„In any case the era of faithfulness and long-lasting relationships is gone.“ (The Story of the Lost Child, E. Ferrante) – Is the traditional family a thing of the past?
Barbara Marten - 28.09.2019 @ 10:52
This is my article on the future of the traditional family =).
Amelie Håkansson - 15.11.2019 @ 11:22
The Future of the Traditional Family
by Amelie Håkansson, VKS Växjö/Sweden
Traditions is something that we all feel a strong connection to. We have our own and we have the ones that everyone is a part of. Traditions bring us closer and it is something we have to bring us together. But the way of living in a traditional family is changing. The traditional family is about to disappear. But why? And what is the “traditional family”?
In my family we are three siblings, me and two brothers, and there is also my mum and dad. We live a life with traditions such as Christmas, Easter, Midsummer and much else, but still I don’t see us as the typical traditional family. We have our traditions, but we are a modern family in our way of living and acting around each other. In school we have just read a book by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called Purple hibiscus (2003) where we get to meet a Catholic family who live in Africa. They live a very conservative life with everything they do connected to the church. When I read this, I thought about how my family isn't religious in the sense that we pray or anything, but we still go to church sometimes on special occasions and celebrate different types of Christian holidays. This attitude towards religion is very common here in Sweden. Still I don’t believe that people mean how we celebrate different holidays when they talk about who are the typical traditional family. I think that the typical family in this case is much as the family in the book. The man is the one who works and is in charge, and the wife stays home with the kids and takes care of the household while the kids are very respectful and blindly obey their parents (the father in this case).
So yes, if that’s what a typical traditional family looks like, which it does in my eyes, then I can understand why some people say that they are “dying out”. We live in a society where women's rights have improved a lot during the last 100 years. We work and share our lives with the men instead of living for the man. We as teenagers are more independent both in good and bad ways, we all live a freer family life and in my opinion that is great. So yes, the traditional family is disappearing but not in the way people think. I believe that the number of families who live like the family in the book is decreasing. We change, and much for the better. The world changes and so do the people. Therefore, the families do to. It is not wrong to live as a traditional family, but it is not wrong to not live like that either.
Hello Amelie!
We really enjoyed reading your text. You have a lot of interesting thoughts that we agree on.
The traditional family is an interesting topic, since people have different thoughts about what a traditional family is. In our eyes, the traditional family is a man, a woman and two kids. We share your thoughts when it comes to the gender roles in the relationship. It is great to hear that people are more open to live according to their own thoughts of what a family is, and that people are no longer stuck in a box with "This is right and this is wrong". The traditional family has changed a lot over the years. A long time ago the traditional family consisted of a man, a woman and a lot of kids. The woman's number one duty was to bear children. As time went by women got more authority and the woman was no longer bound to the household in the same way as before. We believe that the traditional family changed when women got more independent. When our society accepted the fact that a relationship can be between a man and a man and a woman and a woman and so on. The society is becoming more open-minded about the subject of family, which is amazing! People have started to accept everyone.
Thanks again for an interesting read!
Yours truly,
Alma Gréen and Mejja Hammarqvist, Katedralskolan, Växjö
Alma Green - 06.12.2019 @ 10:50
Hello Amelie!
I really enjoyed reading your article. Your text made me think about the meaning of a traditional family.
To be honest I don’t really think that traditional family has a regular meaning, because the world is changing and so are, we and our families. I think when everyone thinks about a traditional family, they imagine a family living by the 20th century’s traditions, but I think it’s wrong. I don’t think that we should define the traditional family by the earlier centuries, because it was a long time ago and we are not living like then. The society is changing, it is becoming more accepting and that gives the traditional family different meaning. So, I think traditional families are not disappearing, they just became something that match the present and not the past. I think it is not wrong, it is absolutely great, we are changing with the world and I think it is normal.
Gréta Juhász, German Nationality School, Budapest
Gréta Juhász - 15.12.2019 @ 20:14