Interesting essay and there can be little doubt many of us live atomized lives, at least here in the US.
I’m not quite convinced, though, that close family living is the preferred mode of living even back in pre-industrial days when there was little choice but to stick close to your family and learn its business if you wanted to survive.
Were parents and adult children really happy to live and work together, and with the grandparents? Is that living arrangement the natural instinct of human beings that modernity has thwarted, or do people crave independence?
My own unsystematic observations are that young people leave the parental home, and business in some cases, almost as soon as possible even if they have the opportunity to stay. The desire for independence seems to win out although it could be argued modern societies condition people to live that way.
The most impressive families I’ve observed are those where most members live in the same geographical region but maintain separate homes. In one case the family members collaborated to run a very successful property rental business. I believe that type of set up is probably the instinctive living arrangement for most people and strikes the right balance between independence and connectedness.
According to Joseph Henrich, overly rigid kinship holds back economic development and naturally involves low level corruption and nepotism. Allegiance to family and clan is replaced by allegiance to other entities such as companies or nations. This appears to have been quite effective at generating wealth, which has mostly been considered a Good Thing.
See my comment on the author’s assumption every culture and nationality/ethnicity should have the same family structure. This wasn’t true even in neolithic tribes!
This was very much my own thinking on reading the article. For all the attractions of the extended family as described (and there are many), the restrictions and problems are obvious.
It assumes that everyone will be happy to be restricted as to where to live and what to do for a living. How many jobs today can be done in the home or near the home? (Many with the help of the internet, but could the internet and all the technology on which it is dependent have come into being without people moving around, working in factories, and so on?)
What for those who want to strike out and travel, meet other people, do something different for an occupation, contribute to greater institutions? What’s life going to be like for ‘the only gay in the village’? How does such a society generate specialists, who often need to congregate in centres of learning or production (at medical school, university, engineers, inventors and innovators).
All given up for a stifling, parochial, clannish, existence, hostile to ‘outsiders’ of every kind – and probably all at the mercy of the most strong-willed family member (patriarchy, anyone?)
“Is that living arrangement the natural instinct of human beings that modernity has thwarted, or do people crave independence?”
Or maybe humans are more complex and have different preferences or personalities, such preferences naturally being different on a practical level in a world of subsistence farmers than a high-tech society.
What I’ve seen in rural Kenya, which is still tribal, is the kids have a house next door. This sounds very good to me considering my sons are still at home!
I’m not sure the author is arguing that i was the “preferred mode of living” but rather that it was a far more beneficial way of living for the society as a whole.
Your concern for the preferences of the young is itself a function of modern, post-Industrial, secular liberalism. Most societies in the world do not embrace this sort of maximal individual autonomy. That’s a WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) perspective.
The last 100 years in West have been a huge experiment in altering the conditions of familial life. What are the results? Look around you. Tremendous material success coupled with devastating spiritual impoverishment. A technological utopia of connection in which everyone is atomized and alone.
Nanda Kishor
1 year ago
Such traditional families are still somewhat common in South America, and many of us migrating to the first world have felt the shock of leaving that behind. The point about family being part of a larger community resonates the most, because I’ve lived it and it’s just so fulfilling and practical in many ways.
Sam Sky
1 year ago
This article makes it sound as if it is just children, who at a certain age desperately want to leave and be free and abandon the family home. I’m not sure. A good many parents are also desperate to be free of their adult children, want privacy and to be able to do their own thing. Many may expect their children to stay close and look after them but do not want them at home. Many resent adult children that don’t fly the nest. Probably because the author, despite writing a book on nationalism hasn’t considered the family dynamics in different nationalities and ethinicities may play out differently, so couldn’t imagine such parents – it seems obvious Orthodox Jewish parentd are very different.
I’m not sure the nuclear family only developed after WW2. It was clearly visible in the 19th century and was clearly a consequence of the industrial revolution. Yes grandparents might live with their families but peoole rarely lived far beyond 70, so their time as a burden was limited and the intergenerational strife of infirm parents living through their 90s wasn’t a phenomenon. Even then, many ended up dumped in workhouses.
At least in protestant countries parents will shame their adult kids into having their own place and living with your parents is a sign of failure and maturity. Yes, the number of adult children doing this is on the rise but it largely seen as shameful. I personally felt great pressure to leave and start my own life. I can’t really say this was necessarily a bad thing. Atomising? Maybe, but then again also a hard lesson in personal responsibility.
Now knowing Spain for some time I see a very different set of cultural attitudes where people only move out when married, if then. There is no shame attached to this. Bit even in the Mediterraean families are small compared to the tribal Arabs. Catholic restrictions on consanguinity pushed families in a more nuclear direction for centuries.
But it confirms my suspicion that family structures and attitudes are very different in place to place and environment they fimd themselves in just on pure blunt antropological facts. Eskimos live in small groups, Bedouin live in large extended family groups, both are “natural” organic responses to their environment. Anglo-Protestant culture may be atomising, but in a colder less resource rich parts of the world a degree if individualism aids survival – Anglo-Saxons and Norse had much smaller families than the equivalenrs south, the opposite is true in but it also was the force that produced much of the modern world through commerce and science.
I think the author is pulling a rhetorical ruse here to assume Orthodox Jewish families under the weasal word Judean-Christian (but mainly Judean) to represent the same cultural amd historic context as, say, Northern Europeans
Caroline Galwey
1 year ago
Some good points – let’s not forget, though, that wife-beating, incest, the ill-treatment of children and elders, and all kinds of petty tyranny and cruelty also flourished in the bosom of the ‘traditional family’ and there was very little recourse against it.
I’m not sure the 70% single-motherhood of American Blacks today is an improvement, Is it better to grow up with an imperfect father or with no father at all. Or worse, a succession of temporary “fathers” that cycle through your home.
