Family crisis

“ To bring a family into the world, give them refined tastes, and accustom them to comforts, the loss of which is misery, and then to leave the family to the workhouse, the prison, or the street—to the alms of relatives, or to the charity of the public,—is nothing short of a crime done against society, as well as against the unfortunate individuals who are the immediate sufferers. ”

“ There are very many families where father [Pg 300] and mother work together with unwearied effort to ennoble home life, but these individual efforts, these aspirations and patient endeavours, although indispensable as a foundation, are isolated and scattered; they are continually overpowered by the evil influences existing outside the family. ”

“ A poor woman, the wife of a working-man, and the mother of a young family, had been deserted by her husband, who had left her, besides her own children, the charge of his bedridden parents. Under this accumulation of burdens, she had been heroically struggling for some months, in the vain attempt, by her single energies, to ward off the approach of want, and to act at the same time the part of nurse to the old couple. ”

“ Does a family exist for the sake of a home, or a home for the sake of a family? I know of many instances in which the former of these suppositions is true. The father toils and wears himself out, often gambles—speculating, some call it—and not unfrequently cheats and steals outright in order to keep up his establishment. The mother works and worries, smooths her wrinkled brow to curious visitors, burdens her soul with innumerable deceits, and enslaves herself that her house and its belongings may be as good or a little better than her neighbor's. ”

“ Family Desertion.—While the burden of housekeeping rests upon the wife, there are corresponding weights and annoyances that fall upon the man. Business pressure and professional responsibility are wearying; he, too, feels the strain upon his nerves. When he returns home at evening he is easily disturbed by a worried wife, tired and fretful children, and the unmistakable atmosphere of gloom and friction that permeates many homes. He contrasts his unenviable position with the freedom and good-fellowship of the club, and chafes under the family bonds. ”

“ WE have all of us seen, with pity and regret, a sickly mother, burdened with the cares of her household. She has felt that there were employments, which no one could discharge as well as herself, modifications of duty, in which the interest of her husband, the welfare of her children, the comfort of the family, were concerned, which could not be deputed to another, without loss. ”

“ Any alteration of natural things results in an imbalance, and alteration of woman's character, the non fulfillment of the offices bestowed by nature, to take her away from her core duties, separate her from home, from taking care of her husband and children, all but annihilates the family, therefore unbalancing society, which is left without its true foundation: the perfectly organized family. ”

“ All men and women, whatever be their shortcomings in other directions, have this impulse, this faculty, in a degree. It takes shape in family ties: makes clumsy and unfortunate work of them in perhaps two cases out of three,--wives tormenting husbands, husbands neglecting and humiliating wives, parents maltreating and ruining children, children disobeying and grieving parents, and brothers and sisters quarrelling to the point of proverbial mention; but under all this, in spite of all this, the love is there. A great trouble or a sudden emergency will bring it out. ”

“ But we all know that so many of our other social problems have their roots in the breakdown of our families. For decades we have seen a stunning and simultaneous erosion of the institutions that give our lives structure and keep us strong—work, family and neighborhood. ”

“ It must be remembered that when you take away the father and supporter of a family you leave them without the means of support; and if the mother happens to be a sick and weakly person, what is to become of them? ”

“ Yet who doubts that among the rich as well as among the poor such judicial protection and care of the children, whom the broken family leaves without true parental care, is needed? To give children into the hands of either parent alone is in many such cases no fitting substitute for the normal home influence. In any case, there should be an external 242conscience and an external solicitude enlisted in the interest of every child whose parents have made such a failure of marriage and the home that the divorce court is the only refuge. ”

“ Small table-skirmishes are put to an untimely end by mamma’s hurrying the unlucky belligerents out of sight and sound of their outraged sire, and the one Medo-Persic law of the family is at all risks to rescue the father from every inconvenience and annoyance from the children. The kind, devoted woman shuts them carefully up within her own precincts. ”

“ We have all seen parental control and the family claim assert their authority in fields of effort which belong to the adult judgment of the child and pertain to activity quite outside the family life. Probably the distinctively family tragedy of which we all catch glimpses now and then, is the assertion of this authority through all the entanglements of wounded affection and misunderstanding. We see parents and children acting from conscientious motives and with the tenderest affection, yet bringing about a misery which can scarcely be hidden. ”

“ The plan for the future of a fifteen-year-old boy which was made by a society for family social work was markedly modified when it was discovered that not only his father but his grandfather had been a man of violent and abusive temper, who drank habitually and neglected their family obligations. ”

“ Disaster will attend any attempt at social reform, if the marriage relation is even suspected to be rendered less happy. The family is a rock against which all objects not only will dash in vain, but they will fall shivered at its base. ”

“ When the head of a household is taken away ere his work is done, and the wife is left alone to provide for a family of young children, the struggle is necessarily one of hardship and is attended with much of privation and trial. ”

“ There are young people, children of dependent parents and near relatives, who see no way of starting a family of their own, who yet should not be denied the comfort and help of married life. The tragedies of sons and daughters made to drag out a lonely existence and either condemning the one they love to like denial or else giving up the hope of union and seeing their chosen one wedded to another—the sort of tragedy that forms the subject of many novels—is a tragedy to be outgrown. ”

