The Loose and Close Families: How They Shape Individual Personalities in Cultures

I am not a freak regarding family structures and how they function or ought to function, nor am I lame on this subject. I respect the dignity that characterizes a family, particularly in the area of nurturing children to sustain the spirit of a society through the family’s reproduction style. I am aware of the consistent role the family has to play to enable members to develop personalities that are expected to be polished, respectable and advanced for the triple development of the individual, the family and the society. Shortcomings may occur in such family activities, sometimes due to limited resources and sometimes due to explicable or inexplicable human failings. The blessing of adequate resources or the striving to generate this adequacy promote the aforesaid triple developments. What I say in the piece below is to show my awareness, my personal observations and informal study of family types that can be claimed to be distinct precisely because the cultures the families belong to are themselves distinct. I do not claim to be precise about what I say, but I hope that whether I have been general or specific in the points I offer, I show some measure of convincingness to those who care to see the modern family in the light of the powerful and irresistible influence of technology and what it carries along with it. Technology is king as it directs, in many ways, the structure of the modern family!

Modern families could be said to be close or loose. For close families, the cooperative force among family members is strong. For loose families, the individualistic spirit is common. But even between these two different kinds of families, shades of the cooperative and individualistic spirits crisscross to blur the dissimilarities. What makes a family loose or close is, in general, not that the families themselves deliberately work out the family structure; it is because the family structure is largely an offshoot of the culture in place. Usually, family structures that resist the temptation to change in line with significant modernizations to technology and employment mechanisms presuppose a toughened traditional culture. Such a culture is enriched with a remarkable history, language, architectural formations, social organizations, and/or allied factors. Concisely, the weight of the declared cultural categories supports the resilience of the traditional culture. Families, on the other hand, that easily change in relation to significant changes in technology and the employment system suggest a malleable culture.

Western societies in particular are full of loose families as the overwhelming importance attached to technology and employment has unseated marked traces of the cooperative spirit in the family. What technology has done is to place much more importance on automation, the use of machines, while labour-emphasized methods of production experience considerable reduction. Thus, people have to compete aggressively for limited jobs to the extent that one’s inherent and acquired skills may be underutilized or, simply, turn out to be irrelevant. This prevalent feature of the employment market has generally brought into being a large pool of employees who are overqualified for jobs they do, yet have no choice but to do them. If they do not do such jobs, they will have little or no income to support themselves. It is this aggressive pursuit for jobs that has restructured the passion and reason of so many people to make them appear self-centred, individualistic, and often secluded from the field of socialistic activities. The average employee has to fasten so much passion and thought to his/her job in addition to the fact that he/she has to prove to be insistently diligent in order to retain his/her job and win the favour of the employer. So how much room is left in the composition of one’s passion and thought to engage the task of catering effectively to the child or children one has or the family one belongs to? No wonder that the fabric of the family turns from being loose to something else. Children often get back home from school to face the toughness of life by themselves as parents have to be busy even at home trying to update their competence on the job and salve their crazy stress through unintrusive rest.

It can be deduced that children are forced to be largely individualistic, made to discover and apply the techniques of creativity mostly on their own accord. The adventurism, the courageous personalities that are typical of loose-family members arises largely from how technology and employment mechanisms forcefully instruct the temperament and direction of the family and family members. Loose-family parents may tell their children this: “Go to the outside world to enable you fulfill all your dreams. Acquire as much social skills and informal education as you could possibly acquire, but, also, redeem yourselves through the expert possession of all the capabilities that will make you well-rounded persons.” Children widen their respective fields of skills. But it could be unfortunate for those misguided children who, despite their wealth of skills, fail to mature in the fields where social morality equally abounds and ought to have been sought and acquired.

If this colourful personal initiative advances creativity, it also breeds the kind of endless ambition that seems to influence the psyche of the individual into thinking that individualism is the major benchmark of progress. It may further be said that getting out to explore the unexplored promotes the unfinished business of critically studying and knowing about matters that were hitherto unknown. This kind of curiosity is a recipe for towering innovation, but it can bring along with it untold stress. The individual, say a young male adult, is pushed to overwork himself, seek his personal development as if on his own accord, and almost perceive cooperativeness as a hindrance to progress. His intuition keeps telling him that his success in life is inadequate whereupon his curious mind undertakes a much deeper exploration of great matters. Doubtless, a government’s timely intervention may be aimed at forestalling individual greed, restlessness, and mindless selfishness. The object, furthermore, could be to moderate excesses and promote social-economic tranquility. Today, government-supervised progress is viewed by many as the ugly erection of socialism. The question is: when did socialism become ugly if it does not stipulate the practice of the forced possession and control of people?

I find this viewpoint of individualistic progress admirable but also troubling. Individualism of this sort is inclined to foster social and moral decay even though it may advance, rather quickly, economic progress. Individualism, while great, needs the conscious supervision of family members as well as authorities who work for the society. We, as individuals, are not perfect with our judgements and consequent doings. Sometimes we need the observance and skilled guidance of others to help us direct our motives and desires in the right directions, so that we do not inflict pain on the society. The young male adult who goes on to sell dangerous drugs because his unrestrained individualistic instincts have prompted him to do so has brought pain to bear on the society; and were his actions previously checked within the ambit of a closed family and the cautiously applied laws of the society, he might have done something different - and better. Individualism, moreover, has reinforced the question of privacy but privacy in a hazy form. Take the case of a man (or a woman) that prefers to stand or stay almost alone and strive for his own progress. Is he not a man trapped in contradictions? He dislikes cooperativeness, but in striving to achieve his own progress, he meets others for help. He has no job of his own and wants to be employed, so he goes to others for help. By his personally observing others, reading all kinds of materials, listening to tapes, and watching movies, he sharpens his mental aptitude, the grace of his body language, the quality of his voice, his speaking style, and goes on to attend a job interview. Finally, he gets a job though not the kind of job that equates with his inbuilt and built talent.

