Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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JANUARY 6-12, 2016 UCW 5 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM For many of us, the holidays bring precious time with family that is of ten hard to come by during the rest of the year. The Dick sons shook our holidays up a bit this year with less formalit y but plent y of togetherness with various family branches at a Christmas Eve supper, a Christmas Day oyster roast, a post-Christmas fried chicken fest and New Year's black-eyed peas with pimento cheese muff ins. Plent y of both family and food. Family relationships ebb and f low, of course, with beginnings and, sadly, endings. They morph, contracting and expanding among husbands and wives, parent s and children, siblings according to changing circumst ances and age. We all recognize when things are evolv ing in our own families. W hat we may not see as clearly is that our change may not be personal to our own families. They may be par t of trends that are carr y ing others along as well. I am par t of the Baby Boom generation, the largest American generation born af ter World War II, until the Millennials, some of them our own children, blew past us in numbers. Our t wo generations spor t many differences, among them that Millennials are far more diverse than Baby Boomers. Another is that while Baby Boomers married for the most par t in our 20s, that is not the case with Millennials. Today 's Americans bet ween 18 and 34 are, in fact, less than half as likely to be married as were their counterpar t s 50 years ago. Reasons for their aversion to the alt ar seem elusive but money likely plays a signif icant role. The Great Recession slowed most people down a bit, few more so than young folk s just st ar ting out . Many continue to live in their parent s' homes out of economic necessit y. In a recent American Family Sur vey, Millennials ack nowledge f inancial securit y as a reason to defer marriage, but they also reference education, several serious relationships as point s of reference and home ownership. Love, it seems, is not enough to tie the k not, mak ing marriage less a marker of young adulthood than a later-in-life achievement . Families come in all shapes and sizes, of course, some of them being foster families and adoptive ones. Nor th Carolina has plent y of both, with more than 10,000 children in foster care with more than 2,000 of them waiting for an adoptive home. The number of adoptive families is harder to pin down, as many of today 's adoptions are private. Foster children who do not f ind their " forever families" have far too of ten had a diff icult time, because they aged out of the foster care system at 18, of ten into nothingness. The Nor th Carolina General Assembly has now allowed some foster children to st ay in the system until 21, not a perfect solution but three years bet ter than f inding oneself entirely on one's own at the tender age of 18. In addition, the st ate has launched an initiative to place foster children in forever homes. No one had ever heard of paternit y leave when I was a child, and my father did what most men of his generation did — he brought home most of the bacon and was sweet to and tolerant of my sister and me. I remember a ver y sleepy Daddy reading "The Three Lit tle Pigs" to my sister who k new the words by hear t, of course. He groggily misread a line, say ing " lay ing pigs and slapping mor t ar bet ween them," which sent the toddler into wails of distress. I do not recall any diaper duties or meal preparation, except for occasional sof t scrambled eggs cooked in the double boiler. Contrast that with new father Mark Zuckerburg , also famously the father of Facebook . The Zuckerburgs have a new daughter, Ma x, and daddy Mark has announced he will t ake t wo months of paternit y leave. Facebook offers four months of paid paternit y leave. Mother Priscilla Chan is a pediatrician who is t ak ing an undisclosed maternit y leave, so lit tle Ma x will be well at tended. Mark has already posted a photo of himself changing a diaper on Facebook with the caption, "One more down, thousands to go." Admit tedly, Mark Zuckerburg has the resources to do whatever he pleases and admit tedly paid paternit y leave remains rare in our countr y out side the technolog y industries. The fact that the high- prof ile Zuckerburg is t ak ing his paternit y leave so publicly still strikes me as signif icant . It says to the fathers of his generation, Millennials, that babies need their fathers as well as their mothers and that this is A-OK . It also says to his generation that paternit y leave is an impor t ant business practice and that American companies should prov ide that benef it as companies in other nations, especially in Europe, do routinely. A ll this may not be evolution in a Dar winian sense, but it is evolution nonetheless. Family Evolution by MARGARET DICKSON THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET MARGARET DICKSON. Columnist. COMMENTS? Editor@upandcomin- gweekly.com. 910.484.6200. Mark Zuckerburg announced he was taking paternity leave, signaling a change in the role of father's in American families.