TruthBook Religious News Blog

Joel Kotkin, 01.20.09, 12:01 AM EST
A model of proper parenting and spirituality for the next generation.

The new president's focus on family reflects an increasing emphasis among African-American leaders on the importance of parental values. Many prominent black activists initially scorned Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report linking poverty among African-Americans to the decline of intact family units. But today, when roughly half of all black children live with single mothers, it is widely accepted that strong families represent the most effective way to reduce "the racial gap" in incomes.

Surveys reveal that people born between 1968 and 1979 place a considerably higher value on family, and a lower value on work, than their baby-boomer counterparts. Women in the former age cohort are actually having more children than their predecessors and, particularly among the college-educated, they appear to be working somewhat less.

And this family-friendly shift is likely to continue throughout the next wave of child-rearers. As Morley Winograd and Michael Hais suggest in their book, Millennial Makeover, the Millennial generation, born after 1983 and twice as numerous as Generation X, also enthusiastically embraces the notion of a strong family.

Indeed, three-fourths of 13- to 24-year-olds, according to one 2007 survey, consider time spent with family the most important factor in their own happiness, rating it even higher than time spent with friends or a significant other. More than 80% thought getting married would make them happy. Some 77% said they definitely or probably would want children, while less than 12% said they likely wouldn't.

What's more, the current state of the economy is likely to strengthen ties among family members. One-fourth of Generation X-ers, for example, still receive financial help from their parents, as do nearly one-third of Millennials. As many as 40% of Americans between ages 20 and 34 now live at least part-time with their parents, an option that will only become more commonplace in areas where home prices are particularly high and employment opportunities are sharply limited.

Yet even if family values are in ascendance, how they are expressed sharply diverges from the norms and attitudes typically associated with the Religious Right. In fact, on a host of issues--including gay rights, interracial dating and stem cell research--millennials trend more toward liberal views than earlier generations, Winograd says.

Attitudes concerning religion--the other critical part of the "values" issue--reveal a similar fusion of conventionality and pragmatism. Like other Americans, Millennials are far more religiously oriented than their counterparts in other advanced countries. Fully one-fourth of Americans in their 20s and 30s, observes Princeton sociologist Robert Wurthnow, consider themselves "very spiritual," even if they rarely attend church. A 2003 UCLA study found roughly three out of four college students deem their spiritual or religious views important, but most see their (older) professors as largely indifferent to such concerns.

Yet this spiritual orientation does not imply a shift toward any retrograde "moral majority" conservatism. Upward mobility among evangelicals and fundamentalists, as well as the increased racial integration within churches, has lessened the once-glaring gaps between conservative Protestants, particularly in the South, and the rest of American society. This liberalization is particularly acute when it comes to issues like homosexuality and censorship, but also extends to the role of women and the teaching of religion in public schools.

Labels: family, family values, Gen X, Joel Kotkin, Millennial Makeover, President Obama, religion

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

Kids today ... find a new way to shock adults

Could it be that the kids get it and the adults don't?

A long, long time ago, in a decade known as the "'60s," many young people who were not in college ROTC or the Young Republicans club had a visceral distrust of anyone over, oh, say ... 30.

These were ... are, the baby boomers, perhaps the most self-indulgent generation in the long, often futile, history of humankind [I yam what I yam. ...]

The boomers have been followed by generations mostly known by chromosomal letters: "X" and "Y"

Anyway, since the boomers had a visceral distrust of the generations that went before them and thought they had invented the world and thus deserved to dominate it ...

And since succeeding generations have had to find their own difficult niches outside the distortions of the Me Generation ...

You would think ...

That kids today ... kids today ... would be rebelling against an adult world that can produce a lot of wealth but can come up pretty short on things that really count.

Then again, you might have missed a recent news story about an MTV/Associated Press study of young people between the ages of 13-24 and what makes them happy.

And the reason you might have missed it? Well, look no further than yet another news story about yet another survey — on the reading habits of Americans ... which found one in four adults read no books at all during the past year.

Of course, if you're reading this you probably are not one of those folks for whom the act of picking up a book and getting lost, lost, lost in it is a lost, lost, lost art.

"Religious" works and popular fiction were the most popular choices according to the poll, with the Bible, the Good Book itself, the most widely read book.

I'll admit to checking out the Bible now and then, and I do read a lot, which led me to the questions asked by MTV on what, if anything, makes kids today happy.

The shocking, shocking answer to what made the most young people happy is ... spending time with their families.

Don't know for sure about generations X, Y, Z, but where I come from — when Visigoths walked the earth — happiness was getting as far away from my family as possible.

By age 13, I was firmly convinced my parents were not only uncool, but hopelessly lacking in any skills that I as an all-knowing teen might find useful or necessary.

Yeah, there was a rather significant level of what we today call "dysfunction" in my "family of origin" [another psycho-babble term popularized in the 'aughts], but still ...

Anyway, this AP/MTV survey also showed that white kids call themselves happier than blacks and Latinos; that many, especially females, feel themselves just totally and irrevocably stressed out — and, get this, that money is not something that makes them happy.

Maybe this is because of the mind-boggling prosperity that has inflicted this country over the past couple of decades, so kids just take it for granted.

Sex? Kids 13-17 showed a lot of wisdom in saying that being sexually active at that age leads to diminished happiness; while the 18-24s were cautious. Yes, sex can lead to momentary happiness, they said, but hardly provides much of a foundation for anything lasting.

Drugs and alcohol — more unhappy than happy.

School makes many respondents in the poll happy, and they also said they believe in the institution of marriage and want to have kids of their own. Significantly more kids from families whose parents have remained married reported waking up happy, compared to kids from divorced families.

Nearly half named their parents as their heroes and three-quarters said their relationship with their parents is what makes them happy.

Family, friends and God, that's who they want to be with.

Nearly half said religion and spirituality are important to them and more than half said they believe God influences what makes them happy. Being part of a religious group also was seen as happiness-inducing.

Of active believers in God, 80 percent said they are happy, compared to 60 percent of the young people who said faith is not important to them.

Perhaps the young people surveyed by MTV already have already learned the spirituality of happiness.

Maybe some have already learned where true joy resides.

This brought to mind a passage written some 1,950 years ago, by Paul of Tarsus, who perhaps was addressing a group of young people in the ancient Greek city of Phillipi.

Paul wrote:

"I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

"I can do everything through Him who gives me strength"

Want to comment on this column or other topics? Check out Don Miller's blog at http://www.santacruzlive.com/blogs/donmiller. Contact Don Miller at dmiller@santacruzsentinel.com.

Talkin' 'bout your g-g-g-generations:

Back in the day, Gen X-ers were known as '20-Somethings,' 'slackers' and 'Baby Busters' and turned away from anything smacking of Baby Boom self-indulgence or narcissism.

Of course, Gen X-ers are now parents and have their own disaffected youths to worry about ...

Generation Y.

'Why, why, why' they might cry, are we going to have to foot the bill for boomers when they start tapping Social Security? Y-ers, also known as 'millennials,' have birthdates between 1984-1993. Naturally, the kids born after 1993 are now being called Gen Z.

The people who mark such things say hallmarks of Y are apathy, childhood obesity, a predilection for pharmaceuticals and, oh yeah, an intimate, sometimes consuming, relationship with all things digital.

Or so they say.

Labels: Associated Press, Baby Boomers, Don Miller, family, Gen X, Gen Y, God, happiness, MTV, teenagers