It may here be argued that the dependence on others to achieve one’s goal or get what one wants does not really meet the full requirements of individualism. The other side of the argument is that individualism merely means an initial glad taking of steps by the individual himself/herself that eventually leads to his/her expectations. Are the expectations genuine, original, in conformity with one’s unduplicated talent? If yes, individualism is really in place; if not, the individualism so achieved is obscure or tainted. Yet, there is the need for reasonable individualism, the kind of individualism that generates moral and social harmony. To what extent, therefore, individualism can be defended depends on how its support and practice yields economic progress within the bounds of moral and social harmony. Where a government and families fail to assert themselves on the issue of morality and social accord, the quest for individualism may be reexamined and its mode of functioning guided well by reformulated laws - laws that tend to be more stringent and more supervisory than before.

I ought to admit that I do not subscribe to unbending individualism, nor do I claim that the loose family is bad but the close family better. With the surge in technology to meet the requirements of growing populations, it has become difficult to retain the purity of the close family in so many cases.

The close family revolves around parents whose systematic guidance, and, indeed, coaching of children relieves families from the dangers of human flights. Children grow to understand that their love for their families is consistent, pretty invariable. They strive to retain this familial character irrespective of age and new dimensions to life. Even when children are financially independent adults, they prefer to work at places that are not that far from the parental homes. The object is to think and be thought of by parents, and get that kind of emotional comfort that derives from parental tutelage. The child adequately pays back with the kind of emotional and financial support that reinforces the mental and emotional fibre of the parent. To be loved so much is a key to building one’s confidence and categorical integration in the family. Why work that far if that may destabilize one’s emotions, erode the health of the mind, and, hence, punch discordant holes in one’s dispositional attitudes? Parents simply form a bond with the children to create reciprocal love. Securing a place in the family is a matter of eschewing unrestrained individualism. Yes, individualism is not barred, but it is made to function within the parameters of the family’s work-plan. A family member plays the game of life according to the set rules of the family. Your multiple functions in living human spaces proceed, time and again, and ultimately, in the living shadows of the family. You usually show a character that is expressly different from that of a loose-family individual. Your moral character is couched in a sober mould. Your dispositional attitudes are softer, gentler. In appraising social skills, one can see that the close-family individual regularly expresses them in ways that are characteristic of what transpires in the family: caring, a good sense of honesty, a good dose of modesty, empathy, the willingness to help, but a kind of a lay-back attitude to life. He/She exudes the principles and qualities of family-hood at public places and proves - or pretends to prove - its efficacy. In general, the adventurist traits typical of the loose-family individual tend to be less in the close-family member. For the latter, exploring the outside world on his/her own accord is inclined to be an arduous task. The conscience continually reminds him/her that the family is unavailable in this kind of enterprise, and therefore that quite a heavy risk, unpalatable consequences could occur. Friends, acquaintances, co-workers, seem to partake in adventures should family members be excluded or be unavailable.

One should not think that close-family individuals lack the innovative force, personal initiative or entrepreneurial spirit that is characteristic of loose-family members. No! Close-family individuals harbour these traits but usually with team-like characteristics, as if the traits are a family possession.

What close-family members find worrying, yet incapable of redressing, is the changing face of technology and its crushing impact on employment patterns. Modern technology has opened up new doors to businesses. New businesses are regularly being established with new compositions, ways of doing things; old businesses are frequently undergoing relocation. Old employees, new employees, and job seekers are logically compelled to follow the movements of these business practices. The trouble for employees in close families is immense on the basis that moving along with business movements also implies leaving behind, in most cases, the solidly built family structures. If a close-family employee has made it an irrevocable duty to stand by the family, be close to it, he/she has to now retract.

I personally regard this anomaly as a huge demerit of technologized businesses, yet its persistence is unquestionable.

Consider two individuals, a couple, so to speak, who belong to a close family. They live in China, are Chinese, and work at separate locations in the same city, the City of Handan, in Hebei Province. The man’s company relocated - to Shanghai; and he, accordingly, moved to Shanghai to work. The woman, the child, and the other family members had to bear with living in Handan. Now, the informal pact that the man made, which meant standing by his family, has been, somehow, dented by the forced migration to Shanghai. Whether a new kind of an individual is produced, it is not easy to hazard a definite answer. However, one can, perhaps, conclude that this man emerges with a synthesized individualism, drawn towards the plentiful practice of curiosity and some measure of adventurism, permeated by new social skills, filled with a new brand of courage, consumed by the spirit of a new temperance, and brought to the fold of a new morality that still exemplifies far more of the qualities of virtue in relation to vice.

Now, it is pretty unrealistic to judge regarding the issue of which family is better, the close or the loose.

I know that in life, extremes produce instability, which can terrify steady progress. Mediocrity or second-rate efforts are no better either. Our man in Shanghai was initially destabilized on all fronts. He learned the art of adapting to his new niche. His synthesis has brought to him a new identity but an identity that destabilizes the structure of a strong, close family. It is a question of which (one) should be retained, the family or individualism? In principle, I believe the family should be retained. With the realities that come along with technology and businesses, the striking change in the individual's doings has given rise to different kinds of turmoil in the family and has, rather unknowingly, made the individual occupy centre stage in the affairs of life. Does that mean the close family is gradually losing the battle for preservation? It seems to me it is.