Modern Youth vs. Preparation for Family Life. Legal Issues
Modern Youth vs. Preparation for Family Life. Legal Issues

Summary/Abstract: Nowadays, preparation for family life is conducted on many different levels. We have come to think about this phenomenon in the context of teaching (school subject: family education), religion or society at large. It can be noticed, however, that this education — albeit indirectly — also takes place in the context of the law. Legal consciousness plays a fundamental role in the shaping of civic behaviour. Without going into the complex questions of the function of the law within society, it should suffice to say that social control maintained by legal norms performs, to put things briefly, three essential functions: it protects the sphere of human freedom; it is a tool with which to achieve particular goals; and, what is especially noteworthy here, it defines the standards of behaviour which bind people (it points to the universal character of the values commonly held to be fundamental). The aim of the law is to shape the members of a community according to a commonly assumed model of conformist behaviours, which is achieved through the internalization of norms and in the process of socialization. Institutions (such as courts), perceived to be not only as entities entitled to impose sanctions but also as carriers of values distributed across the community, play a significant role here. What does preparation for family life look like on the normative level? In other words, for life in what kind of family does the law prepare us nowadays? What is a contemporary family in legal terms and is it the same in both European and national judicature? Are the levels of preparation for family life in contemporary circumstances congruent? Through its synthetic analysis of legal regulations, the object of which is the broadly understood family protection, and of the respective judicatures of the European Court of Human Rights and Polish courts, attempts to answer this question.

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