CHOICES

CHOICES

I was born in 1957. I lived in a three bedroom, fibreboard (fibro) home with a mother, a father, a sister and a dog on a quarter acre block on the northern beaches region of Sydney.

This was a very average family situation; in 1961 there were 3.65 people in every Australian household.

However, by 1992 the average Australian household consisted of only 2.7 family members. What happened to the dog ? Forget the dog -What happened to my sister and me? And when was the last time you saw a fibro home?

Okay, so fibro isn’t the building material of choice these days. The problem is that neither is the Australian household of the 1950’s and 60’s. People are making different choices based on a totally different criteria for happiness.

When I was a child most people believed that the nuclear family held the secrets for personal well being, and a happy life. By the end of the century this philosophy had changed to one that deemed individual achievement, personal fulfillment and material wealth as the keys to happiness.

My memory of my family home is one of incredible emotional security and safety; because my sister and I (as children) were the chosen priority in our family – before income, lifestyle, or the personal achievements of our parents. This was the norm in the Australian household of the 50’s and 60’s. This is no longer the norm; career satisfaction and personal freedoms seem to fly high above the rights of children in society today.

Consider these staggering statistics: By 1994 two in every five marriages ended in divorce in Australia, now it is one in every two, the divorced population of Australia increased four hundred percent between 1976 and 1996 and of all the couples that married in Australia in 1998, 67% had cohabited (compared with 22% in 1978).

But the most distressful statistic has to be this one – by 1998 only one in two pregnancies in Australia resulted in a live birth. Of the 500,000 women who became pregnant in Australia in 1997 150,000 miscarried, 2000 babies were stillborn and 95,000 pregnancies were aborted.

What, Michelle Gunn, wrote in the the Weekend Australian, seems to celebrate this tragic state of affairs;

• To marry or not to marry, to have five children or none.
• To live where we like, to divorce if we feel the need, for mothers to work full-time or not at all.
• The main difference between Australian families of today and those of decades ago can be summed up in one word... choice.

Ms. Gunn applauds this so-called freedom of choice, as if it was something that didn’t exist for the parents of forty to fifty years ago. It did, but my parents made different choices. Children were the primary consideration of our society; their importance an absolute given. Now they are deemed, by many, as disposable; their existence determined by the whim and convenience of the parents.

Ms Gunn makes the further assertion that one shouldn’t compare these trends with the 1950’s and 1960’s because they were atypical. Not if you look to scripture, madam.

Christians look to scripture for their blueprint of family life, and it runs closely along the lines of my personal experience as a child during the fifties and sixties. Children as the bottom line, not economics, personal freedoms, nor personal convenience. Children!. In the New Testament Jesus is clear about the value of a child; It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to stumble (Luke 1:7).

Some years ago Philip Adams wrote an article entitled “Below the Bottom Line”. In it he condemned the Australian Government for putting the well being of the national economy before the well being of the average Australian. This great advocate of personal freedom and freedom of speech stopped short, however, of including children in his “bottom line”. For him, as for many Australians, they are apparently so far down the priority list that they fall under the “below” line.

When are we as a society going to wake up to ourselves and get it right? We are the true legacy of our parents, not money, property, nor the family heirlooms. Similarly, our children are the true legacy we pass on to future generations, future societies. Without them there is no future.

Christians have been behind almost every humanitarian social change over the last millennium. Are we prepared to stand up now and put children back in their rightful place on Australian society’s priority list- on the top?