15/09/2025
The erosion of community, the breakdown of the extended family, the pressures on marriage relationships, the harried lives of nuclear families still intact and the growing sense of insecurity even in the midst of relative wealth have all combined to create an emotional milieu in which calm, attuned parenting is becoming alarmingly difficult.
The result in successive generations of children is seen in alienation, drug use and violence—what Robert Bly has astutely described as “the rage of the unparented.”
Bly notes in The Sibling Society that “in 1935 the average working man had forty hours a week free, including Saturday. By 1990, it was down to seventeen hours. The twenty-three lost hours of free time a week since 1935 are the very hours in which the father could be a nurturing father, and find some center in himself, and the very hours in which the mother could feel she actually has a husband.” These patterns characterize not only the early years of parenting, but entire childhoods. “Family meals, talks, reading together no longer take place,” writes Bly. “What the young need—stability, presence, attention, advice, good psychic food, unpolluted stories—is exactly what the sibling society won’t give them.”
Gabor Mate, Scattered Minds