All familial structures are imperfect. All carry risks and benefits. The question is which provides the strongest basis to build a stable society over the long term. On that count, the author’s suggestion that an multi-generational family living and working together and in close proximity to an extended family group is hard to beat. It is not the most efficient in short-run economic terms, but it is the most stable in long-run societal benefit.
Juffin Hully
1 year ago
Great text, although I don’t completely agree with it. It provides food for thought – which makes it even greater.
One issue I have is that the family is considered as if in a vacuum, without looking at the changes in the wider society like industrialisation and common education. Surely, the fathers have not just decided out of the blue to go and spend their productive hours away from home (or farm). When industrialised mass production took hold, the previous “work-from-home” artisan and farming jobs just ceased to exist. The author also paints the “golden age” picture, where children receive good education and old people receive good care in the family. The reality was less rosy, I am afraid. For most families the alternative to mass education in (however imperfect) schools is no education at all, and alternative to retirement homes – no medical care at all.
The problem that I have with this and many other conservative commentators on this web site is that they paint this appealing picture of the good old days without accounting for the change in material circumstances that has occurred since. Despite the decline in monogamous marriage, we do not see men fighting each other in the streets over women – thanks in no small part to the modern education system indoctrinating us that such behaviour is unacceptable, and also to the modern state with its law enforcement. Similarly, there are enough birth control measures available to both men and women for preventing unwanted babies.
I have been thinking on this subject a lot on my own. I do agree with the author about the shortcomings of the nuclear family. I disagree, however, that the family structure from a few decades (or centuries) ago would work in the modern era as is. I would love to see a debate on what might work on these pages, but so far I have not seen any credible ideas.
It also doesn’t seem to offer a realistic way to enforce this either. Is the government going to force people who don’t want to live in extended families to live together at gun point? Are they going to ban all technology and return to an agricultural society – and presumably hope the Chinese decide to do the same thing rather than invade with their now technological superiority? Are we going to kill people if they are atheists and don’t believe in the religious basis of the society suggested by the author? Stating these is the difference between philosophical or intellectual grandstanding and an actual vision for society.
If people drifted away from these types of families there was probably a reason they did so. I know people from ‘traditional’ families such as India who after a generation or two ended up living in nuclear families. Now you might say this is due to the economic pressure of a modern capitalist society. Well maybe, but if people really wanted this life they would have found ways to do so, as for example Orthodox Jews do.
Now some individuals may well be seeking to return to this for their own moral or religious reasons. And good luck to them. But without some kind of totalitarian nightmare I don’t see how it would be possible to force people who don’t want this kind of life or family structure to live like that.
Well, the government has subtler ways of urging people to do the right thing, other than holding them at gunpoint or killing them. For example, make home schooling for kids easier to arrange. Regulate for building bigger homes. Offer economic incentives.
The point is, we need to agree what the right thing is first, and how to achieve it in the modern era. OK, we might all agree that the nuclear family is not the right thing, but neither is some rosy picture of the good old days.
This reminds me: there is this book, “The Weirdest People in the World” by Joseph Heinrich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World, which argues that the West owes its prosperity in no small part to proliferation of nuclear family. So it might have its benefits, after all.
Yes, and Jordan Peterson kind of argues the same thing too about this being precisely connected. If you can’t get universal agreement among conservatives, then what how is a general consensus on this going to be formed? And this prosperity… it is easy for decadent Westerners to easily scoff at what prosperity and wealth has brought, but I wonder how many would genuinely be happy with returning to sky high child mortality, the risk of famine, being condemned to extreme poverty and illiterate ignorance all your life, which was the lot of the majority of humanity for most of history. It’s easy to whinge about lack of purpose and spirtual emptiness when you don’t have real, more quotidian problems to deal with.
And yes the government can nudge in this way but unless people actually want to live in multigenerational families (except under economic duress), then I’m not sure any of these policies would actually work. Bigger homes could just lead to partitioning or renting out, unless you ban people doing these things. Tax incentives may help, but then again places that offer tax incentives for bigger families often end up only increasing the population among least productive and socially adapted, those with any degree of intelligence or social capital end up finding ways to get what they want anyway.
I don’t think the move to a nuclear family was part of some comprehensive government policy. It just reflected the logical conclusion of the economic and social changes that the whole of Europe, and especially the protestant north, had been experiencing for centuries.
The unasked question in your comment is whether “the modern era” is actually beneficial or not. I strongly suspect that we’ve been unknowingly running down cultural and spiritual capital since the Enlightenment / Industrial Revolution. We can ignore it since the drawdown is so slow, but this piece and others illustrate that the damage is becoming too great to pretend to not notice.
The imploding cultural milieu of the post-Enlightenment world is colliding with the increasingly obvious resource depletion of the post-industrial world. The traditional family may win out over modernity in the end.
See Paul Kingsnorth for a great treatment of this.
It may happen naturally as I fear the west is headed for some substantial dark days. Those without family ties will suffer more I think.
Jane Hewland
1 year ago
That may be the single most important article Unherd have published. A lot more relevant to our lives than the endless gender nonsense they give space to.
Ray Mullan
1 year ago
Excellent piece. I have nothing to add.
Jo Nielson
1 year ago
1) the author doesn’t seem to realize the slack/abuse a lot of us take for being stay at home parents. It’s really a fringe thing these days and the families are already religious. So that’s kind of a moot point. You simply can’t force people to wake up one day and decide to act on religion when they’ve been raised to think of it as hogwash. So many in my generation (under 60) and the younger people LOATHE anything that looks and sounds like religion. This can not be overstated. This is true – even here in America where a good part of the population is still highly religious.
2) Single parenting is a thing and I really don’t know how you’d convince a lot of women or men to actually marry at this point. There simply aren’t a lot of social incentives to do so.
3) while I like the idea of having roots in a community – many in my generation move every few years for work and career advancement. Again, just practically I don’t see how we work in the global economy changing anytime soon.
4) some extended families are just super toxic and really shouldn’t be around the next generation. Yes, you lose some community, but peace and stability is important too.
