How Families in India View American Families
I recently spent 10 days in India, and the people I met were always intrigued to hear I wrote about marriage and parenting. Some people politely asked why Americans don’t understand what Indians take for granted; namely, that marriage is about commitment, and it harms the children to divorce. I did my best to explain the complexities of the American perspective, but I was half-hearted at best in defending America’s approach. A huge portion of India’s population is incredibly poor, but they often live together in households of 3 and even 4 generations. And that’s not because they’re poor. That’s because family is everything to them. Forgive the cliche, but I was left wondering how much we had really gained in comparison.
In Bombay and the bigger cities, the upper middle-class folks I met described how their families were increasingly breaking up, as in America. I was surprised by this, having assumed the phenomenon was one we were not “exporting.” Is wealth the corrupting factor of families? Are these well-educated women gaining their liberation rather than subjecting themselves to a lifetime of marriage to the same man? Neither the people I met nor I came to a clear conclusion, but I can say it was unsettling to find the breakdown of the family structure in another country so far away from ours.
Kids pick up on everything, and research shows that children can "catch" their parents' stress just like they catch a virus—soaking up the stress that pervades a household until their developing nervous systems reach "overload." Then kids act-out, or get sick.
