How Healthy Marriages are Important to a Community

As part of my job interview tonight I am supposed to make a three-minute speech about How healthy marriages are important to a community. Here is what I am planning on saying, barring any last minute changes....

Why I Think Healthy Marriages Are Important to a Community

I believe strong and healthy marriages are essential to the growth and development of the community. They can impact a community on several levels.

Healthy marriages most visibly impact our community in the effects they have on our children. Parents in healthy marriages have the potential to shape the future of their society in how they impact their children. Children learn many of their moral principles and guidelines in life from their parents. It is upon that foundation of beliefs, that future generations will conduct not only their personal lives, but how they conduct business, treat others, and their own children.

Speaking from personal experiences, I have witnessed the impact of both healthy and unhealthy marriages on today’s children. Children who come from strong marriages tend to be more well rounded in their beliefs, their commitment to education, and their treatment of their fellow students and teachers. Children from healthy marriages have a greater self-esteem and a greater sense of wanting to achieve goals and ambitions that will benefits others. Children from healthy marriages have better problem solving skills and a wiliness to help others solve problems as well. Children from healthy marriages are less likely to involve themselves in destructive behaviors in order to seek the love and acceptance that children from unhealthy marriages often do. Healthy marriages, more often than not, produce healthy children. Children who grow up in healthy marriages generally do not become burdens to their community when they reach maturity. Instead they seek out ways to improve the community as well as their own families and marriages.

A community will often spend large amounts of time of money attempting to help children of unhealthy marriages. They will create programs to treat addictive behaviors, such as drugs, alcohol and sex. They will create programs to promote abstinence, in order to curtail teen pregnancies and the spread of STD’s. A community will hire specialize police officers to deal with growing gang violence. Schools will spend money on specialized buildings and teachers to house students who cannot function in a school environment. Cities will build prisons to house the most violent of children. All of this can be stopped or reduced if a community would focus on the root of these problems; the break-up of our families.

Truly healthy marriages produce young adults who are better equipped to handle the challenges of today’s world. These children would have seen first hand how to properly handle disagreements between adults. They would have witnessed first-hand how husbands and wives show love and respect to each other. These children would have a moral set of rules to live by, that when consistently enforced, will teach them how to show respect to authority and live by the laws of the community. These children would have been taught the proper ways to budget and spend money, so that they will not spend beyond their means and have to rely upon the charity of others to help them. These children will have learned how to show charity to others, so they become partners in recovery for those in need, rather than idle watchers.

Healthy marriages show a community’s commitment and hope towards the future. It shows that a community has not adopted the “throw away” attitude of the rest of the world. When a community shows that it is committed to saving the most sacred of institutions, then a community will put forth that same effort in how it conducts business and how it treats its fellow communities.

As you can see having healthy marriages are not just the “moral thing” to do, they are a vital part, if not the life-blood of a thriving and growing community. Don’t you agree?

7-22-08 -- This blog earned a Genius reading level! Cool...maybe this is why I got the job!