Civilizations are, at their core, based on the transmission of memory from parents to children. These memories take many forms, but the aspects of memory which are crucial for the ongoing functioning of a society are in the nature of values. Family values is a term which has been derided by many. It is worth appreciating what is meant by "family values" and how the term has been used and misused to slant its meaning.
As I have written about elsewhere, children must tame their inchoate drives and irrational thinking in order to arrive at an adult rationality. We use defenses (I describe many types of defenses here) to bind some of the energy which arises from our instinctual drives and free it for more adaptive use.
Another extremely important factor in maturation is the use of fantasy to structure and organize the child’s mental life. Fantasy in this use does not refer to the typical adult fantasies made famous by James Thurber in Walter Mitty (a bit of an archaic reference, I suppose). In this usage, fantasy refers to the personal myths a child develops to make sense of his experience. As the child develops and matures, these personal myths join many other memories in the unconscious realm, no longer available to the person but constantly asserting themselves in disguised and derivative ways, and offering a scaffolding for the personality to solidify around. There are some almost universal myths and there are more idiosyncratic myths. Most children grow up with the firm belief that their parents are the best of all parents and that they love their children without reservation. (One of the reasons so many misperceive Psychoanalysis as being a process of "blaming the mother" is that part of the goal of treatment is to resolve much of the distorted ways in which a person sees their parents and allow them to recognize their parents as real, fallible, human beings who have, hopefully, done the best they could with the equipment they brought to the child rearing task. In working to resolve the distortions, much idealization is removed and this is what leads to people thinking we are blaming the parents.) Most "good enough" parents are able to conform closely enough to this model to cause minimal dissonance. Parents who are farther from the model create significant psychological problems for the developing child. As an example, an abused child needs to feel loved (which is absolutely necessary for their psychological survival) and their only recourse growing up is to imagine that their loving parent hit them (or beat them, or did any number of terrible things to them) out of the best of motives. Their parents love them (they tell them that all the time) and therefore, any beatings were deserved; the child must have been bad. The necessity of maintaining the fiction/myth of a loving family leaves this child believing they are bad at their core, which causes lifelong difficulty.
Family values, to my way of thinking, involves all the myriad wishes and fantasies related to the existence of the "ideal" loving family. We may all fall short of this ideal, but its existence offers a template for struggling humans to be "good enough" parents. When we talk about actions that support family values, we are essentially arguing whether or not a given action makes it easier or harder to maintain this image of the "perfect" family to which we can strive.
Raising healthy children is extraordinarily difficult, especially at a time and place when all "verities" are in question and under assault. There is no instruction manual; the closest thing we have to a child rearing template is the ideal, imagined family. As this image is attacked, our social framework suffers. The less secure families have less and less external structure to help them survive, and as families unravel, so does the social network threaten to unravel.
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