Absolutely. The ‘nuclear’ family and the ‘housewife’ were creations of the Industrial Revolution and, particularly, post war capitalism. Feminists know this. The ‘family’ remains strong in traditional working class communities, although it is based around grandmothers, mothers and daughters, with men as peripheral figures (and always has been- men were always at work, asleep or in the pub and often died young), and in rural communities where it is also a business enterprise; most British farms are still family partnerships. In each of those situations, family groups of parents and children live in their own houses but interact on a daily basis with the others. On farms, for example, everyone will eat lunch together in the farmhouse kitchen, particularly at harvest or lambing times. In working class communities most childcare, allowing mothers to work, is still provided by grandparents. That has always been the case, as working class women have always worked; the ‘housewife’ is a middle class creation.
One of the unrecognised effects of the lockdowns (not the “pandemic’, but the hysterical over reactions of governments) was the damage that it did to traditional family life by isolating ‘families’ in their own homes. That did not work, either for the working class sisters who live, with their children, on the same council estate street as their parents and aunts, or for several generations of a farming family living in separate houses on their own land. Hopefully, they ignored it.
“The ‘nuclear’ family and the ‘housewife’ were creations of the Industrial Revolution and, particularly, post war capitalism. Feminists know this.”
Except it is tendentious rot. In both ancient and medieval times women’s place was considered the home. Now it’s true that what was considered housework was much broader, albeit only among the lower classes, but private housework it was certainly considered. Brewing and weaving for example were considered part of the private functiin of maintaining a house, not a public role like men had. The industrial revolution just made housewives bored by reducing the amount of housework they needed to do, or rather reducing its ambit.
Last edited 1 year ago by Sam Sky
Francisco CDN
1 year ago
Great post. I have come to the same conclusions and my family tend to think this way, too – we subconsciously already follow the traditional (but also timeless and resilient) family model as described in this article and I think we are better for it – and the rest of society would be, too. But that’s another matter
Although what counts as “timeless and resilient” depends on who you ask or where you live. Jordan Peterson constantly stresses the importance of leaving home in a timely manner and being independent and separate from your parents, even to the point of *not* helping elderly people excessively for example, and seems to justify this on the basis of timeless Jungian archetypes of the “heros quest” etc.
Earl King
1 year ago
It would be beneficial for elders to be around their children and grandchildren for as long as possible. Elder care isn’t the best. But large homes with 4 and 5 bedrooms are not affordable for everyone. Add in that we where house our elderly our society has an issue. We live to long not to do anything. Humans need purpose.
J. Brelner
1 year ago
The “traditional” family described (where labor and work are done within the home) brings to mind share-cropping and piece work. It might have made for a more cohesive family unit, but familes lived in slums and on subsistence farms. The nuclear family on the other hand is what made America a superpower and its dissolution is fast destroying America.
h w
1 year ago
Thank you for this. The strong families described produce more goods and services for themselves. Thus family well-being offends both left and right because it means less profits for mega-corporations and fewer tax-funded unioinized jobs, and fewer consumers of the drugs and services that deal with dysfunction caused by insufficient love and attachments. No wonder family as a core social-economic sector is ignored or maligned. The family and associates were historically our ‘social safety net’ and now this safety net is other people’s (adult) children. So money-rich/relationship-poor nations like mine (Canada) are importing care providers – only ‘the best and the brightest’ of course – from money-poor/relationship-rich countries to do care-work of our elders, sick, children, dying, and disabled while unburdened family members pursue ‘independence’. This neo-colonialist care-work practice deprives millions of children of their mothers sent here to send back cash, and deprives care-exporting nations of citizens who have enough wealth to obtain the education to speak English and be counted among the desirable human imports. But institutional stranger-care is unhygienic, very cash-costly, inadequate, inefficient, and often inhumane now; the ‘chronic staff shortages’ in waged care-work will only worsen leaving many ‘child-free’ elder and ill adults to suffer horrifically and alone.
The thing is though most ‘traditional socities’ were also places that were or are medically backward where older people tended to die at a reasonably age or after an illness and not hang around for decades in a semi-vegtative state.
Last edited 1 year ago by Sam Sky
Judy Johnson
1 year ago
Working outside the home is surely a consequence of the Industrial Revolution rather than the World Wars.
It would not be possible to return to the traditional family life described here because people know too much of the outside world and that will always beckon to many.
Christopher Chantrill
1 year ago
Maybe “the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family” because modern adults don’t feel the need for the support of a traditional family.
I suspect that the traditional family was a survival thing, not a moral thing.
I think that the nuclear family “just growed.”
Henry Haslam
1 year ago
An excellent article. Some nuclear families work well. Others benefit from – or suffer from the lack of – the support that comes from being part of a wider network of close family and/or community.
Slopmop McTeash
1 year ago
Family is the number one most important thing in human history. Family is also the most powerful concept in human history.
Governments have known this for centuries and until the beginning of the 20th century, governments counted on the philosophy of the family as a strength.
Now things have changed…In the 1920s governments started to understand that they would never have absolute control over the population whilst they remained subordinate to the concept of family.
So, the Western governments went about the task of destroying the family.
First, divorce was granted. We all know that in EXCEPTIONAL circumstances divorce may be a good thing for all those involved. But only in EXECPTIONAL circumstances…and thus divorce must be made illegal…for the good of the many outweigh the selfish idiocy of the few.
Divorce is not freedom; divorce is a catastrophic failing of weak and unworthy people. Divorce is enslavement….divorce invites BIG BROTHER into the lives of its victims.
Marriage is a commitment not just between a man and a woman, but also it is a commitment to all of their unborn children to create a system of love and structure into which those unborn children will be born and raised.
Next the government deliberately sponsored (with tax payers money) childbirth out of wedlock. Then the governments taxed families until the pips squeaked!
Next, we were told two people of the same sex can get married! HOW?
Then we were told the concept of male and female no longer exists.
