Come together: Tonic for troubled families

Let’s assume you paid attention to Friday’s column because we mentioned sex a lot.

Hopefully, though, you also picked up on a theme that isn’t, well …

Very sexy.

The problem is that we, American society in general, seem to be drifting in the wrong direction.

Apart.

“In so many ways, people are getting disconnected,” said Coeur d’Alene social worker and therapist Barbara Mace-Tucker.

“Families just wander in different directions. Couples spend an evening with one of them upstairs and the other downstairs.”

Mace-Tucker meant that in both the individual and larger sense. Our interactions, even in marriages or parent-child relationships, are less and less intimate.

The reason for this entire discussion — and the need to feature a therapist on center stage — is right there in black and white.

The U.S. birth rate is tumbling to an alarming extent. It hit the lowest-ever percentage in 2017.

We’ve reached the point where the population is not even replicating itself. That’s the kind of thing that academics can plot and assess, but maybe we ordinary folk just don’t see what’s happening to us.

EVEN MORE alarming than hearing about the birth rate is grasping one of the wildest reasons for it.

Americans are having less sex.

Across all ages and demographic groups, this most intimate form of togetherness keeps diminishing.

“I’m not surprised,” Mace-Tucker said when she learned about the fading interest in sex. “Isn’t that terrible, that I wouldn’t be shocked?

“But hearing from the people I see professionally, I get it. That’s so sad, but I do.”

The obvious question for an experienced professional counselor like Mace-Tucker, who raised three sons as a single mother and spent years running a day care center in her home, is pretty darn simple …

How have we changed as a society?

If these critical markers — birth rate, interest in sex — keep falling dramatically, they must have been good at one time.

Isn’t that the definition of going downward?

You had to be somewhere up there in the past.

“Things were better, say, in the 1950s,” Mace-Tucker said. “Yes, there were problems, like racial segregation in the South and other ills that you find in any society.

“But I picked those years, back past the age of the internet and people connecting to screens instead of each other, because it was common for families to spend more time together and become more of a unit.

“That’s just such an important distinction, because trying to understand where we are now comes back to children.

“How children react later in life, in areas like communication, interaction with others and relationships … so much of that begins when they’re very, very young.

“I tell people that every second with a child is a teaching moment, and everything you say and do affects how that child might react weeks later or years later.”

THERE’S A tendency, I suspect, to believe that North Idaho — conservative to the core and filled with so many family-first communities — might be handling this personal disconnect better than most places.

But Mace-Tucker is quick to warn that she sees the same scary issues almost every day, and that we certainly are not immune to America’s wider problems.

“Smartphones are here, too,” she said, repeating again the list of bad outcomes she watches as a result of this digital addiction.

“I saw something in a restaurant recently,” she said. “In fact, it was Anthony’s (in Riverstone) and you’d think that would really be a special dining-out experience.

“But there was a couple sitting there with their son, who was about 22 or so. And all three of them were on their phones non-stop.

“Then I thought: I suppose from the people I see in my work, that kind of non-communication shouldn’t be a surprise.”

MACE-TUCKER believes a lot of our problems could be solved by families doing more things together, and she sure wasn’t suggesting that a night online was any way to enjoy each other’s company.

“In a time like this,” she said, “with so much technology and so many toys to take your mind off things that really matter …

“We need to step back, see what we’re missing, and approach life differently.

“Something like sex is built into us. And, hey, it’s great. It was meant to be great.

“To get in a mindset where you’d rather be on a smartphone …

“What does that tell you?

“When people aren’t even interested in sex, something’s really wrong and we have to look backwards — to how it all starts with families and children.

“If that’s the priority, then things that happen to our kids as adults will take care of themselves.”

•••

Steve Cameron is a columnist for The Press.

A Brand New Day appears from Wednesday through Saturday each week.

Steve’s column on Gonzaga basketball runs on Tuesday.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

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