6 ms·

I think if anything, the "shift" is more like an unveiling. There are and have always been extremely problematic issues in many families, it's just that in the

• pmichaud 5y ago
  Yeah I mean, this is the claim / supposition: this isn't new, it's just not hidden anymore. But I think it's worth questioning whether the supposition is true or not, and not in the sense of "can I think of any examples of a dysfunctional family being exposed now that would not have been back then?" because when you're talking about a large population you can find examples of pretty much anything (including that a lot of dysfunction that would not have been tolerated in the past is now flying under the radar). Rather the right question (according to me) is: what are the broad trends of what is actually happening to hundreds of millions of people and what are some of the factors driving the trends?
  • kenjackson 5y ago
    The three biggest things I’ve seen cause estrangement are: 1. Coming out. I suspect that gay people always existed, but just didn’t come out. 2. Interracial relationships. Far less common in the past. And society doesn’t view them as negatively now, which changes the power balance. 3. Parental affairs. I suspect this is the one that always happened, but people just lived with it more. From my anecdotal list the problems are actually new. And except for the third, likely to get better.
    • pseudalopex 5y ago
      4. Abuse. Did you mean they aren't actually new?
      • dktoao 5y ago
        I think they meant that their examples are things that would have been "shoved under the rug" or hidden in the past and are no longer taboo. If you were gay in 1900 you hid it, if you are gay in 2020 you are out (usually). Abuse may consist of a lot of things, but using physical abuse as an example. If you beat your kids (more than just spanking) in 1900 it was still taboo (but maybe less so)
        • vkou 5y ago
          I think your view of the past is colored by 21-st century social norms. In 1900, a husband beating his wife wasn't even illegal in most of the world. [1] Beating children and other animals would barely even register as unusual. [1] It wasn't practically illegal in most of the US, both on the state & federal level until the late 20th century - https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/domestic_abuse_report.pdf https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/domestic_abus...
          • dash2 5y ago
            But beating your kids or wife - again, in the "more than just spanking" sense of physical abuse - was often punished informally. Working-class communities had clear senses of the relevant boundaries (though again those wouldn't be the same as our boundaries necessarily) and institutions like the Charivari to support them. (Google "Rough music".)
      • jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
        Huge agreement on including abuse. It's hard to make this question grounded in data, but here's an anecdote I do think is accurate. My grandfather was a horrific man. He died of complications due to alcoholism before I was born. That said, I've heard a lot about just what he was like, including from people outside the family. I've also seen 16mm film footage of him at family holidays, and it's shockingly clear every single other person in the room is straight up terrified of his potential temper. I'm not exaggerating on this point. I think he must have had something going very, very, wrong inside that skull. My grandmother, who otherwise was a fiercely independent woman, stayed with him despite the abuse. My Dad, hitchhiked to Mexico one summer to escape him, but otherwise still tried to be the good son. Why? Why not just divorce/disown the asshole? The norms against that half a century ago were so much stronger. I do think that's an important shift that's happened recently. There's still plenty of people that stay in a bad situation due to loyalty, but the stigma, in the sense of victim blaming, has definitely eroded within my lifetime. This is a very good thing in my book, even if it looks like a decay of society to some idiots.
    • thebiss 5y ago
      5. Addiction Adultery, abuse, and addiction are not new.
• rayiner 5y ago
  I see it more as con self-involvement than empathy.
  • vineyardmike 5y ago
    The parents probably do as well.
• inlikealamb 5y ago
  I came here to say this. My step-sister's family sticks to the concept of family despite all the women being raped and beaten by their father. They will not address the problem, their mother will not address the problem, and the only way to live in reality is to leave them. They violently attacked her for trying to discuss it on multiple occasions. Their mother continues this even after the death of their father. They tell everyone they know that she's addicted to drugs and won't talk to them because they want to help her. In reality she's more successful than all of them combined, which she attributes largely to seeking mental health counseling and removing herself from their constant drama. We're living through a reckoning for abusive people. In the past people were ostracized for cutting off their families for any reason, especially women... but now there's little reason to put up with this kind of bullshit. These cycles of familial abuse reach back generations and it's about time they're addressed.
