Samplings of “Me First” as a Home Wrecker
“Do you think that the so-called ‘me’ society leads to more broken marriages?” an interviewer asked Dr. Robert Taylor, author of books on the subject. “Yes,” he answered. “I believe the ‘me’ philosophy is contributing to the high divorce rate we have now.”
Today’s self-fulfillment fad is causing “whole neighborhoods,” an editorial in “U.S. News & World Report” said, “to subordinate or abandon jobs, politics, civic service and family responsibility in favor of self-realization classes, exotic exercises, getting stroked with peacock feathers and fur mittens, communal hot-tubbing, extramarital sensations and other pursuits imagined to produce pure happiness.”
“The modern parent is remote from his child.” Why? A report in “Newsweek” explains: “He feels he has ‘little to pass on and, in any case, now gives priority to his own right to self-fulfillment.’”
“In an age that emphasizes maximum personal expression and gratification, many parents don’t want to sacrifice anything of themselves for their children, who are viewed as a burden. So either they don’t want their children at all, or they want their kids to be quiet and inconspicuous. . . . People are more egocentric than they were 20 years ago.”—“Homemaker’s Magazine,” June/July/August, 1976.
A special CBS television report last December focused on a divided family and the ill effects it had on the children. The mother was in the women’s liberation movement, which precipitated the divorce. The children expressed sadness that their mother’s job took her away from the home too much, and their father lived separate from them.
Concerning psychiatry “U.S. News & World Report” said: “Society as a whole may have suffered from some psychiatric practices. There is a widespread feeling, rightly or wrongly, that the anxieties of modern America have been increased by psychiatric advice that often encourages an individual to ‘do his own thing’ even if it breaks up families.”
Under the heading of “Me, Me, Me,” “Newsweek” magazine reviewed the book “The Culture of Narcissism” by Christopher Lasch, a history professor. The current tendency of parents to give ‘priority to their own right of self-fulfillment’ leaves their children emotionally crippled and without a moral code. He contends that the new awareness movement “provides self-defeating solutions, advising people not to make too large an investment in love and friendship.”
At first, women’s magazines focused on home, food and children. Then came magazines for the working girl. Later it was magazines for the feminist movement. The newest entry is a magazine called “Self.” “The Wall Street Journal” editorial that told of this magazine concluded that the publishers thought that their readers “want to concentrate not on children or sex or politics but on their own pretty much unattached egos. Not a terrifically encouraging message for the end of the decade.”