“ If, as is beginning to be understood, it is not for the interest of society that men and women should marry who are so physically diseased, or mentally defective, or morally perverted as to make them injurious members of a family circle, is it not as clear that in many cases such persons when married are not helpful members of any family; and if so, again, is it not clear that there is justification in social need itself for the removal of such persons from the family circle they have already polluted or injured in vital ways, to prevent their doing more harm to family life? ”

“ It may be added, however, that in so far as observations have been made of the results of divorce upon children, that the argument has been substantiated, for apparently the children of separated or divorced parents are much more apt to drift into poverty, vice, or crime, that is, into the unsocialized classes, than children who do not come from such disrupted homes. Assuming, then, without further argument that divorce, or rather the instability of the family, is an evil in modern society, the question arises, how can it be remedied? ”

“ But our country is now in the situation of a private family whose means are absorbed by an expensive sickness, involving the life of its head: just now it is all we can do to keep the family together; all our means are swallowed up by our own domestic wants; we have nothing to give for the encouragement of other families, we must exist ourselves ”

“ It is as an outcome from these emotions that the family exists; it is through these emotions that the most deadly wounds may be inflicted upon her morality and self-respect. In the majority of cases, if through her error, or that of others, the family is a failure, the woman of the family is a failure also. ”

“ RELATION OF THE FAMILY TO THE PROBLEM Normally, the needs of those who are unable to support themselves, whether because of extreme youth or old age or because of physical or mental defects, are provided for by the family. It frequently happens, however, that the family is unable to perform this service. It may be entirely broken up. Children may be left without parents, and the aged without children. The natural supporters of the family may be stricken by disease, or by accident, or by financial misfortune. ”

“ My Connie, you must remember this—it's a cruel law in our social life—that parents care much for their children, but children less for their parents; that the family-bonds become still looser between brothers and sisters; and that those bonds gradually become wholly loosened between uncles and aunts and nephews and nieces and cousins. Family-life may have existed in the days of the old patriarchs, who went into the wilderness with sons and daughters and herds, but it has ceased to exist in our modern days. ”

“ Just as with children who are kept too much at home, overweening family feeling interferes with their progress in society and hampers them through life, so, on the other hand, too much society weakens the parental relation. There should be a certain equilibrium of influence, as in all other departments of culture, to supply the most favourable conditions in the struggle for existence. ”

“ Is it not notorious, that the families of the married often increase beyond what a regard for the young beings coming into the world, or the happiness of those who give them birth, would dictate? In how many instances does the hard-working father, and more especially the mother, 115of a poor family, remain slaves throughout their lives, tugging at the oar of incessant labor, toiling to live, and living but to toil; when if their offspring had been limited to two or three only, they might have enjoyed comfort and comparative affluence! ”

“ In the past few decades, as a host of new pressures have placed fresh strains on the health of family life in our society, a process of restoration has begun. Policymakers at all levels of government, and leaders in religion and the social sciences, are taking a closer look at the cultural and legal forces undermining the well-being of families. ”

“ A daughter-in-law will drown or hang herself to get free from, and also to avenge, the tyranny or cruelty of her husband's mother. These acts lead at once to family feuds, which sometimes end in bloodshed; more often in money compensation; and the known risk of such contingencies operates as a wholesome check upon aggressive treatment of the weak by the strong. ”

“ Is it because, being cut off in a great measure by the nature of their employment from family ties and family pleasures, they feel a malicious delight in all family trials and vexations, and the ever-recurring breezes which disturb the domestic atmosphere? ”

“ The enemies of divorce assert that it is the destroyer of the family. That is not so, for there are no more families to destroy. Frankly, honestly, where is the family of old, since the law of the majority has freed the child, since compulsory education has lessened the moral authority of parents, without perceptibly improving the mass of the people; since in the vast field of higher education boys and girls, through school life, become strangers to the authors of their being and are mainly indebted to the State for their training? ”

“ The life-long invalidism of many women, the childlessness of multitudes, the statistics of home conditions revealed by Children's Courts furnish testimony of like character. The unknown toll of loss of personal aptitude for family life leading to broken homes, or to hopeless struggles against invasions by poverty of the right of common men and women to a home, are proof positive that a change in economic conditions is demanded in the interest of family life. ”

“ Are Marriage and the Family in Danger?—Certain magazinists, croaking preachers, and foreigners who look at American society through telescopes leveled at Utah and Chicago, have sounded a cry of alarm that the marriage institution and the purity of the family are decaying in the United States. ”

“ There is yet another and still more effectual system of strains at work in the existing social unit, and that is the strain between 38parents and children. That has always existed. It is one of our most transparent sentimental pretences that there is any natural subordination of son to father, of daughter to mother. ”

“ To understand the real reason for marital unhappiness and for family instability, to know that such reason inheres primarily in personal character and not in any statute, is to begin work for the real cure and prevention of such unhappiness and instability. The broken family may be a sad necessity, alike for individuals concerned, and for the well-being of society. To prevent that tragedy is a social duty than which none is more pressing or more open to social effort. ”

“ Early widowed, the young mother herself may have to earn her children's bread. Or the husband may become crippled, or an invalid, or he may turn out a drunkard and a spendthrift. In any of these circumstances, the responsibility and the burden of supporting the entire family usually falls upon the wife. ”