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Individualism and the Family

Ezra Taft Benson, "Salvation--A Family Affair"
"Today’s inordinate emphasis on individualism brings egotism and separation. Two individuals becoming “one flesh” is still the Lord’s standard. (See Gen. 2:24.)"
Bruce C. Hafen, "Individual Liberty, Commitment, and Marriage"
"Somehow, the idea of irrevocably committing oneself to spouse and children seems out of fashion in these days of individual liberation. There is almost endless talk about personal liberty and self-fulfillment; it is in the air, everywhere. There are “rights movements” not only for minority groups and women, but also for children. However, the leaders of these movements—to leave their advocacy undiluted—seldom talk about the serious problems that could be created by a wholesale adoption of their goals. A line from one of the ballads of the student rights movement of the late 1960s reads, “We want our rights, and we don’t care how.”
This current obsession with individualism has already begun to affect attitudes toward marriage and family life. Strangely, the sacred idea of individual liberty—when carried to its extremes—also contains the seeds of selfishness, the enemy of marriage.”
Bruce C. Hafen, "Covenant Marriage"
"The third wolf is the excessive individualism that has spawned today’s contractual attitudes. A seven-year-old girl came home from school crying, “Mom, don’t I belong to you? Our teacher said today that nobody belongs to anybody—children don’t belong to parents, husbands don’t belong to wives. I am yours, aren’t I, Mom?” Her mother held her close and whispered, “Of course you’re mine—and I’m yours, too.” Surely marriage partners must respect one another’s individual identity, and family members are neither slaves nor inanimate objects. But this teacher’s fear, shared today by many, is that the bonds of kinship and marriage are not valuable ties that bind, but are, instead, sheer bondage. Ours is the age of the waning of belonging.
The adversary has long cultivated this overemphasis on personal autonomy, and now he feverishly exploits it. Our deepest God-given instinct is to run to the arms of those who need us and sustain us. But he drives us away from each other today with wedges of distrust and suspicion. He exaggerates the need for having space, getting out, and being left alone. Some people believe him—and then they wonder why they feel left alone. And despite admirable exceptions, children in America’s growing number of single-parent families are clearly more at risk than children in two-parent families. Further, the rates of divorce and births outside marriage are now so high that we may be witnessing “the collapse of marriage.”
Spencer W. Kimball, "Families Can Be Eternal"
"We of all people, brothers and sisters, should not be taken in by the specious arguments that the family unit is somehow tied to a particular phase of development a mortal society is going through. We are free to resist those moves which downplay the significance of the family and which play up the significance of selfish individualism. We know the family to be eternal. We know that when things go wrong in the family, things go wrong in every other institution in society."