Marriage and a traditional family are still the bedrocks of a stable society

In a few days, a new year will be upon us. And after the disaster of 2020, and the nearly-as-bad 2021, we can all hope for a much better 2022.

We might wish for a return to normal, but that is a bit too optimistic. Maybe we can be satisfied with several steps toward normal.

There is a long list of the things that need to be rolled back to where they used to be. We have seen how crime, destruction and death have risen since foolish ideas like defunding or reimagining the police were put into place in some cities.

Another mistake is destroying our history instead of learning about it and learning from it. And, the so-called cancel culture that attacks people with the goal to destroy them for no better reason than that they don’t agree with them about something is irrational.

But a very important way to fight off these destructive ideas is to rebuild our culture through an emphasis on marriage and the traditional family, as well as how we educate our children. Much of the damage to our culture can be traced to these areas.

The devolution of the family is something that started years before the pandemic came along, and has continued to devolve during it. It is something that desperately needs to be reborn.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to have been brought up in one of those traditional families understand just how important they were, and are.

Marriage and the traditional family are bedrocks of a stable society, and were a critical part of what made America the world-leading nation it became. Today, we see that the traditional family and its stable rules of the road have fallen by the way-side, and that has had a serious negative impact on our culture and our lives.

In 1960, 73 percent of children lived in a two-parent household with parents in their first marriage, another 14 percent lived with two parents who had remarried, and only 9 percent lived in a single-parent home, a Pew Research Center study tells us.

Through the years, those statistics showing 87 percent of children living in a two-parent home have taken a beating. In 2014, only 46 percent of children lived in a two-parent, first-marriage household, 15 percent were in a two-parent re-married family, and 26 percent were in a single-parent household. Things have not improved over the last seven years.

In the 60s, Pew’s study said, “babies typically arrived within a marriage, today fully four-in-ten births occur to women who are single or living with a non-marital partner.” And then there are the millions of babies who were conceived, but never born because of abortion.

The traditional family put children in a stable setting in which most learned valuable life lessons. That stability occurs far less today. That does not mean that today’s parents do not love and take good care of their children. It simply means that the benefits of the traditional family are available to fewer children today.

And whatever the situation is for children and their parents, education from elementary grades through high school and college have changed, too. And not for the better.

In many elementary and secondary schools, tried and true methods of learning how to read, write and do arithmetic have been done away with. Some schools have done away with GPAs and class rankings. And some colleges have abandoned ACT and SAT requirements to enter their institutions. 

Many schools today underhandedly push Critical Race Theory on their students, teaching them that, depending upon their skin color, they are either an oppressor or are oppressed. 

Some advocate the idea that math, as traditionally taught, is racist. And, believe it or not, some are trying to encourage children suffering from gender dysphoria to go through the dangerous process of changing genders before they are even old enough to consider such decisions. 

Some schools are trying to impose equality of outcomes on students — referred to as “equity” — instead of encouraging them to earn rewards through hard work. These efforts to treat everyone as if they are the same, as if everyone has the same level of skills in all areas, are destroying the idea of excellence. 

If everyone is assumed to have the same abilities, if everyone’s’ strengths and weaknesses are hidden under a blanket of equity, people will never fully develop their strengths. How will our country be able to reach the high levels of performance needed to measure up to the rest of the world if, while other nations focus on achieving excellence, we focus on preventing it?

If we cannot achieve our highest possible level of performance, aggressive nations with negative intentions — like China, Russia and Iran — will gain control of the world, and we will be at their mercy.

America must refocus its attention on being the best it can be, which is what made it the best in the world. 

By refocusing on those fundamental concepts that provide stability, like marriage and family, and an education system that is focused on helping every student achieve to their highest levels, we can begin to recover what has been lost.