Week 2 blog: Research

This week I researched  about the trends around the world to have less children. An interesting trend that I looked at is the change in culture regarding the family in Japan. It has been said that individuals are expected to serve the best interests of their family above their own. This has been the culture around Japan for hundreds of years. It has always been widely expected for men to be the breadwinners for families, while women would stay home and keep up the house. Within the last hundred years, it has gradually become more and more acceptable for women to go out and get jobs, and educations. This has led to more women putting career advancement over trying to start a family. As a result the population of children under 20 is less than the population of the working class, which means that the general population is generally going to decrease, because there are not enough people to fill out the population in Japan.

I found this to be very interesting, because I feel that I have noticed that generally, there has been a growing sentiment in America for women to also join the workforce more, and go and receive educations. As a result, I was wondering why there is a different story with the population of America. Even though it seems that there are more women going into different sectors, the population has not yet begun to decrease, and rather stay constant. I believe that it is because of the many different ideologies across America. For many people they who belong to some sort of  Christian religion, they are more likely to pursue having a family. In Japan, 1.5% of the population follows Christian practices, while in America 65% of the population practices some for of Christianity.

Religion has long been shown to have a large impact on the ideological thinking of people. For many people religion has a direct influence on the choices they make. For example it is now very common in America for people to not work on Sunday's, because many people would need to take it off for church on Sunday. Many people around the globe have different traditions that have been passed down through generations. It is interesting to see how religion around the globe impacts similarly across different cultures. An example of this is how the Jewish religion, Passover is on the same day as Easter, which are both considered the biggest days in each religion. 

Even though all cultures from across the world are largely very different, it is interesting to see there view on the family. In Catholicism, the family is considered an essential part of the church, and for them, marriage is one of their seven sacraments. Islam views the family as the fundamental unit of society. Throughout the whole world, they all believe that the family is essential characteristic of society. Even though in different views on the roles people play in the family, it always has the same goal for their families which is to help strengthen their society that they live in.

I think it is interesting how to many people around the world, they believe that their religion is right, while others must also be wrong, but as we look around the world, we can see many similarities that come up throughout all kinds of different cultures and religions. I believe as the world moves on and blends together more and more, there will become less and less individual cultures, and as a result, more and more people will become understanding of  each other, and allow for more cohesion. This will allow for either families to become a bigger trend, and increase in a lot of places, or the opposite could happen, and cause a deep decline in the amount of people who pursue families in search of advancement in their own personal lives, such as a career.