Interesting question, good to see it on the forums.
Oh yeah, I feel the need to clarify something. Nichodemus comes from Singapore, which, for our purposes, should be viewed as culturally Chinese. This is particularly important because:
traditional as in Oriental sense. Like a three generation family.
Is not a common arrangement in the US etc.
For what it's worth, I'm going to acknowledge that there is significant tension between egalitarianism, labour and demographics. A trend to career women means a trend away from kids, which means an ageing population which is fast running out of young labour to keep the system running. Is a recourse to traditional family units the answer to this?
Yep, as our governent has already been lamenting our lack of traditional values resulting in lesser nuclear familes, leading to drop in the fertility rate. ( Main reason, importan!)
Read about post modern families, interesting article here.
Since I quoted the source, this is a disturbing quote from it for me :
In the United States, concerns have been expressed about children raised in impoverished single-parent households by young mothers who are still children themselves. According to Elkind (1981), there also are problems with post-modern children of middle-class families as permeable families "hurry" their children to take on the physical, social, and psychological trappings of adulthood before they are prepared to deal with them. Permeable families tend to thrust children and teenagers forward to deal with realities of the outside world at ever-earlier ages, perceiving them as competent to deal with the steady diet of overt violence, sexuality, substance abuse, and environmental degradation that they view on television. Such abuses in the United States and Europe often translate into worse abuses in poor neighbourhoods of large third world cities, where unsupervised children of all ages are lured, together with adults, into watching sexually explicit "adult videos" for the equivalent of a few pennies (Dr. Tade Akin Aina 1992, personal communication). Countries such as the United States, as well as places in the developing world that have departed most widely from institutional family values, appear to be particularly vulnerable to such abuses in the post-modern era. Both Elkind (1981) and Spock and Rothenberg (1992) deplore the tendency of parents to rush children into adult roles.
This is a very interesting topic to me as well, because I am of Chinese heritage living in an atypical family unit for my culture (in my case, a nuclear family). At the same time though, I'm exposed to both types of family units. When I go to China, I live in an extended family, and I am capable of embracing this lifestyle. When I'm back in California, I'm in a nuclear family, and that's fine also. Which do I like best? It's a question that I honestly can't answer.
