The student of fourth year of the School of Nursing, Fatima Estraviz, has been honored for her writing about the family in the European Youth Conference, a session organized by the Confederation of Family Associations in the Carpathian Basin, celebrated between 15th and 18th October in Brussels. The Confederation of Family Associations in the Carpathian Basin was founded in 2001 by more than 10 associations in Hungary, whose intention was to spread pro-family approach both in the Carpathian basin and in the international arena.

Finalists chosen at the conference had the opportunity to travel to the European Parliament in Brussels, to know the city and do different activities as well as reading their texts, in English, at the seat of Parliament.

Family love

It is a specific human need to have someone to love, somebody you belong to as The Beatles song said “All you need is love” but not only is family a source of love, but it is also a basic unit of a society. The things we learn in a family correspond to the values we expect from everyone. The family teaches you how to interact with other people, how to respect them, and furthermore: how to be happy. It helps its members to develop and pursuit their dreams. It supports you, but also stops you when you are about to make a mistake.

There is no denying, that the family should be based on love and trust between a man and a woman. Since the family shows us how to interact within the society, every child has a right to be brought up by man and woman as only in this situation, one can be fully prepared to understand the different ways of percepting the world. In my opinion, we can do nothing but agree that marriage is the beginning of the family.

To be absolutely honest, the future of the European family worries me. Nowadays there are certain dangers to the family life and I fear that not only will they not disappear, but we will have to work much harder to fight them. Statistics are not lying and they are warning us   that while the number of marriages is decreasing, the number of divorces increases. People waiting years before getting married or deciding to live in cohabitation, the strengthening of the 2+1 family model.

So the question we need to ask is why we do not get married? The answer is simple, we have changed. Nowadays, everything is about “us”: what I think, what I want, what I am going to do… We prefer the comfortable, easy way of living to founding a family of our own. We only want to follow our dreams regardless other things. Women often choose their career, being sure that they have no other choice if they want to be successful.

I think that the main cause is the ideal image of life, proposed by the media and accepted by our generation. It is thought that marriage is restricting because while deciding that you want to spend your whole life with one person, you automatically resign from all the other people. Our generation is used to have everything we want. We are convinced that it is easier to live with somebody with no commitments and that is the reason why we postpone settling down. It all comes to one conclusion: we are running away from responsibility, we are so used to receiving, that it turns out to be extremely hard for us to actually give something.

So, how can we encourage people to take the responsibilities? I strongly believe that we just have to show them that it pays off. When you care for someone and you are responsible for him, you build a beautiful relationship founded on loyalty and trust. You give something, but you receive much more in return. Marriage is the only way to eliminate the wall between man and woman, to make them feel sure and secure about each other. We need the media to remark the positive aspect of having a family and increase the awareness of the incredible work mothers do raising their children.

It is sad that nowadays happiness often equals success at work. So I find it important that we convince young people that they can pursuit their dreams while founding a family. We have to create the circumstances on which a person is not obligated to choose between the well-being and the family life.

Moreover, we have to make the employers understand that by offering a job to a mother they gain a perfectly organized member of the crew and not a person that would have to be paid and then go on a maternity leave. Because who can know better how to manage things than the mother, who has to deal everyday with thousands of issues that are essential to run a family.

Then, when we finally encourage the society to get married and start a family we have to stop the widespread phenomenon of having just one child. “why are people afraid of large families? does more children mean more responsibilities?” that’s what it seems. But in fact it’s easier for a kid to become a model member of the society while having siblings. People tend to over parent one kid, and children need to learn how to take responsibility for themselves and for the others too. Siblings take care for each other, they learn how to cooperate, compromise and share. These are very important advantages of having a large family.

In relation to the divorces, I think they are a serious damage to the institution of family and we should make sure that people realize the responsibility they’re taking while promising to spend life together. Sometimes divorces are the result of the couple forgetting about themselves, they get lost in a crazy rhythm of bringing up their children and they don’t spend enough time together. They’re forgetting that love is not only the emotions we feel at the beginning.

So, as you see, we have to redefine the idea of love and motivate people to fight for it. People used to fix things and they lasted for a long time, but nowadays we tend to throw things away and get new ones, it’s easier, but that cannot happen in marriage.

Since we are grownups we have to remember one thing, life is about making decisions, every single day and marriage is a beautiful decision that should be made under no pressure. When we make a decision we should be ready to face the consequences and not just face them, but do it with joy, enthusiasm and passion.

So to finish I just would like you to think of the beautiful words ending every tale “and they lived happily ever after” sadly, the first words are ‚a long time ago…’, let us not leave it this way, and try to put this magical words in our time by supporting marriages and families, let us live the tale and lead a family life happily ever after!