Dear reader,
Despite what some people may lead you to believe, I love my family.
You see, my parents are divorced, and far too many people think that simply because of that, my family is broken and I am a psychological time bomb, just waiting for the slightest trigger to explode into a full rainbow of mental disorders and social not-niceties.
I hear this shouted down to me from various family-value politicos, who – though by-and-large conservative and religious – need not be either. According to such groups, the proper form of marriage – and hence, family – is one man and one woman and anything else hurts children. They point to statistics of single-mother families with maladjusted teens and claim marriage good and divorce bad, for the sake of the children. But I think all these groups have misinterpreted the data to further their own agenda.
The problems that these groups believe stem from different family structures also appear in so-called traditional families, and although these groups would say that the different family structures increase the rate of psychological problems in children (among other things), they fail to explain why. They simply assume that the one-father-one-mother family is better, based on some unprovable and untestable notion of natural order.
At the same time, family-values pundits have ignored the extended family. They fail to differentiate, for example, between families wherein the parents are too busy with work to raise their children from a similar family wherein other relatives help raise the children in their parents’ absence. A family rarely consists of a just a single generation and its progeny and it need not even be formed by a bond of blood or marriage. How often have soldiers claimed each other to be their brothers- or sisters-in-arms? How often do churches try to treat the whole world as family?
Natural order fails to explain the differences between families because there is no natural family to start with, but to me, the explanation of when families work and when families fail requires a single word: love. When there is honest-to-goodness love and support present, the family structure that values-pundits dote on is irrelevant. On the other hand, when children grow up without love and encouragement it takes an extraordinary amount of courage and self-will to raise themselves into happy and healthy adults, and that is just as true if their family consists of the favored one-man-one-woman marriage.
The structure of the family, after all, does not affect the love given. It is just as possible for two parents together to completely neglect their children as it is for two parents divorced or a single parent on his or her own to neglect their children.
Even saying that love equals good parenting oversimplifies: Love means little if parents and guardians lack the time or skill to use it, and each child responds in their own way to their environment. Still, I feel that in an environment without love a child will develop into a healthy adult despite their environment, not because of it.
The focus of family-values groups on marriage may in fact cause more harm than good. It gives people an artificial feeling of rightness in being married and an equally artificial sense of wrongness in stepping outside the norm. Moreover, it tries to attack the cause of the problem so vigorously it ignores the symptoms and leaves the non-traditional families that struggle to raise their children without any advice or assistance, besides the quite unhelpful and often inapplicable directive to get married.
So to all such writers and pundits who may be reading, let me say this: Yes, I lost having my biological parents together, but I gained a wonderful stepfather and stepmother; a slew of aunts, uncles and cousins; a new set of grandparents; and more love than I know what to do with.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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