Now, we are peddled the lie that we are getting freedom when, in truth, all we are getting is the hollow and vacuous shame of self-worship.
Each year western governments increase the pressure on the family unit, and as more cracks in the family structure develop, the harder they squeeze. Once the family unit has been destroyed, the government will own us all and freedom will be but a distant memory.
Last edited 1 year ago by Slopmop McTeash
Terence Fitch
1 year ago
My reading of history is that most families have always been complicated: eg Shakespeare’s family life or The Paston Family of the Paston Letters. All this subject to early death and remarrying and childlessness and infertility: Henry VIII! Thomas Hardy- selling your wife plus 19th century soldier’s wives ‘on the strength’ remarrying a number of times as their husbands were killed. The 1950s-60’s consumer family is atypical. That said, bringing up children is vastly less exhausting with a long settled couple plus grandparents.
Iggi Steiger
1 year ago
Great essay with (to me) surpring insights about the dynamics of child-parent relations in childhood, puberty and adult life. I just wanted to add two aspects: typologies of personalities and welfare states.
Individuals differ in their preferences and it is obvious that your personality traits like openess to new experiences, agreeableness, introversion/extraversion, conscientiousness will heavily influence the quality and quantity of intergenerational cooperation you desire.
On the other hand, availability of formal child care, health insurance, pensions, retirement homes and the real estate market determine a great deal of how much intergenerational detachment can be chosen. Societies differ markedly in that regard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Worlds_of_Welfare_Capitalism
Gordon Arta
1 year ago
The nuclear family has not ‘failed’. What has failed is the assignment of parental responsibilities to ‘the state’ by well-meaning but essentially dependency-culture inducing policies such as the Great Society and the Welfare State. The imposition of religious diktat on parents and children is no solution at all. What 2 adults arrange between themselves is their business; people grow and change, and a partnership that is mutually advantageous in their early adulthood may be very different later in life. It is only where children come into the equation that long term, broader, responsibilities should be encouraged, if not legally enforced. Take away the outdated notions of a few convenient biblical texts (ignoring, of course, the many inconvenient ones), and the responsible nuclear family has the key attributes of the ‘traditional’ family.
Are you really that blind? Then look at rich countries with weak social welfare, such as Hong Kong, South Korea or Chile; and you will notice the same pattern of failed families and atomization of society.
Last edited 1 year ago by Roberto Zetola
John Hilton
1 year ago
I read a book on stone-age economics a while back. Using experiences from cultures discovered in historical time (incl aborigines), they noted that the grandparents usually do the child tearing. This is often partly true for contemporary nuclear families, and was probably more prevalent before the great wars.
Last edited 1 year ago by John Hilton
David Johnson
1 year ago
My wife and I, our son, daughter and son-in-law and two grandchildren all live within 10 minutes of each other in the same small city. While we do not all live together, we gather every Sunday for lunch. Some combination of us also talk, visit, or work together on a project most days.
Our adult children both came back to live with my wife and I at different times. Our daughter and her husband lived with us for a season after a period of living on their own. They now have their own house shared with their kids.
This is the richest season of our 70+ years and I believe the younger adults would say the same. We genuinely like being together. The youngest don’t know any other way of life, and thrive in the attention of five adults.
We are also individually and together connected into a larger community of Jesus people. This brings hope, plus common purpose and vision.
As our grandchildren reach adulthood, I hope they will have caught a strong sense of what life together with extended family can be. I hope they will add their adult lives to ours as part of an ongoing family enterprise that will build the relational wealth we all enjoy.
I have thought for some time that we in the West too easily cast aside familial connections on reaching adulthood. While clearly not for all, many of us of all generations would fare much better in stronger extended-family-centric arrangements. With the growing access to remote work, many more young people could take advantage of the joy and economic improvement of life together.
Our family culture in the West is the way it is…..but that does not mean it is the best way. I believe the emotional well-being of most of us would improve by strengthening family bonds however that looks.
Lori Wagner
1 year ago
Lovely article
William Shaw
1 year ago
Video calls to friends and relatives are a poor substitute but I don’t see any other alternative today.
Luke Lea
1 year ago
Readers might be interested in my proposal for factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs: the new lifestyle such factories would make possible, how they can be made to run faster and more efficiently than conventional factories, and the new kinds of families, neighborhoods, and towns that might develop around them. Here is a link:
People become as independent and autonomous as they can afford to be. In affluent societies we have to choose to prioritise relationships, community and the vulnerable.
Kat L
1 year ago
Wow fascinating article, I never knew any of this and it makes total sense.
John Riordan
1 year ago
It is surely clear that if the traditional family’s existence depended upon it being a business as well as a home, then it is the advance of mass production and the growth of corporations which has made the family redundant as an economic force.
I don’t say this in order to ascribe blame here: we are all far wealthier as a consequence of how industry and commerce has evolved over the past century. But this essay is well timed because we are now seeing some re-establishment of the home as a business enterprise with the way the knowledge economy is changing where we work – or at least it appears to be post-Covid, but the jury’s still out on that.
Speaking for myself though, my job as an IT contractor isn’t going to work very well if I’m doing it at home with my parents, wife and kids in the house all at the same time. I think that’s more a recipe for disaster than a basis for restoration of the traditional family unit.
Jake Prior
1 year ago
A very well written article. Many btl are pointing out the obvious and often painful flaws of the arrangement suggested. I think this misses the point, which is really, what ideals might be aimed for to give the best chance of successful personal and civil lives, rather than setting a blueprint for automatic contenment and happiness. Of course people are flawed, and will manage to find fault with and wreck even the most ideal of situations, but it’s worth considering what guidelines might give the best chance for fulfilment. Just saying every situation creates the fertile ground for human misery just describes human nature, at least the author makes an attempt at a positive arrangement.
