A recent Time magazine article by Laura L. Carstenson might be of interest to alienated parents and grandparents. It is now obvious to sociologists and psychologists, said Carstenson, that today’s baby boomers “are less likely to participate in community or religious organizations than were their counterparts 20 years ago. They are less likely to be married. They talk with their neighbors less frequently. And it doesn’t stop with participation in communities and neighborhoods: boomers report fewer meaningful interactions with their spouses and partners than did previous generations, and they report weaker ties to family and friends.”
What we’re experiencing, in other words, is a cultural phenomenon in which baby boomers, the generation of late-middle-aged adults who were born in the aftermath of World War Two, are less integrally tied to their parents and society than those of us who were born before the great war. This can be read as a weakening of all societal ties, or perhaps even a complete refusal of that particular generation of people to be intimately related to and responsible for fellow human beings.
Suppose this is a trend, and that the children of baby boomers, those born after 1970, are even less inclined to be obligated to or related to the generations that went before them.
While this possibility is disconcerting to imagine, it may help to explain why many of our alienated children have renounced all responsibility to and for the parents who brought them into the world and spent years nurturing them. Our very culture appears to be shifting into a new mode, one in which some of our children now disown all relationships to us and can casually reject us without feeling any sense of regret or failure. They simply refuse to accept any moral responsibility toward those who gave them life and sheltered them through their early years, as if their relationship to those forebears is a mere accident of time and matter which they can disregard with full impunity. They have forsaken all the old guidelines about love and family and responsibility, leaving them free to live as they please, without any obligation to those who cared and sacrificed so much for them.
It’s a frightening thought, but what we are witnessing is, in some measure at least, the breakdown of society as we have always known and understood it, where people honored their fathers and mothers and continued all their lives to acknowledge an indebtedness to them.
What, if any, are the conclusions we can draw from this enormous change in the younger generations’ sense of meaningful ties to the society that produced them?
For one thing, our own disrespectful sons and daughters are not at all unique in their rejection of us; they are merely doing what an increasing number of sons and daughters are now doing when they separate from their original families with the intention of becoming fully independent of them.
Unless something happens to reverse this tendency, the dissolution of the family will only worsen as time goes by.
By the end of the present century, all human existence on this planet will be vastly different from the way it has always been in the past. We may well be entering a historical phase in which family relationships as we have known them will be completely abandoned in favor of a rootless, unrelated society in which everybody is independent of everybody else, even parents, children, and siblings.
All I can say about this is God help us, for we are on the path to the eventual and complete destruction of the very feelings and understandings which from the dawn of time have made human life beautiful and meaningful.
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