For more than a century, clinical investigators have focused on early life as a source of adult psychopathology. Although the hypothesized mechanisms have evolved, a central notion remains: early life is a period of unique sensitivity during which experience confers enduring effects.
Its a fragile time, something that we protect through our responsibility in how we create children -- and right now marriage is the only institution devoted directly to creating children with equity and mutual responsibility and respect. And if marriage can't do that because that statement (by virtue of the biology of reproduction) is heteronormative (the pejorative) then what can?
I was just reading a piece by Eve Tushnet on novels written in the college setting and being 'broken' in college.
ReplyDelete"In The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Andrew Solomon argues that the decay of traditional institutions has contributed to the rise of depression. Although he notes (and I agree with him), "I love this century," he goes on to write:
The climbing rates of depression are without question the consequence of modernity. The pace of life, the technological chaos of it, the alienation of people from one another, the breakdown of traditional family structures, the loneliness that is endemic, the failure of systems of belief (religious, moral, political, social -- anything that seemed once to give meaning and direction to life) have been catastrophic.
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As one commenter on the piece mentions, college doesn't break you, you were probably already broken before you came.
Some time ago I wrote about high school college, in which I observed that everyone talked about their parents' relationship.
"While in high school and college, my peers always talked about their parents and their relationship with each other. Even though it was never considered a factor in success and happiness, we talked about gender, incomes, and race, even sexual orientation but never how marriage affected society in formal terms. Informally though I could tell you the lives of dozens of parents, because we spoke so much of them.
We talked about how well they got along with each other, if they fought, if they were divorced, remarried, abandoned us, and even if they smoked pot. Parents were important to us, even though educators, marketers, and counter sub-cultures wanted us to ignore what they represented to us."
"the loneliness that is endemic"
ReplyDeleteI think that is the key phrase right there. Families, religion, traditions, etc., they all give us a sense of who we are, that we belong, and where. I think many people are walking around with gaping holes in their hearts, because they are not whole, and much of that loss of wholeness is a direct result of the breakdown of families, the rejection of religion, and a failing government's attempt to replace home and family w/ expensive programs, which rob out wallets while leaving our society emotionally bankrupt. Nothing can take the place, in a family, of a loving, married, mom and dad, and their offspring, working together, worshipping together, making family traditions together, and passing along their family values to the next generation.