At the October General Conference yesterday, Pres. Dallin H. Oaks - now the senior apostle - described a few points of how family life has changed from when he was a child. To summarize, he contrasted how it used to be an economic necessity for families to have a highly organized structure, with all members pushing towards a common goal. There was much more family oversight of children, and therefore also time for real connections to be made and instruction given. In today's urban environment, he contrasted, families tend to be units of economic consumption, rather than production. It is too easy to treat home as a boarding house, where people share a common address to eat and sleep, but where children receive little guidance, direction, or connection.
In his comparisons, I do not hear him wishing that we all went back to those poorer times, but rather that we need to take proactive thought and consideration for how to create "consistent, family-centered" activities, to make time together, to create a vision of what we want our family to be like and work together towards those goals.
I was a missionary in eastern Germany shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I cannot recall a day going past when some middle+ aged person would recite the same litany of miseries East Germany had experienced since reunification, most especially unemployment (which was 40% at the time) and the lack of connection between neighbors. Under socialist rule, there was such scarcity that it was an economic necessity for you to know your neighbors and work together. If I had a hardware store and you had a grocery store, I might offer that the next time I got a shipment of nails in, I'd set some aside for you if you would set aside some oranges for me next time you got a shipment. With the arrival of capitalism, nails and oranges were in such abundance that being connected was no longer an economic necessity, and communities fell apart.
It seemed to me then that the solution was not to go back to the poverty and repression of the socialist state, where secret police without showing identification grabbed people off the street who were never heard from again, but rather to make deliberate, proactive choices to get together with neighbors and form community activities.
In both cases, some very important things that used to be supported as natural and normal necessities of survival, fell by the wayside as the urgency for them fell off. "It is vital that Latter-day Saints do not lose their understanding of the purpose of marriage and the value of children." He urged us to follow Jesus' example by giving ourselves in service, and to create meaningful family activities that build family relationships and ties.
