The Importance of a Complete Family - 3
Anyone that views Mark’s five videos with Ivy feel her pain resulting from her lack of success in striving to overcome her personal challenges. She feels alone, unloved, and that the public views her as an inferior person being a drug addict and a whore. Actually, we should admire her courage to share her struggles and grief so that others can understand and develop approaches to ensure that others do not have to experience the social trap that has resulted in her psychological and physical pain.
It would be easy to identify missing elements in Ivy’s social environment, but a greater challenge is to describe the type of environment that she was unable to have.
In our American society we call an important social unit a “family.” Ivy and many others that Mark interviews did not experience a full family in their early years. Is this a major cause of their personal struggles?
In various parts of the world, groups of people have successfully structured families in different ways. In our nation we have developed several successful structures. An American ideal regarding families involves a group of adults that live by common abstract concepts and values, and that are educated, skilled, and motivated to be self-reliant. Because we have intentionally created a nation made up of people of all races, cultures, and customs, the adults must be tolerant of differences among our people. The adults must advocate and live by E Pluribus Unum, our national moto “Out of Many – One.”
Those involved in successfully raising children of good character include biologically related adults (parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.), but also neighbors, family friends, team coaches, teachers, leaders in child development organizations (scouting, YMCA programs, churches, etc.), and so on. These individuals are respected in their communities and are mature, adult role models that might be called child development facilitators.
A common element in helping children become adults involves first providing them enough of a feeling of security to overcome their natural fears of the outside world but also involves encouraging them to progressively attempt new things and gain confidence in their personal capabilities. Self-confidence, feelings of self-worth, and self-respect come from children’s personal accomplishments.
Because of our population being multicultural, different groups apply different approaches to accomplish similar positive children development outcomes. In “The Thoughts of a 22-Year-Old Woman-Hunny” video Mark discusses the emphasis made in Asian families for pressuring their children to be well-educated and achieve success in high-paying careers. This probably relates to the fact that Asians Americans make more income per-capita than any other group, including whites.
Although Mark’s videos document that serious social challenges are experienced by people of every race and ethnicity, Ivy’s difficulties may relate to her race. The U.S. Census Bureau documents that from 1890 to until the late-1960’s black Americans were more likely to be married and raise their children in traditional family environments than any other group. Today, black families that live in traditional families are more financially well off than those in fragmented, incomplete “families” like Ivy’s. Why did that negative, social change occur in the late 1960’s? Should there be investigations to answer this question?

What would Frederick Douglass think? 6/29/2025