The Cynic Express(ed) 1.13: On Family Values

     The four year old with the deep brown, Precious Moment (tm) eyes, blinked at me as I explained the spelling of a word. My niece Starr, with two r's like the Green Bay Packer quarterback she was named after, wrote SIMBA in rigid capitals on a little address label and applied it to her omnipresent stuffed toy. Littered about were the scraps where she had showed me what she could write, namely cat, dog, god, and Starr. We had spoken a little about books, once she had overcome her initial shyness, and she announced affectionately, "You're my daddy."

     Later that afternoon, after several shrieking laps around the dining room table with a friend of mine, she collapsed breathlessly against him and supplanted me with the declaration that he was her Daddy now.

     Starr's mother, my sister-in-law now, had never married Starr's father, and the break-up of whatever family shelter that union had provided was gone. My sister-in-law stopped in St. Louis on her way to Virginia to introduce Starr to my brother, her new father, and something called a family.

     I guess what bothers me most about the whole situation is the easy with which Starr transfers the title, the affection, and perhaps all the vestments that she can ordain from one male figure to the next. That her conception of "Daddy" is an adult male who pays her some attention and plays with her a bit. Certainly things a daddy does, but not everything.

     Behind the preening politicians' rhetoric about Family Values and the return of Kansas-style homespun morality lies the true importance of the family unit, whether nuclear (which means a mother and father and a couple of children for those of you uninitiated in the ways of sociology) or extended. Having both parents in a child's upbringing gives the child a proper sense of adults' roles in society and how they complement one another. Kids missing one or the other lack a certain rooting in a lot of cases, and growing up is a little harder.

     The breakdown of the family unit adversely affects our society. With the traditional family framework gone, a lot of child rearing is left to the child. Without the tugs of male and female elders, confusion can result, emotionally (how should I become happy?), morally (what is the right way to relate to the opposite sex?), and other conundrums. Is it any surprise that adolescence stretches as this angst remains unresolved?

     See how easily one can slip into abstractions, rhetoric, and bland broad strokes of self-righteousness? When one does, as some people, myself included, often do, one tends to forget who loses when that structure breaks down, when the support network is cut off. The children. They are the ones family values protect, not incumbents.