  • Akinato 5y ago
    Exactly. Most of my family and I cut ties with a family member as she went batshit insane and started thinking the secret police were after her. Started yelling and screaming at all of the family members that eventually cut contact, usually calling them at odd hours in the night. Nothing we did could convince her to get help, and there's no way to force her into care even though she's called the police constantly to report false crimes. (Such as the janitor breaking into her house and rearranging her furniture). However, she's very cyclical and can act normal ~30% of the time. She's told everyone that we're all drug addicts, or child abusers. Lots of people believe her, and think we all abandoned her. I've had family members call me and reduce me to tears with insults, because of the things she's told them. From what I've seen anecdotally in every single family where the child has cut contact: there's ALWAYS a (good) reason. It almost always boils down to a failure in respecting their children, and treating them with kindness and understanding. Younger generations are growing up with better mental health care and social awareness (due to the pervasive nature of it these days with social networks) than previous generations. We grew up in an era of public PSAs and school videos on bullying and acceptable behaviour. We know what's "right", can recognize abuse, and prefer to associate with those that treat us well.
  • dm319 5y ago
• Y_Y 5y ago
  > the "shift" is more like an unveiling Is there a name for this phenomenon? I think many articles could plausibly be "This Bad Thing is Downright Ubiquitous, But We Only Just Realised!".
  • pjc50 5y ago
    Awakening? Pointing out ubiquitous bad things tends to result in "woke" used as a denouncement.
• mcguire 5y ago
  Had a friend who told the story of her aunt: Her aunt's mother married a man and had several children, including the aunt. Her aunt's mother left her husband as he became an abusive alcoholic and returned to her family. Who proceeded to treat the aunt's mother like a pariah for deserting her husband. The aunt grew up living in a converted chicken coop and being completely ignored by her extended family.
• mensetmanusman 5y ago
  It also might be a reversion to the mean. E.g. One reason ancient Christianity was such a big deal according to historians (and resulted in billions of followers, etc.) was their profoundly different family structure when compared to what was happening in the roman culture and throughout the world. They brought Jewish traditional family structure to the ‘gentiles’ (read: everyone else who wasn’t omitted by blood line). It’s possible that a more secular materialistic society will have completely different relationship structures because there is no objective truth saying ‘hey, respect your elders’
  • whytaka 5y ago
    I wish you would elaborate more. What you're saying is very interesting. What were families like in Roman culture? How did Christianity change that?
  • bckr 5y ago
    I like this perspective. There are so many folds to it, though. First fold: Christendom and its 2,000-year-old siblings/cousins Islam (also Confucianism? Buddhism?) have been around long enough to form a sort of base social reality. Second fold: These 2,000-year-old cultural regimes are crumbling and we are moving into new cultural regimes. Third fold: The crumbling is actually, as you said, a reversion to the mean. Fourth fold part A: This so-called reversion to the mean is itself impossible because cultures from 2,000 years ago were themselves much different from the cultures that came before them, and so on in both time and space dimensions. Fourth fold part B: This so-called reversion to the mean is impossible also because we don't have enough context about ancient cultures to say that we are reinstantiating them, and things have changed so much (technology, residual effects of the most recent cultural regimes) that, even if we had enough information about the ancient cultures, there's no way we're really doing what they were doing.
    • StopTheWorld 5y ago
      In Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, he traces shifts in culture and family to shifts in the forces of production, and makes a pretty convincing argument. Some have followed on this work. The modern version would be: 50,000 years ago - behavioral modernity. The whole world a primitive communist society of hunter-gatherer bands. Remaining culture is cave paintings and Venus figurines. 10,000 years ago - agricultural revolution. The rise of slave states, polytheistic religions, emperors and high priests with many wives and concubines. 2,000 years ago - the end of the Roman slave latifundias and rise of feudalism. Kings and peasants. The beginning of the Roman Catholic church. Turn of the 16th century - the beginnings of modern capitalism, bourgeois republics, Protestantism, the rise of the city and universities. Changes in the forces of production affect the relations of production and culture (hegemony), in this idea. The idea in Engels crowd was the beginning of the next system was the 1871 Paris commune. If one were looking for modern changes in production, I would guess programming and media would be two candidates for being at the vanguard of production change. Stephen King and John Carmack can make a lot of money just going into a room, whipping something up, and sending it out to the masses to see millions rolling back in. That's not like a Detroit factory 75 years ago, and is less so a farmer's field 750 years ago. And those changes in production would affect society, the culture. In that case it would be San Francisco, and/or Shenzhen culture at the vanguard. Also media creation, so that coming out of LA, Mumbai etc.