importance of family is in establishing of long-term relation, especially in the model of parent-child relations, where links are most profound and strong. These long-term relations are opposite to the short-term relation in society, where the ruptures of relations are quite often and are considered as normal. In fact, a family is a unique place where the long-term relations are stimulated, which is of great importance for the child self-identification. Numerous studies show that family is a decisive factor for developing proper concepts of interpersonal relationships and values and may have a powerful negative effect on the development of the personality of a child or an adolescent, resulting in different psychological aberrations, such as social infantilism and antisocial or delinquent behavior.
All that said, we can see that despite all the controversy that family provokes in the modern society, the role of the family is still very important. Most of us are the product of a family. Family for us is a place we were born to, where we can find support, help, and understanding: the eternal values that give us reason to be. It does not matter what this word means for each of us – the meanings could be different – it is always a place where we want to return to.
At this rate of the world transformation, it is very important to be a part of such a social project as a family.
About author:
This personal essay was written by Robert T., a freelance writer whose life goal is to help students in writing academic projects working for https://smartwritingservice.com custom writing site. He has been writing original papers since 2010.
Featured image: By Catherine Scott (Family <3 Uploaded by Yjenith) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