Sadly, I think for many people, myself included, too many of the pillars are missing so they have no foundation from which to build this sort of family. I agree that the pressures of the nuclear family look intolerable, and I’ve favoured remaining single – of course aided by rejection a few times – and will very likely have no children as a result. This is of course a very imperfect solution, not that I’m dissatisfied with my solitude, but I enjoy life, so not finding a situation in which I’m willing to bring more of it into the world is of course a failure. I’m afraid I think it very unlikely I would enjoy life in a nuclear family, as I’ve seen all too often, and it’s not in my power to have the situation the author proposes. So what should one do?
Interesting essay and there can be little doubt many of us live atomized lives, at least here in the US.
I’m not quite convinced, though, that close family living is the preferred mode of living even back in pre-industrial days when there was little choice but to stick close to your family and learn its business if you wanted to survive.
Were parents and adult children really happy to live and work together, and with the grandparents? Is that living arrangement the natural instinct of human beings that modernity has thwarted, or do people crave independence?
My own unsystematic observations are that young people leave the parental home, and business in some cases, almost as soon as possible even if they have the opportunity to stay. The desire for independence seems to win out although it could be argued modern societies condition people to live that way.
The most impressive families I’ve observed are those where most members live in the same geographical region but maintain separate homes. In one case the family members collaborated to run a very successful property rental business. I believe that type of set up is probably the instinctive living arrangement for most people and strikes the right balance between independence and connectedness.
According to Joseph Henrich, overly rigid kinship holds back economic development and naturally involves low level corruption and nepotism. Allegiance to family and clan is replaced by allegiance to other entities such as companies or nations. This appears to have been quite effective at generating wealth, which has mostly been considered a Good Thing.
See my comment on the author’s assumption every culture and nationality/ethnicity should have the same family structure. This wasn’t true even in neolithic tribes!
This was very much my own thinking on reading the article. For all the attractions of the extended family as described (and there are many), the restrictions and problems are obvious.
It assumes that everyone will be happy to be restricted as to where to live and what to do for a living. How many jobs today can be done in the home or near the home? (Many with the help of the internet, but could the internet and all the technology on which it is dependent have come into being without people moving around, working in factories, and so on?)
What for those who want to strike out and travel, meet other people, do something different for an occupation, contribute to greater institutions? What’s life going to be like for ‘the only gay in the village’? How does such a society generate specialists, who often need to congregate in centres of learning or production (at medical school, university, engineers, inventors and innovators).
All given up for a stifling, parochial, clannish, existence, hostile to ‘outsiders’ of every kind – and probably all at the mercy of the most strong-willed family member (patriarchy, anyone?)
“Is that living arrangement the natural instinct of human beings that modernity has thwarted, or do people crave independence?”
Or maybe humans are more complex and have different preferences or personalities, such preferences naturally being different on a practical level in a world of subsistence farmers than a high-tech society.
What I’ve seen in rural Kenya, which is still tribal, is the kids have a house next door. This sounds very good to me considering my sons are still at home!
I’m not sure the author is arguing that i was the “preferred mode of living” but rather that it was a far more beneficial way of living for the society as a whole.
Your concern for the preferences of the young is itself a function of modern, post-Industrial, secular liberalism. Most societies in the world do not embrace this sort of maximal individual autonomy. That’s a WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) perspective.
The last 100 years in West have been a huge experiment in altering the conditions of familial life. What are the results? Look around you. Tremendous material success coupled with devastating spiritual impoverishment. A technological utopia of connection in which everyone is atomized and alone.
Such traditional families are still somewhat common in South America, and many of us migrating to the first world have felt the shock of leaving that behind. The point about family being part of a larger community resonates the most, because I’ve lived it and it’s just so fulfilling and practical in many ways.
This article makes it sound as if it is just children, who at a certain age desperately want to leave and be free and abandon the family home. I’m not sure. A good many parents are also desperate to be free of their adult children, want privacy and to be able to do their own thing. Many may expect their children to stay close and look after them but do not want them at home. Many resent adult children that don’t fly the nest. Probably because the author, despite writing a book on nationalism hasn’t considered the family dynamics in different nationalities and ethinicities may play out differently, so couldn’t imagine such parents – it seems obvious Orthodox Jewish parentd are very different.
I’m not sure the nuclear family only developed after WW2. It was clearly visible in the 19th century and was clearly a consequence of the industrial revolution. Yes grandparents might live with their families but peoole rarely lived far beyond 70, so their time as a burden was limited and the intergenerational strife of infirm parents living through their 90s wasn’t a phenomenon. Even then, many ended up dumped in workhouses.
At least in protestant countries parents will shame their adult kids into having their own place and living with your parents is a sign of failure and maturity. Yes, the number of adult children doing this is on the rise but it largely seen as shameful. I personally felt great pressure to leave and start my own life. I can’t really say this was necessarily a bad thing. Atomising? Maybe, but then again also a hard lesson in personal responsibility.
Now knowing Spain for some time I see a very different set of cultural attitudes where people only move out when married, if then. There is no shame attached to this. Bit even in the Mediterraean families are small compared to the tribal Arabs. Catholic restrictions on consanguinity pushed families in a more nuclear direction for centuries.
But it confirms my suspicion that family structures and attitudes are very different in place to place and environment they fimd themselves in just on pure blunt antropological facts. Eskimos live in small groups, Bedouin live in large extended family groups, both are “natural” organic responses to their environment. Anglo-Protestant culture may be atomising, but in a colder less resource rich parts of the world a degree if individualism aids survival – Anglo-Saxons and Norse had much smaller families than the equivalenrs south, the opposite is true in but it also was the force that produced much of the modern world through commerce and science.
I think the author is pulling a rhetorical ruse here to assume Orthodox Jewish families under the weasal word Judean-Christian (but mainly Judean) to represent the same cultural amd historic context as, say, Northern Europeans
Some good points – let’s not forget, though, that wife-beating, incest, the ill-treatment of children and elders, and all kinds of petty tyranny and cruelty also flourished in the bosom of the ‘traditional family’ and there was very little recourse against it.
