Problemas y tendencias contemporáneas de la vida familiar y urbana en Medellín

Abstract

This article, based on secondary bibliography, deals with some contemporary family issues and tendencies in the city of Medellin. These changes in family structure stand out as a result of complex processes such as the decline of the patriarchal family, the massive entry of women into the labor force, and the culture and the success of birth control campaigns in Colombia since the middle of the twentieth century. It also deals with the problem of the new places of infancy and youth within the family and in school, where they occupy central positions with greater recognition than in the past, displacing adults from the center and challenging their authority; and in the forms of urban socialization, defining new cultural paradigms. As in other contexts of the western cultural world, the family has somehow become the refuge of urban life, due to the deterioration of public life, and its supposed crisis is closely associated to the appearance of other forms of socialization in large cities. These and other problems such as the new gender identities and the end of the heterosexuality on which the family and patriarchal society were based, are inscribed within the processes of internationalization of culture, with its distinctive traits in a city like Medellin.