January 08, 2006
Interesting Article on Americans and Kids
On Friday I read an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal: Eight is not Enough. It mainly discusses the recent depictions of large families in Hollywood, but makes a few interesting points:
Today fewer than 10% of Americans live in households of five or more people and only 1.8% in families of seven or more. That means that if your family consists of a mother and father and five children, you live where I do, which is statistically on the lunatic fringe. "Omigod, five kids?" people gasp when I tell them. "Are you nuts?"There is, however, one corner of the U.S. where family size has suddenly expanded to titanic proportions, and it isn't Utah. It's Hollywood . . . So what is the appeal of these supersized families now? Last year, cultural commentator David Brooks declared of children that "three is the new two," and anecdotally you can find evidence for this. Thirty years ago it was not uncommon to see a wooden-sided station wagon with lots of arms and legs poking out the windows. Then came the de facto "one child" policy of the Me decades. Today it's not uncommon to see a gleaming SUV hurtling down the HOV lane with three or four heads in the back seats.
Interesting. In my personal experience, I believed that American families were growing in size. Even my non-religious friends seem to be more interesting in having three or four children than the previous generation. Is this a sign of blessing from God? Since all children are a gift and a blessing from God it would seem so at first glance. But of course, this blessing has always been available, it's just that Americans have decided to use contraception in order to prevent these blessings from occurring (or abortion to outright reject the blessing once it has occurred). In other words, God has always sought to bless us with more children and larger families, but we haven't been open to these blessings.
But of course, Hollywood can't positively depict this phenomena:
In this latest litter of movie features, we are shown that the more children in a household, the more deranged and uncivilized it becomes. A parent must be either fabulously wealthy or some kind of control freak (or, like the boastful Murtagh in "Cheaper by the Dozen 2," both) to have a clean floor with a horde of young 'uns around. To cope, a nanny must be either a witch, like La McPhee, or, as in last spring's Vin Diesel vehicle "The Pacifier," a Navy SEAL.
Of course, those of us in the 10% have the last laugh:
The odd thing is that, off the screen, large families are seldom the ones with wildly misbehaving children. In real life, they tend to be the orderly people with the polite children, the families in which older siblings can be seen caring for their little brothers and sisters without griping about it. Indeed, onlookers are so taken in by the popular stereotype that they are often surprised to see a large family acting peacefully.The recent return of big families to the screen is both telling and pleasing. It will be more pleasing still when those families are able to appear not solely amid zany pandemonium but also in orderly accommodation with the rest of society. Then reel life will be a whole lot closer to real life.
Here's hoping you allow God to bless you with a "quiver full of arrows" (who can cite that verse ;-)
God bless,
Jay
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