Urban Tribes

[eredien]

This is mostly a post to the people I will be living with at some point within the next year, although others are certainly welcome to read it.

So sometime around late junior highschool, I noticed that more and more people I know had begun to form permanent social groups around friends. This, as anyone who has ever been a teenager will recall, is nothing new. Friends are the center of life, then.
But--and this is a large but--parents and the traditional nuclear family have started becoming less and less so. We've become so alienated from each other that people can make a movie about leaving a child home alone, and that child can go out and take care of themselves for over a month with the poise of an adult, and everyone expects this. (Home Alone, if you're wondering. I just read an article on this the other day, and have been thinking about it).
It's not that they don't love us in their way (one hopes), or that I don't love them in my own. But it's that no one does anything to bridge that awful disconnect, mostly because people aren't expecting that it can be bridged anymore--that stops people from trying. I know I've tried.

My own attempts at bridging this gap have been mildly disastrous by my own standards, and I know that from about the age of fifteen on I was more of a parent-figure to my sister than my parents were--they actually asked me to enforce their punishiments on her (which I refused to do) and to talk to her when there were problems (which I, on occasion, did. She somehow turned out to be a responsible, caring, free person and individual, and the person in my immediate family I like the most. Go figure).

So, we're expected to be our own parents from an early age. We're expected (and we expect) to grow apart from our parents.
People are not meant to live alone (I tried that for a while too. Ick). So what do we do? We form groups of friends-like-family. And we stick with them. What else have we got?

I put this theory forward for the past four years with other friends, with my sister, with adults that worked with kids, with teachers and adult friends I knew and trusted. There was a general agreement that this might be a trend. I thought about writing a book about it.

Well, it's a trend: there's a book. It's not mine, but that just saves me the trouble of trailblazing research and I will merely write the reviews.

It's called Urban Tribes, by Ethan Watters.

Canaday has it, but Rabidfangurl has it out, and I have dibs on it after her, but you can go read it. Or go to the blog. Or the book's website. Or both. They profile different things.

That idea of how we're family and know it? That's what this book is about. I think we all ought to read it. I don't know anyone who wouldn't want to read it, come to think of that.

Isn't this great?

Update: I just found out this guy will be in Boston this year to promote this book. BOSTON Tuesday, October 7 Harvard COOP, 7:00 p.m.

Comments

[khava.livejournal.com]

Well, for a lot of reasons. Let me name some, in no particular order. And, just to make me seem not so extremist, I realize that there are many good reasons to put off childbearing to an older age, and my list is not meant to detract from those reasons but only to highlight the often-overlooked benefits of reproducing early.

1. Fertility in women begins to decline after age 25. It declines sharply after age 30. If I remember correctly, a woman age 31 has fertile moments in her cycle only half as often as a woman age 21. Recent research indicates that male fertility probably declines with age also. (Older males are also increasingly likely to have daughters rather than sons.) Putting off child-bearing could make it impossible to have children.

2. Because of decliningy fertility, older couples often have to resort to fertility treatments, which are expensive, uncomfortable or painful, and sometimes heartwrenchingly unsuccessful. When successful, there is a much higher risk of a multiple pregnancy, which leads to another heartwrenching decision - abort some of the fetuses or risk birth defects.

3. Pregnancies in older women have a higher rate of birth defects anyway, even if they are single births.

4. Single young adults are statistically more likely to do stupid things than married ones. Stupid things include driving really fast, drugs, etc. Marriage and children make people more responsible, which is good for them and for society as a whole.

5. You mention getting to know your grandchildren. But it's also being around to support your children and help them raise their own children. Raising kids is much easier if there are grandparents around for advice, babysitting, sometimes financial help, etc.

[daisho.livejournal.com]

Contrary to that, you have more people marrying late who decide simply not to have kids. This creates an ageing population, possibly with negative growth, that needs to be kept afloat by working-age people from elsewhere. In turn, this allows people from poorer countries to improve their lot by filling that gap. Some countries are moving towards such a position.

Personally, I have no problem with the upward trend in marriage age. Given the current divorce rates, I'd rather people were certain they wanted to be together before setting up home and having kids. The major down-side, particularly in crowded places like my small island, is more people living alone, and thus enormous housing pressure.

Taking on board the original point eredien raised, that pressure could be exacerbated by people wanting to move out of their parents' homes sooner, if their relationship is distant or even strained. In Britain, FWIW, that's not the case -- our young people are actually tending to live with parents far longer than they used to. It's a circular argument, though -- part of the reason for that is the high cost of housing here... <:)