Absolutely. I was plotting my escape from the age of twelve! Fortunately that was the age of grammar schools and grants.
I’m not sure the 70% single-motherhood of American Blacks today is an improvement, Is it better to grow up with an imperfect father or with no father at all. Or worse, a succession of temporary “fathers” that cycle through your home.
All familial structures are imperfect. All carry risks and benefits. The question is which provides the strongest basis to build a stable society over the long term. On that count, the author’s suggestion that an multi-generational family living and working together and in close proximity to an extended family group is hard to beat. It is not the most efficient in short-run economic terms, but it is the most stable in long-run societal benefit.
Great text, although I don’t completely agree with it. It provides food for thought – which makes it even greater.
One issue I have is that the family is considered as if in a vacuum, without looking at the changes in the wider society like industrialisation and common education. Surely, the fathers have not just decided out of the blue to go and spend their productive hours away from home (or farm). When industrialised mass production took hold, the previous “work-from-home” artisan and farming jobs just ceased to exist. The author also paints the “golden age” picture, where children receive good education and old people receive good care in the family. The reality was less rosy, I am afraid. For most families the alternative to mass education in (however imperfect) schools is no education at all, and alternative to retirement homes – no medical care at all.
The problem that I have with this and many other conservative commentators on this web site is that they paint this appealing picture of the good old days without accounting for the change in material circumstances that has occurred since. Despite the decline in monogamous marriage, we do not see men fighting each other in the streets over women – thanks in no small part to the modern education system indoctrinating us that such behaviour is unacceptable, and also to the modern state with its law enforcement. Similarly, there are enough birth control measures available to both men and women for preventing unwanted babies.
I have been thinking on this subject a lot on my own. I do agree with the author about the shortcomings of the nuclear family. I disagree, however, that the family structure from a few decades (or centuries) ago would work in the modern era as is. I would love to see a debate on what might work on these pages, but so far I have not seen any credible ideas.
It also doesn’t seem to offer a realistic way to enforce this either. Is the government going to force people who don’t want to live in extended families to live together at gun point? Are they going to ban all technology and return to an agricultural society – and presumably hope the Chinese decide to do the same thing rather than invade with their now technological superiority? Are we going to kill people if they are atheists and don’t believe in the religious basis of the society suggested by the author? Stating these is the difference between philosophical or intellectual grandstanding and an actual vision for society.
If people drifted away from these types of families there was probably a reason they did so. I know people from ‘traditional’ families such as India who after a generation or two ended up living in nuclear families. Now you might say this is due to the economic pressure of a modern capitalist society. Well maybe, but if people really wanted this life they would have found ways to do so, as for example Orthodox Jews do.
Now some individuals may well be seeking to return to this for their own moral or religious reasons. And good luck to them. But without some kind of totalitarian nightmare I don’t see how it would be possible to force people who don’t want this kind of life or family structure to live like that.
Well, the government has subtler ways of urging people to do the right thing, other than holding them at gunpoint or killing them. For example, make home schooling for kids easier to arrange. Regulate for building bigger homes. Offer economic incentives.
The point is, we need to agree what the right thing is first, and how to achieve it in the modern era. OK, we might all agree that the nuclear family is not the right thing, but neither is some rosy picture of the good old days.
This reminds me: there is this book, “The Weirdest People in the World” by Joseph Heinrich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World, which argues that the West owes its prosperity in no small part to proliferation of nuclear family. So it might have its benefits, after all.
Yes, and Jordan Peterson kind of argues the same thing too about this being precisely connected. If you can’t get universal agreement among conservatives, then what how is a general consensus on this going to be formed? And this prosperity… it is easy for decadent Westerners to easily scoff at what prosperity and wealth has brought, but I wonder how many would genuinely be happy with returning to sky high child mortality, the risk of famine, being condemned to extreme poverty and illiterate ignorance all your life, which was the lot of the majority of humanity for most of history. It’s easy to whinge about lack of purpose and spirtual emptiness when you don’t have real, more quotidian problems to deal with.
And yes the government can nudge in this way but unless people actually want to live in multigenerational families (except under economic duress), then I’m not sure any of these policies would actually work. Bigger homes could just lead to partitioning or renting out, unless you ban people doing these things. Tax incentives may help, but then again places that offer tax incentives for bigger families often end up only increasing the population among least productive and socially adapted, those with any degree of intelligence or social capital end up finding ways to get what they want anyway.
I don’t think the move to a nuclear family was part of some comprehensive government policy. It just reflected the logical conclusion of the economic and social changes that the whole of Europe, and especially the protestant north, had been experiencing for centuries.
The unasked question in your comment is whether “the modern era” is actually beneficial or not. I strongly suspect that we’ve been unknowingly running down cultural and spiritual capital since the Enlightenment / Industrial Revolution. We can ignore it since the drawdown is so slow, but this piece and others illustrate that the damage is becoming too great to pretend to not notice.
The imploding cultural milieu of the post-Enlightenment world is colliding with the increasingly obvious resource depletion of the post-industrial world. The traditional family may win out over modernity in the end.
See Paul Kingsnorth for a great treatment of this.
It may happen naturally as I fear the west is headed for some substantial dark days. Those without family ties will suffer more I think.
That may be the single most important article Unherd have published. A lot more relevant to our lives than the endless gender nonsense they give space to.
Excellent piece. I have nothing to add.
1) the author doesn’t seem to realize the slack/abuse a lot of us take for being stay at home parents. It’s really a fringe thing these days and the families are already religious. So that’s kind of a moot point. You simply can’t force people to wake up one day and decide to act on religion when they’ve been raised to think of it as hogwash. So many in my generation (under 60) and the younger people LOATHE anything that looks and sounds like religion. This can not be overstated. This is true – even here in America where a good part of the population is still highly religious.
2) Single parenting is a thing and I really don’t know how you’d convince a lot of women or men to actually marry at this point. There simply aren’t a lot of social incentives to do so.
