FAMILY VALUES

Family Values

Family Values

Introduction

Multiple definitions of family exist depending on the theoretical orientation of which it is being explained. Interactionist defines family in terms of interacting personalities with emphasis on the family's transactional characteristics (Popenoe 2001). Family is defined according to the general systems theory as a small open social system composed of a set of highly interdependent parts and affected by both its internal structure and external environment. Redefinition of the family occurs with succeeding generations

Discussion

The Communitarian movement, seeks to bring moral thinking back into our political and social worlds without becoming Puritanical. The Communitarian Network has a platform that expresses the need for balancing civil rights with civil responsibilities. The family is generally perceived as two or more persons who are joined together by bonds of sharing and emotional closeness and who identify themselves as being part of the family (Hochschild 2002). This is the most conclusive definition of family which includes a variety of families including those outside the legal system, not related by blood, marriage, or adoption and not restricted to household membership. This definition includes the extended family living in two or more households, cohabiting couples, childless families, gay and lesbian families, and single-parent and nuclear families.

The best place to start is where each novel generation acquires its moral anchoring: at home, in the family. We must insist once more that bringing children into the world entails a moral responsibility to provide, not only material necessities, but also moral education and character formation.

Moral education is not a task that can be hand over to baby sitters, or even professional child-care centers. It requires close bonding of the kind that characteristically is formed only with parents, if it is formed at all.

Fathers and mothers, consumed by "making it" and consumerism, or preoccupied with individual advancement, who come home too late and too tired to attend to the needs of their children, cannot discharge their most elementary duty to their children and their fellow citizens.

The recognition of homosexual marriage by the state -- though inoffensive to many, and an article of faith among most libertarians and liberals -- is another step down [a slippery] slope. When the state, through its power to distinguish marriage, bestows equal benefits on homosexual marriage, it will next bestow equal benefits on other domestic arrangements that fall short of traditional, heterosexual marriage. And that surely will weaken heterosexual marriage, which is the axis around which the family revolves. The state will be saying, in effect, "Anything goes. Do your thing. The courts, the welfare system, and the taxpayer -- above all -- will pick up the pieces." And so it will go....

Faced with a choice between libertarian shibboleth and libertarian substance, I have chosen substance. I now say: Ban homosexual marriage and avoid another step down the slippery slope toward incivility and bigger government.

According to anne marie''s concept of contemporary family the concept of "family values" is rooted in each entity culture thus making the values different for different ...