We all know the romanticized image of the All-American family: two parents with two kids, a dog and a minivan behind a white picket fence, mom cooking dinner when dad returns home from a day at the office, and the kids playing baseball in the front yard.
This image of the family is all but, gone and nostalgia of the typical 1950s family faded. Americans no longer marry as young, more mothers are in the workforce and non-traditional families are the new normal.
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson condemns these non-traditional types of families, suggesting not all families have the same value, in a Sirius XM radio interview last Wednesday.
In his interview, Carson disparaged non-nuclear families by arguing Americans need to stop paying attention to the “PC police.” Like many of his campaign trail comments, Carson has again put his foot in his mouth and refuses to back down from his statement.
“Let’s stop pretending everything is of equal value,” Carson said.
He continues by arguing some “lifestyles” are more valuable than others, claiming “traditional, intact families” are the only ones that can produce stable members of society.
Society no longer vilifies single parent households and divorce. These days, it’s rarer to come from a nuclear family. The institution of marriage changed with the times: Americans are delaying marriage or choosing not to marry at all, and same-sex marriage is legal in all states. Families can be made up of step-parents, teen parents, grandparents or foster parents, making the notion of a traditional family highly idealistic and impractical.
While there are studies showing a modest advantage of having a traditional, two-parent household, less than half of kids under 18 actually have this advantage. Pew Research Center conducted a study finding 46 percent of children in the United States come from two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. Non-traditional families are fast becoming the new traditional families, and according to Carson, non-traditional families will bring about the death of moral society.
Carson says we should ignore the PC police, but this has nothing to do with political correctness. There are some “traditional” two-parent households who procreate when they don’t have the means or the desire to raise children. Abusive two-parent households by no means foster proper growth and development for a child.
If two homosexuals adopt a child, at least it is because they both are willing and able to care for the child. Several studies, such as the one conducted at Boston University by Benjamin Siegel of the American Academy of Pediatrics, show LGBT families are just as likely to produce a loving and supportive family environment as families.
“Many studies have demonstrated that children’s well-being is much more by their relationships with their parents, their parents’ sense of competence and security, and the presence of social and economic support for the family than by the gender or the sexual orientation of their parents,” Siegel wrote with coauthor Ellen Perrin.
Maybe traditional family values evolved, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We cannot expect families to operate the same way they did before the 1950s, when divorce was social suicide.
We can’t idealize the past. Arguing for every family to be the picture-perfect image in our heads isn’t realistic. In 1960, 5 percent of all births were to unmarried mothers. By 2014, the percentage of births to unmarried mothers has risen to 41 percent.
Carson is acting as if we can go back to a time where everyone stayed married, but was that any better? Many of those couples are now divorced was considered because they married too early or weren’t compatible.
He also claims Americans have lost their values and that we must find a way to reinstill them. However, Americans haven’t lost their values — they have just evolved to represent different lifestyles.
While traditional families can foster a loving and supportive environment to raise children, there is no reason these new types of families cannot do the same. The structure of the family is not nearly as important as the quality of the relationships between members of the family.
The best environment to raise a child in is where the child is loved and supported unconditionally — it has nothing to do with the makeup of the family.
Conservatives need to lose the unrealistic mentality thatwoman who gives birth to have a ring on her finger and stay married forever. It simply won’t happen. Uncompromising conservative values need to change with the times and recognize that the past isn’t as picture-perfect as they think.
The new normal isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To keep the world spinning, it takes all kinds of kinds.
Mariah Manuel is a 22-year-old mass communication senior from Lake Charles, Louisiana. You can reach her on Twitter @mariah_manuel.