Here is another mental exercise for us to consider.

Pick some affluent suburb in America.  It needs to be fairly large and it needs to be mostly white.

At the same time pick some poor, underprivileged urban neighborhood.  It also needs to be fairly large and it needs to be mostly black.

Find two similar families in the white suburb.  The two families need to have similar economic situations and incomes and similar homes with space enough for a guest family.  Each family needs to have a set of heterosexual parents and a boy and a girl somewhere between 10 and 14 years old.  For the sake of this experiment only the father in each family works.  The kids are active and are all good students, preferably at the same school.  Those are the similarities.  

The differences are as follows: one family consists of two liberal parents who are agnostic, atheist, or non-practitioners of their chosen religion while the other consists of two conservative parents who are faith based and active practitioners of that faith.

For now, political preferences are not a major concern but neither family should have a professional or personal agenda which is influenced or impacted overly much by political considerations.  Political situations may be important to the family’s existence and success but need to have no discernible effects upon this experiment.

Find two similar families in the black inner-city neighborhood.  The two families need to have similar economic situations and incomes and similar homes or apartments.  Each family needs to have four members but one has a set of heterosexual parents while the other has a single mother and would therefore have two boy and one girl or two girls and one boy.  All kids will be aged between 10 and 14.

The differences here are as follows:  the single-mother family is essentially dependent on the government for its existence and is mostly non-religious, not attending church except when necessary.  The kids go to school but are not necessarily good students and education is not considered important in the household.  The other family has a working father and perhaps a working mother.   The kids attend school because it is considered of paramount importance for them to be successful students, which they are, and for them to be working toward getting into a good college to pursue a useful and useable degree there.  The second family attends church regularly and is, in general, quite religious.

Have you guessed yet what is next?  Good for you!

Yes, the single-mother family packs up their stuff and are transported to the home of the liberal white suburban family.  They will move in and live with this family for one year.  A set of goals and objectives will be created by each family in terms of what they expect from each other and also how they hope to change one another.  These may or may not be shared- it is up to the two families.

And, yes, the two-parent urban family also moves in with the conservative suburban family to live with them for a year as well.  The creation and possible sharing of goals and objectives will be done by them also.

We might also assign an independent panel of sociologists to help monitor but in no way control or even influence the experiment.    

Interaction between the new households, including at school if they do attend the same one, is to be kept at a bare minimum.

So set it up and get it going and then just watch what happens over the twelve months.

Any thoughts on how things will go to in each household and with each family?  Any projections on where things wind up?

Yes, I know that the variations on this experiment are endless and interesting but we’ll just leave those aside…for now at least.