What the past can teach us about families. When it comes to the family, that is particularly true. This century has transformed the way we mate and raise children in the West, and we tend to forget just how far we have strayed from our roots. On the other hand, the past is merely foreign territory, not another planet.
People differ enormously, but they remain human.
No matter how earnestly the authorities advocate a harsh and detached approach to children, there have always been parents too loving to conform. We start life with the same desires, but different cultures channel them in very different ways. Because historians have begun to turn their attention to the realm of private life and emotion, we now know a great deal about our collective past. There's no such thing as the traditional family. The first and most important lesson is that we cannot look to the traditional family for guidance, simply because there is no single traditional family.