Family 3052

Family 3052

That which constitutes a family will certainly be different 1,000 years from now. The concept of children as a gift from God or the other god or the other god has been diminishing over the past century after receiving an unprecedented rise in the first place. This gift concept is also Western Romantic notion born of the idea that one must keep the babe no matter how difficult that might be. For a very short few decades, Americans were ready willing and able to fund the perpetual care of deformed infants and search for a cure to the ravages of such disease as polio, Muscular Dystrophy, Down Syndrome, Spina Bifida, Cystic Fibrosis and many other ailments. Some parents kept their guilt at home while others sequestered their defective children in rural homes for the infirm.

Internationally, male children are preferred as the eldest due to the need for that child to become the man who will eventually provide for the parents in their declining years.  If you look at the World Fact Book that is compiled and published by the CIA, and add the abortion rates by country to the infanticide rates, you get a near constant. That is to say poor and developing countries are more apt to kill a child than abort a fetus. In more technologically advanced countries, defects can be easily determined before the birth. Gender can be determined early on. And in wealthy countries and countries where male children need to be first for economic reasons, female infanticide is far more common. This fact can be seen in the same tables when you look at the gender split at early ages.

Children have always been economic labor units around the world for at least the first two millennia of recorded human history. It was only in the 1920s that America banned child labor for children under 16 years. They stopped businesses from exploiting child labor but exempted the family farms where children were and remained a major source of cheap labor.

The whole system of family farming harkens back to pioneers who were a man and his wife who ventured west into the plains to carve out a home for themselves and raise a family. The family ostensibly was the future labor for plowing the fields, slopping the hogs, feeding the chickens, etc. As Farmer Brown aged he and his equally aging misses needed someone to take over all that hard fought labor and keep the farm in the family.

As the need to feed billions of people overtook the feeding of tens of thousands, the farms became more and more mechanized. Even the short lived attempts at local food had to give way to the massive factory farms. Family units for family businesses became a quaint aspect of the distant past.

The idea of passing a family business on to a next generation was already failing in the latter part of the 20th Century when the children could barely keep up the business activity to pay off the parents' debts. Annually, tens of thousands of family businesses are abandoned in favor of going one's own way.  The days of Farmer Brown becoming Farmer Brown & Son was already mostly gone by the start of the 21st Century.

Through 1,000 years of nearly no one owning and operating a family business, the whole concept of a family unit evaporated. The idea of working harder and longer to reach a better economic level faded into the past as it became increasingly more difficult to accomplish.

Child labor was not required much in the same way the parents' labor was superfluous. Portable electronic devices maintained the attention of children as they grew. They ate when and what the messages said to eat. They wore the clothes that the suppliers made and made available to the public. With no need to pass along wealth, special information or heritage, the entire concept of the nuclear family became a thing of the past.

The vast majority of children are the mere results of the sex act for most of human history. In some cultures the birth of a child or two served to provide future economic security. With the lack for that need providing for children lost its special status and they were raised by the devices and messages drilled into their formative minds. A childhood came to be consisting of a period of sleep followed by a period of visual and auditory stimulation that involved hand-eye coordination at ever increasing rapidity. Between these two periods was the time to consume food.

The western romanticism of providing a good childhood became lost in the lack of need for anyone to plan to have children and attempt to raise them as being special to the parents and their siblings.