In the case of my country, people usually aren't rich enough to save for retirement, nor are starting salaries high enough for young adults to stake out on their own. So parents help their kids right up to the point they can no longer work, and then kids take over to provide for the family.
In case of you being affluent (as in with a completely well-funded retirement), I can totally see why you'd want your kids to not see your wealth as theirs. It might ruin their incentives to be productive citizens.
So, does affluence naturally lead to a weakening of strong family ties? Dunno.
In my teammate's experience, parents in India tend to be more hands off and let their kids develop independence earlier. Parents focus more on career. Grandparents are more involved with caring for the children while parents work. Despite the more hands off approach, my teammate misses her parents greatly and was very sad and worried when her father was ill recently.
The parenting approaches are different, but the ephemeral "family tie" seems to be present in both situations.
Americans inculcate a _lot_ more independence than Indians do.
For example, in the US:
- Kids often get jobs and earn their own pocket money at 13+. It's the norm in most places after 16.
- Kids fund their own education
- After 18, there's an expectation in many families that the child will leave and become independent (or at least start paying rent)
- Kids generally make their own life decisions
- This reverses in old age; "old people's homes" are common in the US. After retirement, parents stay separate, and if they're unable to take care of themselves will often move into one of these. Nuclear families are common
In India:
- Middle class kids will not earn until 18, mostly not until after college. When they do earn it's something you can brag about. Definitely not the norm.
- Education is funded by parents. I earned a lot of money last year (I'm a college student). When my friends asked me what I intended to do with it, I got quizzical looks when I said that I was repaying my education. (Higher ed isn't particularly expensive here, but it's not cheap either, and I sort of wanted to start being more independent)
- It is perfectly fine to stay home till ... forever.
- Life decisions are made by the family, sometimes. Marriage is an example of this (though arguably there's a lot of legacy cultural reasons behind that). But career choices are too. A ton of the folks in my college are there because their family wanted them to study engineering.
- Kids take care of their parents as they get older. Extended families are common.
YMMV, of course, but this is commonly how things go from talking with my peers in both countries. Perhaps what you're noticing is a difference in generations, not in countries. Parents are universally more involved in the minutae of their children's lives than they used to be in the past.
http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/children-today-are-suffering...
I'm about to have a kid (wife is 8 months pregnant) so I've been thinking about this some. Unfortunately though, a lot of this is culture and individual parents can't necessarily do a lot. It doesn't matter if I'd rather my kid play in a pick-up game instead of an organized league if all the other kids in the neighborhood are only in leagues.
The biggest drain on your child's free time is going to be school. Our culture is scared right now about falling behind the rest of the developed world in cognitive skills necessary for the future job market. The knee-jerk reaction is to work harder. The result is that more homework gets assigned, more testing takes place, and some groups are calling for longer school days and less vacation time.
You're a parent now. Educate yourself on child development and Education reform. Then get yourself involved politically so you can be your child's advocate.
IMO, what you call strong family ties, others might call patriarchy. When women have improved ability to support themselves, they're more inclined to leave abusive relationships. And like Sandberg, they're less willing to accept menial household roles traditionally assigned to them. There's a podcast from Planet Money about how this plays out among textile workers, if I recall correctly.
They are often correlated and found in similar cultural sources, but they are distinct elements. The US idealization of the nuclear rather than extended family and corresponding weaker family ties didn't (and still often doesn't) come with the breaking of patriarchy -- in fact, it is rooted in a time when patriarchy was quite strong -- though you sometimes (especially now) find non-patriarchal arrangements along with it.
Strong family ties and non-transactional view of family interactions doesn't have any essential tie to patriarchy, nor do weak family ties and a transaction approach to interactions have any essential tie to the absence of patriarchy.
