BREAKDOWN OF FAMILY UNIT

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31145, 23 August 1966, Page 16

BREAKDOWN OF FAMILY UNIT

“The Press” Special Service WAIKERIA, August 22. The family, once regarded as a stabilising factor for youth, had broken down under the assault of modern trends and ideas, the Christchurch district probation officer (Mr L. A. Brown) told a seminar at Waikeria Youth Centre.

A psychological attack' had been made upon the family institution. It was now possible to get “spare-part mums,” said Mr Brown, and some of the old family terms were in danger of disappearing. He spoke to the seminar, organised by the Waikato

branch of the Prisoners’ Aid and Rehabilitation Society, on the subject, “Socially Lost Young Men.” “Once we used to talk of maternal feeling or instinct,” he said, “but the experts are now so busily ironing out the differences between the sexes that the terms mother and father, male and female may soon lose all meaning. “We may yet, with the assistance of the biologist, see the first father to become a mother.” A Japanese firm was producing artificial women’s breasts with built-in heartbeat, to give to babies, “I am old-fashioned enough to want the good old mother rather than the spare-part mum,” he said. Separation and divorce also attacked the family, said Mr Brown. They were probably responsible for more misfits in society than anything else. In the past kinship had been vitally important as a part of the family way of life. Today members of families lived in different social networks rather than as a group. “Even the parent of today meets his own friends separately.” The society in which today’s youngster lived and grew up in was different from that of his parents. Because parents tended to use their own early experience as a guide some conflict was inevitable. “The sources of conflict are further strengthened in the Western society,” he said, “by the fact that the conjugal family is one of intense emotionality, with few kin who can act as buffers or shock absorbers.”