Families in the 21st Century

Will lonliness and less family contact be a feature of the 21st Century?

Every century has its downsides.  This century will be better than the last.  But recently someone attending the big NineShift annual presentation questioned why I was not more supportive of strengthening families. Well, I certainly am. I just don't know how.

I know people living alone is increasing.  I know many older people who want more visits from their children. I remember my mother always asking if I could stay longer.  And me always feeling guilty driving out of her driveway.  Is there a solution, or is lonlineness and living alone just a feature of this century?

Snow Family.  Kids down the block making a snow family this week. These first two snow people are their parents.

Comments

[D. P. Lubic]

In my opinion, a big part of the problem stems from a lack of opportunities where your family may be from. It used to be that sons followed fathers in their trades or professions. For a variety of reasons, that's pretty rare nowadays, and for a lot of jobs (particularly in mining or in some manufacturing work) one could argue that it wasn't always desirable in the first place.

At the same time, though, too often the alternative opportunities that some people would like to follow aren't available where they grew up--and yet in many cases, those opportunities should be there! A local business could use, say, better advertising, and it could be of local or regional origin, but the person in charge of ads at the business will use commercial "clip art" rather than hire some local artist. Or you may see the need for a better public transit system, but the local establishment can't and won't see what you may have to offer. (I've had personal experience with that one). Other designers,including people in engineering, may not be able to get into a local firm because there are already enough people there--and of course, the manufacturing work that also paid for these designers and engineers has either gone away, or may be awarded to a studio from China, France, or somewhere else as well as a local firm.

Better intermediate and long range transportation would help alleviate some of this, and it wasn't bad with cheap gas and low air fares (which were helped by low cost jet fuel), but those options are going away, and the stagnation of many people's wages hasn't helped matters.