broken families

[Khamsin]

My parents were married up until this past year. I am 26, so I don't consider it a "broken family". I actually consider the term a bit accusatory and unnecessarily negative. Some families are more broken when they're together and end up better off after they split up.

It is unfair to portray families as some how "broken" because the father and mother are not living under the same room and are not married.

Is it broken if they're divorced and living together peacefully?
Is it broken if they're married and living apart?
Is it broken if they're unmarried and living together?
Is it broken if one parent dies while they're still married, and then the other parent raises the child(ren) on their own?
Is it broken if the same widowed parent remarries?
Is it broken if a parent is sent overseas because of the military and the other parent is left to raise the child(ren) on their own?
Is it broken if a parent is raising their child(ren) alone because the other parent was abusive? The family is better off without the abusive parent, how is it broken?

I can continue to create questions similar to these for different situations. The flaw of believing a family can be "broken" is that there is a perfect, ideal, natural form of a family, and anything else is considered "broken". The world is too diverse to consider one form of a family as healthy or "whole", and all others as "broken".

A relationship can be dysfunctional, and usually that involves abuse.

I think you're confusing "broken" and "abnormal".

It is possible for every family on earth to be broken, but it is not possible for every family on earth to be abnormal.

Just because the world is diverse and many different family styles exist throughout our own and other cultures, it does not invalidate the fact that non-whole families can be considered broken. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's a word with a definition that means precisely a non-whole family. Perhaps one with a bit of a negative connotation, but it is what it is. It's a categorical label, not a judgment.

Now, applying it to other cultures in the world who don't share our concept of whole families is another matter. Perhaps they have their own words to refer to the different types of familial structures typically seen in their own cultures.

[Eanae]

Father died when I was 5 of a heart attack.

[Correction]

yeah didnt understand shit chubbs, wtf.

Chubbs is indicating his extended family's marital status

Poll answer) Age relative, married or not, which side of the family

[Day]

Functional Family. Parents married almost 50 years now. 2 Brothers and 2 Sisters.

[RPGTyrant]

Option 1, one of the families Tekoa mentioned on the first page. Parents married for 30+ years, brother and sister both in happy marriages. As Tekoa said though, all of our girlfriends have divorced parents where fishy business went on, but they turned out just fine, if not with a few more issues every now and again than Tek and I.

Poll is going as exptected, last I heard figures were 50% of all marriages end in divorce, so this seems to support that, and seems to indicate to me that BG has a pretty normal cross-section of posters.

[Tymon]

Parents divorced when I was 5

Dad beat my mom, think he molested me when I was 2 or 3 as well, no one would ever tell me something like that and I don't care to ask

He got out of jail when I was 17 and tried to come to my house and talk shit on my 18th birthday but I got him re-arrested on a technicality in that it wasn't past my legal birth time. He showed up in the morning and I was born at 6:03 PM or something like that

Oh yeah, he's a stupid redneck too