3) while I like the idea of having roots in a community – many in my generation move every few years for work and career advancement. Again, just practically I don’t see how we work in the global economy changing anytime soon.
4) some extended families are just super toxic and really shouldn’t be around the next generation. Yes, you lose some community, but peace and stability is important too.
Hear hear! You’ve hit just about every relevant nail on the head.
I think globalization is coming to an end.
Absolutely. The ‘nuclear’ family and the ‘housewife’ were creations of the Industrial Revolution and, particularly, post war capitalism. Feminists know this. The ‘family’ remains strong in traditional working class communities, although it is based around grandmothers, mothers and daughters, with men as peripheral figures (and always has been- men were always at work, asleep or in the pub and often died young), and in rural communities where it is also a business enterprise; most British farms are still family partnerships. In each of those situations, family groups of parents and children live in their own houses but interact on a daily basis with the others. On farms, for example, everyone will eat lunch together in the farmhouse kitchen, particularly at harvest or lambing times. In working class communities most childcare, allowing mothers to work, is still provided by grandparents. That has always been the case, as working class women have always worked; the ‘housewife’ is a middle class creation.
One of the unrecognised effects of the lockdowns (not the “pandemic’, but the hysterical over reactions of governments) was the damage that it did to traditional family life by isolating ‘families’ in their own homes. That did not work, either for the working class sisters who live, with their children, on the same council estate street as their parents and aunts, or for several generations of a farming family living in separate houses on their own land. Hopefully, they ignored it.
“The ‘nuclear’ family and the ‘housewife’ were creations of the Industrial Revolution and, particularly, post war capitalism. Feminists know this.”
Except it is tendentious rot. In both ancient and medieval times women’s place was considered the home. Now it’s true that what was considered housework was much broader, albeit only among the lower classes, but private housework it was certainly considered. Brewing and weaving for example were considered part of the private functiin of maintaining a house, not a public role like men had. The industrial revolution just made housewives bored by reducing the amount of housework they needed to do, or rather reducing its ambit.
Great post. I have come to the same conclusions and my family tend to think this way, too – we subconsciously already follow the traditional (but also timeless and resilient) family model as described in this article and I think we are better for it – and the rest of society would be, too. But that’s another matter
Although what counts as “timeless and resilient” depends on who you ask or where you live. Jordan Peterson constantly stresses the importance of leaving home in a timely manner and being independent and separate from your parents, even to the point of *not* helping elderly people excessively for example, and seems to justify this on the basis of timeless Jungian archetypes of the “heros quest” etc.
It would be beneficial for elders to be around their children and grandchildren for as long as possible. Elder care isn’t the best. But large homes with 4 and 5 bedrooms are not affordable for everyone. Add in that we where house our elderly our society has an issue. We live to long not to do anything. Humans need purpose.
The “traditional” family described (where labor and work are done within the home) brings to mind share-cropping and piece work. It might have made for a more cohesive family unit, but familes lived in slums and on subsistence farms. The nuclear family on the other hand is what made America a superpower and its dissolution is fast destroying America.
Thank you for this. The strong families described produce more goods and services for themselves. Thus family well-being offends both left and right because it means less profits for mega-corporations and fewer tax-funded unioinized jobs, and fewer consumers of the drugs and services that deal with dysfunction caused by insufficient love and attachments. No wonder family as a core social-economic sector is ignored or maligned. The family and associates were historically our ‘social safety net’ and now this safety net is other people’s (adult) children. So money-rich/relationship-poor nations like mine (Canada) are importing care providers – only ‘the best and the brightest’ of course – from money-poor/relationship-rich countries to do care-work of our elders, sick, children, dying, and disabled while unburdened family members pursue ‘independence’. This neo-colonialist care-work practice deprives millions of children of their mothers sent here to send back cash, and deprives care-exporting nations of citizens who have enough wealth to obtain the education to speak English and be counted among the desirable human imports. But institutional stranger-care is unhygienic, very cash-costly, inadequate, inefficient, and often inhumane now; the ‘chronic staff shortages’ in waged care-work will only worsen leaving many ‘child-free’ elder and ill adults to suffer horrifically and alone.
The thing is though most ‘traditional socities’ were also places that were or are medically backward where older people tended to die at a reasonably age or after an illness and not hang around for decades in a semi-vegtative state.
Working outside the home is surely a consequence of the Industrial Revolution rather than the World Wars.
It would not be possible to return to the traditional family life described here because people know too much of the outside world and that will always beckon to many.
Maybe “the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family” because modern adults don’t feel the need for the support of a traditional family.
I suspect that the traditional family was a survival thing, not a moral thing.
I think that the nuclear family “just growed.”
An excellent article. Some nuclear families work well. Others benefit from – or suffer from the lack of – the support that comes from being part of a wider network of close family and/or community.
Family is the number one most important thing in human history. Family is also the most powerful concept in human history.
Governments have known this for centuries and until the beginning of the 20th century, governments counted on the philosophy of the family as a strength.
Now things have changed…In the 1920s governments started to understand that they would never have absolute control over the population whilst they remained subordinate to the concept of family.
So, the Western governments went about the task of destroying the family.
First, divorce was granted. We all know that in EXCEPTIONAL circumstances divorce may be a good thing for all those involved. But only in EXECPTIONAL circumstances…and thus divorce must be made illegal…for the good of the many outweigh the selfish idiocy of the few.
Divorce is not freedom; divorce is a catastrophic failing of weak and unworthy people. Divorce is enslavement….divorce invites BIG BROTHER into the lives of its victims.
Marriage is a commitment not just between a man and a woman, but also it is a commitment to all of their unborn children to create a system of love and structure into which those unborn children will be born and raised.
Next the government deliberately sponsored (with tax payers money) childbirth out of wedlock. Then the governments taxed families until the pips squeaked!
Next, we were told two people of the same sex can get married! HOW?
