While recently reading about Theodore Roosevelt, our 26th president, I was impressed with his devotion to his family.
The Iowa Family Policy Center, dedicated to strengthening families, has this quote attributed to Roosevelt highlighting its Web site:
"When home ties are loosened, when men and women cease to regard a worthy family life, with all its duties fully performed, and all its responsibilities lived up as the best life worth living, then evil days for the (nation) are at hand."
I wonder what the man who charged up San Juan Hill would think were he to be transported to our time.
Would he have any clue what "living together" means? Had he been en route with me to work the day before Thanksgiving and heard the woman on the radio explain how she and her male "partner" were going to change the way they prepared their Thanksgiving fare this year, what would he think?
After explanations about changing societies and values, he would probably be saddened, but I doubt that would cause him to budge from the beliefs he had when he was the leader of the free world the first part of this century. No, he likely would reiterate the same formula for happiness he expressed in his autobiography:
"There are many kinds of success in life worth having . . . but for unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison. It may well be true that he travels farthest who travels alone; but the goal thus reached is not worth reaching."
The breakdown of the family in the past 25 to 30 years has been catastrophic.
Based on the annual General Social Survey, the number of homes with married couples and children has declined from 45 percent in 1972 to just 26 percent today; the percent of children living in a household with their two original parents had dropped from 73 percent to 51 percent; and the percent of children living with single parents has climbed from just 4.7 percent to 18.2 percent over that same time period.
What has happened and what can be done to reverse this tragic trend?
The difference today as opposed to 40 years ago -- and earlier, to Roosevelt's time -- is that many people are choosing to live a lifestyle that used to be unacceptable. The abnormal is starting to become the normal.
What's missing today, Bahira Sherif, a professor of individual and family studies at the University of Delaware, told the Associated Press, are role models young people need to teach them how marriage works. That leads her to believe the divorce rates won't be dropping anytime soon.
The professor has a point. We need more people who feel about families the way Roosevelt did. Starting at the top. Contrast Roosevelt's values with those of our current president.
Columns have already been written about how those guardians of free speech and freer morals in Hollywood have abdicated whatever responsibility they have to strengthen society for the pursuit of money and fame.
One of today's prevalent lines of reasoning against marriage is that if people don't marry they can't get divorced. True, but they can also get traded in like used cars. And they can also create all kinds of societal and emotional problems for themselves and their children born out of wedlock.
Statistics indicate people don't take their marriage vows as seriously as they used to; that divorce becomes an early, rather than the last, option.
Marriage implies commitment. Serious commitment. Without the traditional family structure, the nation, as Roosevelt noted, is in peril.
The trend will change when the majority of men and women realize that the family values extolled during Teddy Roosevelt's time are just as valid today.
A number of groups and individuals are sounding the alarm to rescue the traditional family, an example being the recent World Congress of Families in Geneva.
Their call is being heard.
Deseret News editorial writer John Robinson can be reached by e-mail at
jrob@desnews.com