Season 3 Podcast 117 The Disappearing Family

The Disappearing Family.Of the Ten Commandments, one is noted for “being a commandment with a promise.” It is commandment Six “Honour thy father and thy mother; that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” (Exodus 20:12)The easiest thing to find is data on marriage and divorce. The hardest thing to find is accurate data on marriage and divorce. I don’t mean that the surveys are fraudulent or manipulated.  It is simply that there are so many variables it is virtually impossible to be 100 percent accurate. Fifty percent divorce rate is the number that always seems to emerge, but that may merely be a convenient opinion.  In 2002 The National Center for Health Statistics released the following data.By age 30, three-quarters of women in the U.S. have been married and about half have cohabited outside of marriage, according to a comprehensive new report on cohabitation, marriage, divorce, and remarriage released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).NCHS also found the followingAmong the findings in the report: unmarried cohabitations overall are less stable than marriages. The probability of a first marriage ending in separation or divorce within 5 years is 20 percent, but the probability of a premarital cohabitation breaking up within 5 years is 49 percent. After 10 years, the probability of a first marriage ending is 33 percent, compared with 62 percent for cohabitations.That should not come as a very big surprise. Neither should the following data. The Encyclopedia of Children’s Health listed the following trends of children from divorced families.·               Lower education·               Higher teen pregnancy·               More abuse of drugs and alcohol·               More high-risk sexual behavior·               More likely to join a gang·               Twice as likely to go to jail·               Four times as likely to need help for emotional and behavioral problems·               More likely to participate in violent crime·               More likely to commit suicide·               Twice as likely to get divorced in adulthoodToday we seem to honor rebellion, dissent, dysfunctional families, breaking family ties, destroying traditions, breaking off from family values, dishonoring parents, devaluing marriage, making the father unnecessary, and even making marriage unnecessary. If moving smoothly from Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best to Meet the Bundys and Modern Family are not wakeup calls, what is?What does the Lord mean when he said, “Honour thy father and thy mother; that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”  It is an intriguing promise.  Behind the chilling promise is its antithesis. “If you do not honor thy father and thy mother; then they days may be short upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”  The message is clear. The longevity of nations depends on a strong family foundation. This may come as a surprise, but a nation does not have a foundation.  Only a family has a foundation. It is in the family not in the nation where values are taught.