WEEK 1 & 2

Marriage and family statistics are mostly based off trends of society. The fluctuation of population relies upon what society thinks is acceptable regarding the creation of the family.

TRENDS

- Parental age

- Marriage

- Men vs woman marriage age

- Cohabitation

- Divorce rate

- Birth rates (replacement rate)

- Fertility rates

- Abuse

- Happiness

- Carbon footprint

- Career

This is only a fraction of trends that occur to impact the worlds view on the family.

WHAT IS HAPPENING TODAY?

Before we can talk about why you should have a family, we need to talk about what is happening in the world today so we can properly understand what these unfortunate trends do to the healthy the outlook on marriage and family.

Recently the age which spouses decide to get married has gone up, the average age is 27 years of age for female and 30 for male. This creates a problem with fertility, studies find that the older you get the more likely you are to have a chance with fertility complications.

Yes, we understand that lots of people don’t wait to be married to have children, which brings up another trend.

Cohabitation (a couple living with each other all while living the same life a married couple would without being legally married) has become more frequent, most people believe that living together to test the waters of what marriage would be like together will make a marriage last longer but in fact studies show that it does the opposite and divorce is more likely than if you weren’t living with each other beforehand.

Divorce rates are up more than ever which in the grand scheme of things is probably the biggest problem we face in the marriage and family world.

Children that come from abusive and/or divorced households tend to have a harder time to understand how a healthy family operates. Very often the lack of experience and knowledge is discouraging for the child’s future and might create their view of family as not essential or unreachable because they…

1. never experienced a healthy family or

2. They have developed fears that they will also create an unsafe place alike the one they grew up in.

SO WHAT?

This is common for many situations, having a rough upbringing sometimes causes adults to not want to bring another person into the world to experience what they had experienced as a child. To be clear the problem is NOT the children and young adults for not wanting to have children down the road, but it is the people who made the children a victim of abuse who should take the blame. “Globally, it is estimated that up to 1 billion children aged 2–17 years, have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect in the past year” this was said in June of 2020 by the world health organization.

Lastly the most shocking example of this is trend setting habit is a book named “Population Bomb”. I had learned about this book in my first week of family relations class and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. In this book it warns society about the threats high population rates have on the world in the future, it spits out predictions with what will happen if we reach 3 billion people on earth. This book was written in 1968, 53 years ago. The worry of overpopulation was nearly desolate up until this man named Paul R. Ehrlich took a singular trip to India and believed he knew all and could create a solution by warning others about overpopulation. Paul was in fact wrong about most predictions and we are now surpassing 7 billion people. Paul sold over 2 million books, most of those 2 million people were convinced bringing in more people into this world would destroy the world itself, there for not having children.