Then we were told the concept of male and female no longer exists.
Now, we are peddled the lie that we are getting freedom when, in truth, all we are getting is the hollow and vacuous shame of self-worship.
Each year western governments increase the pressure on the family unit, and as more cracks in the family structure develop, the harder they squeeze. Once the family unit has been destroyed, the government will own us all and freedom will be but a distant memory.
My reading of history is that most families have always been complicated: eg Shakespeare’s family life or The Paston Family of the Paston Letters. All this subject to early death and remarrying and childlessness and infertility: Henry VIII! Thomas Hardy- selling your wife plus 19th century soldier’s wives ‘on the strength’ remarrying a number of times as their husbands were killed. The 1950s-60’s consumer family is atypical. That said, bringing up children is vastly less exhausting with a long settled couple plus grandparents.
Great essay with (to me) surpring insights about the dynamics of child-parent relations in childhood, puberty and adult life. I just wanted to add two aspects: typologies of personalities and welfare states.
Individuals differ in their preferences and it is obvious that your personality traits like openess to new experiences, agreeableness, introversion/extraversion, conscientiousness will heavily influence the quality and quantity of intergenerational cooperation you desire.
On the other hand, availability of formal child care, health insurance, pensions, retirement homes and the real estate market determine a great deal of how much intergenerational detachment can be chosen. Societies differ markedly in that regard https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Worlds_of_Welfare_Capitalism
The nuclear family has not ‘failed’. What has failed is the assignment of parental responsibilities to ‘the state’ by well-meaning but essentially dependency-culture inducing policies such as the Great Society and the Welfare State. The imposition of religious diktat on parents and children is no solution at all. What 2 adults arrange between themselves is their business; people grow and change, and a partnership that is mutually advantageous in their early adulthood may be very different later in life. It is only where children come into the equation that long term, broader, responsibilities should be encouraged, if not legally enforced. Take away the outdated notions of a few convenient biblical texts (ignoring, of course, the many inconvenient ones), and the responsible nuclear family has the key attributes of the ‘traditional’ family.
Are you really that blind? Then look at rich countries with weak social welfare, such as Hong Kong, South Korea or Chile; and you will notice the same pattern of failed families and atomization of society.
I read a book on stone-age economics a while back. Using experiences from cultures discovered in historical time (incl aborigines), they noted that the grandparents usually do the child tearing. This is often partly true for contemporary nuclear families, and was probably more prevalent before the great wars.
My wife and I, our son, daughter and son-in-law and two grandchildren all live within 10 minutes of each other in the same small city. While we do not all live together, we gather every Sunday for lunch. Some combination of us also talk, visit, or work together on a project most days.
Our adult children both came back to live with my wife and I at different times. Our daughter and her husband lived with us for a season after a period of living on their own. They now have their own house shared with their kids.
This is the richest season of our 70+ years and I believe the younger adults would say the same. We genuinely like being together. The youngest don’t know any other way of life, and thrive in the attention of five adults.
We are also individually and together connected into a larger community of Jesus people. This brings hope, plus common purpose and vision.
As our grandchildren reach adulthood, I hope they will have caught a strong sense of what life together with extended family can be. I hope they will add their adult lives to ours as part of an ongoing family enterprise that will build the relational wealth we all enjoy.
I have thought for some time that we in the West too easily cast aside familial connections on reaching adulthood. While clearly not for all, many of us of all generations would fare much better in stronger extended-family-centric arrangements. With the growing access to remote work, many more young people could take advantage of the joy and economic improvement of life together.
Our family culture in the West is the way it is…..but that does not mean it is the best way. I believe the emotional well-being of most of us would improve by strengthening family bonds however that looks.
Lovely article
Video calls to friends and relatives are a poor substitute but I don’t see any other alternative today.
Readers might be interested in my proposal for factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs: the new lifestyle such factories would make possible, how they can be made to run faster and more efficiently than conventional factories, and the new kinds of families, neighborhoods, and towns that might develop around them. Here is a link:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TMMLDNF
People become as independent and autonomous as they can afford to be. In affluent societies we have to choose to prioritise relationships, community and the vulnerable.
Wow fascinating article, I never knew any of this and it makes total sense.
It is surely clear that if the traditional family’s existence depended upon it being a business as well as a home, then it is the advance of mass production and the growth of corporations which has made the family redundant as an economic force.
I don’t say this in order to ascribe blame here: we are all far wealthier as a consequence of how industry and commerce has evolved over the past century. But this essay is well timed because we are now seeing some re-establishment of the home as a business enterprise with the way the knowledge economy is changing where we work – or at least it appears to be post-Covid, but the jury’s still out on that.
Speaking for myself though, my job as an IT contractor isn’t going to work very well if I’m doing it at home with my parents, wife and kids in the house all at the same time. I think that’s more a recipe for disaster than a basis for restoration of the traditional family unit.
A very well written article. Many btl are pointing out the obvious and often painful flaws of the arrangement suggested. I think this misses the point, which is really, what ideals might be aimed for to give the best chance of successful personal and civil lives, rather than setting a blueprint for automatic contenment and happiness. Of course people are flawed, and will manage to find fault with and wreck even the most ideal of situations, but it’s worth considering what guidelines might give the best chance for fulfilment. Just saying every situation creates the fertile ground for human misery just describes human nature, at least the author makes an attempt at a positive arrangement.
Sadly, I think for many people, myself included, too many of the pillars are missing so they have no foundation from which to build this sort of family. I agree that the pressures of the nuclear family look intolerable, and I’ve favoured remaining single – of course aided by rejection a few times – and will very likely have no children as a result. This is of course a very imperfect solution, not that I’m dissatisfied with my solitude, but I enjoy life, so not finding a situation in which I’m willing to bring more of it into the world is of course a failure. I’m afraid I think it very unlikely I would enjoy life in a nuclear family, as I’ve seen all too often, and it’s not in my power to have the situation the author proposes. So what should one do?