The world that I was born into seventy years ago was much different than the one in which I find myself today.
Back in 1947, adult women were expected to marry and be homemakers and child-rearers. In fact, 70 percent of all adults over age 15 were married back then, and most women did not work outside the home. Today, in contrast, only half of adults are married, and approximately 46 percent of the American workforce is comprised of women. The change on society and family life has been dramatic, like night and day.
In the old days, mothers used to feed and see their children off to school, do household chores, socialize with neighbor Moms during the day, be there when the kids came home from school, supervise the afternoon activities and squabbles of the children, prepare a dinner, organize the family sit-down meal, provide love and affection to the hard-working husband, and see the children cleaned up and sent to bed at an early hour. This was hard work in its own right, work that had a purpose. Weekends were times of socialization for the family and friends, in the neighborhood and at church.
Today’s empowered women have options not foreseen in 1947, like higher education and careers. Fifty-six percent of current college enrollees are women, and most adult women currently have jobs outside the home. There are many times more women in the workplace, working side by side with men, than there were seventy years ago. Not surprisingly, divorce rates are doubled now, and incidents of sexual harassment and sex-based job discrimination are rife. With the good, comes the bad, I guess.
With careers to think about, fewer women are marrying, most are having fewer children, and there are substantially more single-parent households. Working mothers have less time to be traditional Moms, and computers, play stations, and cell phones have increasingly replaced parental nurturing. Hence, we hear about the “latchkey kids”, i.e. unsupervised school-age children, and we read about seriously increasing juvenile crime. Many kids are raising themselves.
One of the attempts to remedy this situation has been the rise in home office jobs, where one or both of the parents can support the family economically and “be there” for children. These jobs were few and far between in 1947; now, approximately 3 percent of U.S. jobs are home-based. With increased technology, and the shift towards a service economy, more and more jobs will likely be outsourced (i.e. away from “headquarters”). This would be a positive step for parenting/socialization purposes.
Neighborhoods, trade unions, churches…these were the building blocks of blue-collar society back in 1947. Lasting friendships, tight-knit bonds (sometimes ethnically-based), a sense of “togetherness” were forged through these person-to-person social mechanisms. In stark contrast, current union membership is down two-thirds from 1947 levels, church attendance has been halved, and the idea of “neighborhood” has totally changed; now, it’s basically a place where your home is, where you retreat to after your day’s toil. Neighborhoods are more homogenized nowadays, many people don’t know their neighbors, and quite a few don’t want to. People have become more isolated, less socialized, in the traditional sense.
In addition, changes in mobility have impacted land use. Expanded automobile ownership and improved public transit have made possible the creation of “suburbia”, or residential areas at the periphery of an urban area, which, in turn, enable commuting workers. Housing is more affordable and congestion is less in suburban communities, but the added commute time, coupled with job time, increases stress and reduces socialization time with family and neighbors.
“White flight” from city centers has had the effect of disconnecting the more affluent suburbanites from the suffering of the disadvantaged who cannot escape inner city ghettoes. So, we have large swaths of America who don’t see or understand poverty, and have no experience with subpar educational opportunities, police brutality, economic discrimination, etc. There are two separate societies which don’t relate to each other very well; hence, built-in conflict.
We now have technological innovations designed to replace in-person socialization with convenient, digital substitutes for the on-the-go modern populace. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, U-tube and others provide for a new type of social networking, albeit anonymous to some extent. Real-time communication in voice and video allows for family and friends to “stay close” even if separated by continents. It’s wonderful, in that way. However, clever use of the technology by unscrupulous or mean-spirited individuals and/or organizations threatens to undermine the veracity and utility of the technology.
There are a lot of fake people trolling the Internet with the intent to do harm. These predators, coupled with the unsupervised ability of children and young adults to “surf the Web”, present a real dilemma to parents and society: how are our innocent, gullible youth to be protected?
Not all Internet trolling is targeting children; adults are subject to a constant barrage of sales marketing, easy money scams, and probes targeting banking information, passwords, and other financial information. In addition, political propaganda is being spread through the social networks by domestic political action committees and foreign governments. Sometimes, innocent social networkers’ computers are hijacked to help spread the propaganda.
Is it no wonder that modern society is confused, alienated, and forlorn? Serial murders and mass shootings didn’t happen 70 years ago, and teen suicides weren’t an epidemic. Civility, i.e. formal politeness or courtesy in behavior or speech, was the norm; today, incivility is the norm in entertainment, politics and Internet discourse. Hate, bullying, shaming, and wholesale dishonesty are endemic on social media, teaching our youth that this is the way people should treat each other.
Even the President of the United States behaves like this. What happened to dignity and example-setting?
Yes, many things are better in modern society: lots of gadgets, instant communication, economic opportunities for women, people live longer, etc. But, we’ve lost some things in the process…important things that shape society and the culture that we’re passing along to our children.
As a society, we need to be more cognizant of the legacy that we’re handing down.