Recently Statista made an infographic out of a portion of this recent PEW survey on the future of the family. I have posted it, and my analysis of the PEW data in tabular form on my LAKE COUNTY OHIO WEAL site:
Here is my table of the basic findings which I think is much better than the Statista graphic because it summarizes the Somewhat and Not too/Not at all categories.
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Percent saying each of the following is important in order to live a fulfilling life |
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|
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Extremely, Very |
Somewhat |
Not too/Not at all |
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Having a Job or career that they enjoy |
71 |
25 |
4 |
|
Having close friends |
61 |
29 |
10 |
|
Having children |
26 |
33 |
42 |
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Having a lot of money |
24 |
49 |
27 |
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Being married |
23 |
33 |
44 |
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Share of respondents who did not offer an answer is not shown |
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For myself I would agree that "having a job or career that I enjoy" and "having close friends" are both extremely important. I would include my parents as life-long close friends.
Being neither married nor having children I would also agree that they are not too important. However I think there is a missing category that I think is extremely important "growing up in a healthy nurturing family"
"Having a lot of money" depends upon what that means. I think of myself as having "sufficient money" i.e. I own my own home and have a decent retirement. It has been easy to live within my salary, retirement plan, and savings. I would rate "sufficient money" as being very important. However, if having a lot of money means dining out much of the time, taking vacations around the world, having a larger home than I need in a wealthier neighborhood, buying a new car every 3-5 years rather than every 10 years, I would say that is not at all important.
The "Not too/Not at all" statistics on "having children" and "being married" tells me that the future of the family is bleak. Evidently there are a lot of married people out there with children who don't think either has contributed much to living a fulfilling life!!!
I'd say having a sense of purpose and being relatively mobile and pain-free trumps all of these.
ReplyDeleteAnd having a lot of money is way more important to happiness (or at least security and dignity) than most people will admit.
I'm surprised that having children doesn't score better. I believe there is a 70/30 split in the US among adults having children/not having children.
ReplyDeleteMy initial thought is the reality of single parenthood, combined with the prevalence of divorce, complicate people's feelings/attitudes about having children.
Most of my kids are out of the house now, but not for many years, so being the parent of adult children is a relatively new phenomenon for me. I don't think it's changed my attitude about my children, but I can see that a parent's feelings toward adult children may shift over time, e.g. if the child doesn't work at maintaining the relationship with the parent, of if the child's life choices disappoint the parent, or if the child isn't there for an elderly parent during the parent's time of need.
In my preaching, I generally assume that parents in our parish are thrilled to be parents and adore their children. This survey is making me question those assumptions! Or maybe our parish is a bit of a bubble, and parental attitudes there don't mirror those of society at large.
ReplyDeleteThe survey raises way more questions than answers. For instance, I think you can love your kids to pieces and still find them a source of cradle (theirs) to grave (yours) anxiety because they do stupid things, or because they're going to inherit a really crappy world.
DeleteFWIW, I would have chosen Extremely/Very, both for having children and being married. I consider both to be vocations. I'm not trying to preen in saying this; I just think that these roles are truly what God intended for me.
ReplyDeleteJim I think you are right about marriage and children being a vocation. I feel that those were my vocation too. Not everyone has the same vocation. I had two aunts who never married. One was a high school music teacher, the other was a counselor at a large university. Both enjoyed their occupations, and were good at them. Though both had boyfriends, I don't think they wanted to get married. I think we can value marriage and children without selling the vocation to the single life short.
DeleteFamilies--parents, sibs, spouses, kids--are a crap shoot, and the joys of "settling down and raising a family" are oversold. Given divorce rates, this only works out for about 50 percent of people who try it. Seeing it as a sacred calling certainly helps people through times they want to bean their nearest and dearest.
ReplyDeleteAlso pretty well established that men live longer if they're married, women live longer if they're single. Every married woman I know married longer than 10 years is happy to tell you why.
I will say that my never-married friends are very happy people--interesting conversationalists, empathetic, and generous. They also have far fewer financial demands and are much more economically set.
I think we all have a tendency to think that if we're happy, this is what God intended for us. This line of reasoning may not be foolproof.
In the Byzantine ritual tradition shared by Catholics and Orthodox, the couple are crowned, i.e. crowns are held above their heads, as a sign of martyrdom, dying to self-hood in order to live together in Christ. Probably not the type of fulfillment that any of the respondents were thinking about. Maybe much more realistic than many romantic delusions of marriage and child raising.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Catholic parishes tend to support rosy images of marriage. We talk about priests and religious giving up marriage as if their lives were ones of martyrdom.
ReplyDeleteYet, Andrew Greeley maintained that Catholic priests are some of the happiest people in the world. Women religious live such long healthy lives that they have been the objects of study.
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ReplyDeleteThese answers might be different if we lived in a less individualist, less capitalistic society would make the categories less mutually exclusive. There are forced tradeoffs between successful career and family life. Corporations don’t care about your family. At best, they consider it a hobby like golf, something you do on your own time which they would like to keep at a minimum. Perhaps the career category is prioritized because being fulfilled in your work is something most people actually don’t have.
ReplyDeleteThree women at the outfit I was working for when The Boy was born had babies the same year. The CEO blamed us for health care premium rises.
DeleteSnide comments about "all these gals getting knocked up and waddling around" were made by the would-be playboys in the sales team.
I may have said something like, "What, Kevin, too broke to afford your Viagra this month?" before waddling away.
Not my finest moment, but certainly very satisfying.
Hypercapitalism doesn’t seem to incentivize having babies. I think of Korea and Japan with their low birth rates. Not sure what Italy’s problem is. If capitalism is all there is, then let’s keep dancing.
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