Just Get a Strong Family!

Wouldn’t it be great if we all had perfectly functional families that met all our needs and expectations? We don’t, though, and it is irritating when some folks cite a “breakdown of the family” or some such thing as the cause of some social problem or other. Would a hypothetical juvenile delinquent have been less likely to have turned to crime if he had had a loving father to keep him in line? You bet. But he didn’t, and there is no sense in blaming him for not going out and recruiting a dad in the Ozzie Nelson or Ward Cleaver mold.

It takes the cooperation of a number of people to make a well functioning family, and children who do not enjoy the benefits of such families are hardly to blame for not having them. Tsk-tsking about their weak or nonexistent families is not helpful. Each of us has to make do with the families we find ourselves part of, and there is not much chance that any of us is in much of a position to improve on our family situation. We can resolve to try to be better fathers, mothers, spouses, siblings, children, whatever, but that’s all we can do. Our family is a matter a luck.

We often can’t help it if our marriages turn out badly, and we should be held responsible only for our part in the failure of our marriage. It does no good to point out that the consequences of a failed marriage might have been avoided if one had not been in a failed marriage. That’s like telling a homeless person that his problems would be solved if he got a house. Certainly it is good advice to tell someone to marry well, but this is sometimes harder to do than to say, and most people think they are marrying well when they enter the matrimonial state. I am sure my wife never imagined that I would be such a disappointment, or she would not have married me.

What do those who complain about familial “breakdown” mean by it? Are they exhorting us to seek out new and improved families for ourselves? Do they imagine that their observation is explanatory in any meaningful sense?

The “family” is an abstract concept that encompasses a set of relationships among individuals. It does not exist apart from those individuals, and it consists in interactions among them. If anyone should fall short due to circumstances or character or whatever, needs may go unmet, and dire consequences may ensue. To state that the “family” is impaired in such instances is to employ a euphemism. Let’s call it like it is: somebody done somebody wrong; somebody disappointed somebody; somebody had to go it alone.