Some trends of the worlds today are: premarital sex, delaying
marriage, out-of-wedlock births, living alone, cohabitation, birthrate
decreasing, household size decreasing, more employed mothers, and increase in
divorce. Can you point out one that correlates with another or one that starts
a domino effect? Let’s talk about each individually.
Premarital sex tends to related to cohabitation. Some people
might say that if you’re giving the milk for free, what’s the sense in buying
the cow? A lot of people see it as an unnecessary step if they are already
living together. Studies show that couples who have sex before marriage are
more likely to get a divorce. I don’t know if they’re thinking “I’ve had better”
or what but that’s just what statistics say.
Premarital sex is also related to illegitimate births. If you’re
unmarried, have sex, and get pregnant, it’s likely that you will bear an illegitimate
child. Then, to care for this child a mother must get a job and thus there is
one more employed mother in the world.
Also, premarital sex and cohabitation have something to do
with delaying marriage. More and more people want to do a “trial run” of what
marriage will be like when they move in together. Because of the delay in
marriage people have started their careers and create goals of getting promoted
before raising children and by the time they are to that point they’ve missed
the prime time to conceive. This decreases birthrate as well as household size
in one blow.
Can you think of any other correlations I haven’t addressed?
Comment and tell me which ones I’ve missed.
So let’s define some things here:
Population is the total number of human beings in whatever
area you are finding the population of.
Birthrate is the number of births per thousand people and
this is decreasing greatly.
Fertility rate is how many children a woman has within her
life. That doesn’t mean how many of her children have grown to adulthood but
how many she has birthed. Studies show that access to soap and clean water
greatly increases the number of children who will grow to adulthood.
So, if you haven’t figured out by the various terms I just
defined, the number of children to adopt is going down with every passing year.
Now, a little backstory for me, when I was going through treatment for brain cancer
they had to radiate all my female plumbing because the cancer had spread to my
spine. That left me very unlikely to ever conceive or bear children. Whenever I
bring this up people always, without fail, say “you can always adopt.” I knew
the waiting list for adoption was long but I didn’t know that eight or nine years on that wait list was the norm! And
it seemed to be getting longer all the time. So needless to say, after that day
in class, I kind of felt like a gutted pumpkin. I had just had a rug ripped out
from under me. I was now hearing that the thing I was counting on for me to
ever have children was being ripped away too. I know that seems melodramatic
but that’s how I felt.
Then our teacher started talking about foster care and how
there are 500,000 children within America every
year. I’d always kind of shied away from foster care because I’m afraid of
becoming attached to a child then having him taken away from me. I also fear
having a child placed in my care who is older and knows that I’m a “temporary
parent” until their parent shapes up or they get moved somewhere else. You
always hear the stories of children moving from one home to another when they
are in foster care. I know that’s not every case but those are my fears.
The last class I went to we talked about various kinds of theories.
A theory tries to explain phenomena.
Systems theory is looking at the whole system and not just
pieces. For example, family is a system and is a whole, not just pieces.
Conflict theory is that some systems have more power than
others. Like, certain classes are wealthier than others. Or like faculty has
more say over how the school is run than the students do. Conflict is inherent,
it’s going to happen no matter what. However, conflict isn’t always argument,
it’s just decisions that must be made that both parties don’t agree on
initially.
Exchange theory is that we want to get at least as much as we give. This explains why I broke up with my
boyfriend; I was putting an immense amount into our relationship and was
getting bubkis back and believed I deserved something back.
Symbolic Interaction Theory is that everyone interprets
various actions or “symbols’ differently. Going back to that relationship, I
was giving him all these different symbols of what I interpreted as hints of
what I wanted in return and he might of seen it as “I’m doing all right if she
still invests all this.” We must share the things we know, not just what we
think, feel, and speculate about it.
Well that’s all for this week kids. Come back next week for
Episode 3!
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