The document discusses the breakdown of the traditional family unit in recent years. It notes that nuclear families living together have been replaced by single-person households, and that extended families have dissolved. Today, single-parent families and latchkey children are common, and senior citizens are often placed in nursing homes. Both parents frequently work, leaving children to spend their formative years without parental guidance. This lack of supervision contributes to increased juvenile crime and drug use. In contrast, joint families remain the norm in Eastern societies, where social and moral values are instilled by elders. The breakdown of the family is linked to increased promiscuity, disease, and the erosion of religious values in modern Western society.

1. In recent years, almost all countries have witnessed a gradual
disintegration of the family unit. The concept of the ‘nuclear’ family,
often living together and sharing resources, has been given up in favour
of a single-unit household. Since large, extended families often served
only to contribute to agrarian earnings, they dissolved to cater to the
needs of the urban-industrial era.
Today, small families, (often with a single parent) are common. The
divorce rate and the number of illegitimate children are also in the rise.
Senior citizens are no longer a part of their families, and are left at the
mercy of private and public "old person's homes". Children, too, leave
home at an early age, for independence or income.
To meet the needs of the so called "rat race", often both parents have
to work. Therefore children often spend their formative years without
the care and guidance offered by parents. "Latch-key" children have
independence thrust upon them when they most need care. They are
often resentful of their parents, to a degree that they tend to do the
same to their own children.
Children without supervision or children left wanting care and
nurturing, tend to behave in ways that are socially and morally
repugnant. It has been shown in studies worldwide that at least 85% of
children under the age of eighteen dabbling in drugs such as marijuana

2. and opium, come from "broken homes" or are "latch key" children, in
households where both parents work.
Crime is increasing dramatically. Juvenile crime has probably shown the
greatest rise. This is because, left unsupervised, children have the
freedom to watch uncensored media, which is often violent or
pornographic. Homicide, rape, vandalism or robbery by teenagers is no
longer shocking.
In the East, a "joint family system" is still the norm. Values are imbibed
through the experience of "elders", instead of personal
experimentation. Skills and morals alike are drilled into impressionable
young minds. The result of this is that Eastern society is perhaps not as
rank with evil as the degenerate West.
Because of the stifling pressures of modern living in the West, people
do not have time for one another. Social and cultural values are not
instilled into the individual by parental force, so each generation
emerges the more immoral. It is a vicious circle. Studies in the United
States have shown that children given up for adoption, despite the pain
and betrayal they feel, as grownups with children of their own, tend to
give them up for adoption, too. Similarly, a child who has not known
the affection and security afforded by a parent′ s care, will not know
how to provide his own children with the same.

3. Promiscuity and Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) are on the
increase all over the world, but especially so in countries where the
collapse of family life is most significant. Lax moral values are often
bred by a lack of adult concern. This in turn ironically perpetuates the
same insecurity in the children resulting from such liaisons.
More often than not, religion is "born into" and not acquired. As a
result of this, religious values are breaking down. With this have
inevitably emerged various other "isms" to quench man′ s need to
worship an institution higher than him. Money, Power, Prestige: these
are the gods of today, creating in modern man a lust unmatched by
ancient religious deities. People will stoop to any nadir of degradation
to amass what they crave most.
The breakdown of family life is largely the result of each person serving
his personal altar of self-aggrandisement. However, if it is not checked
in the future, it may create disastrous consequences which are often
irredeemable.