A failed experiment (Getty)
When people talk about the structure of the family, they often find themselves arguing for or against the “nuclear family”, which consists, on most tellings, of a father and mother, with perhaps two or three children in their care for the first 18 years of their lives. These children are then supposed to leave the house, move somewhere far away, and make nuclear families of their own.
Contemporary conservatives are especially inclined to embrace this image of the family, although it is not entirely clear why. The “nuclear family” is not the same as the traditional Christian or Jewish family that existed before the two World Wars. On the contrary, the nuclear family is closer to being an invention of industrialisation and the 20th century.
And there are good reasons to think that this form of family is, in fact, a failed experiment, one that has done immeasurable harm to almost everyone: to women and men, children and grandparents. The time has come for us to consider retiring the ideal of the nuclear family, and replacing it with something that looks more like the family of Christian and Jewish tradition.
What is the traditional family? I’d like to propose five principles by which the traditions descended from the Bible channelled the natural tendencies of men and women to establish what I’m calling the traditional family:
1. The lifelong bond of a man and a woman.
The traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond of a man and a woman. Contrary to what is often said, such a bond is not the dictate of untamed nature. Indeed, there is nothing that is more contrary to human nature, and in particular to male nature, than a man marrying a woman with the intention of foregoing all other sexual interests for the rest of his life. But by this artifice, biblical religion summons up the forces of loyalty, honour, and the urge toward purity and holiness, turning these against the urge to seek sexual gratification outside of marriage; and harnessing them to the project of establishing a strong household and giving it permanence and life. In this way, marriage brings peace to the broader society, which no longer tolerates barbaric scenes of men shedding blood over women, and of loose children who know nothing of their father. Instead, these competitive energies are turned to the building up of the household and all its members. This institution of lifelong marriage is indeed the first pillar of what we consider a civilised life.
2. The lifelong bond between a father and mother and their children.
Similarly, the traditional family is built upon the lifelong bond between a father and mother and their children. Many suppose that this bond is natural as well, but this is not the case either. Children are by nature in awe of their parents in early childhood, but as their body and spirit grow to adult proportions, they are often filled with self-regard and treat their parents with defiance and contempt. In this way, nature prepares children to leave their parents and lead an independent life. Yet in the traditional family, the principle of honouring one’s father and mother establishes a lifelong relationship between parents and children that is much like marriage. By this artifice, the forces of honour and loyalty are turned against the natural tendency of adolescents to grow contemptuous and abandon their parents. This permits children to continue learning from their parents throughout life, forming a permanent community of interlocking generations; and barbaric scenes of the elderly cast aside with none to care for them, and of children preying on their parents to advance themselves, are banished.
3. The traditional family is a business enterprise.
Because liberal society considers one’s “career” to be the defining characteristic of the individual, we have largely forgotten that the traditional family was usually a business enterprise. The average family was engaged in farming, commerce, light manufacture, or a profession; and the family business was usually conducted close to the home, if not within the home itself. Often both parents were deeply involved with the family business, a custom that is vividly described in the Bible. Parents taught their children their business, and children gained self-esteem as well as practical skills by contributing actively to the family livelihood. Where children went to school, this was balanced against responsibilities to the family business. And the family itself was often extended by the informal adoption of unmarried relations, or of young men and women who were hired to help with the business and had no other home.
4. The traditional family consists of multiple generations in daily contact.
The traditional family often consisted of three generations (or even four) in daily contact with one another. The bond between parents and children was not yet imagined as something that undergoes a rupture when a child turns 18 or 21, and so the relationship of parents to children continued throughout life. And where there is no rupture between adult children and their parents, grandchildren grow up with grandparents and perhaps great-grandparents. Thus young children were able to learn the skill of honouring their father and mother by watching their parents do it. It also meant that in raising children, grandparents were often a crucial presence, providing stores of wisdom and attention to children who learned to honour earlier generations as an integral part of growing up.
5. The traditional family is part of a broader congregation.
The traditional family was part of a broader loyalty group — the clan, which in later versions became the community or congregation — with which it was concerned on a daily basis. Such communities or congregations often included adult siblings and cousins who had chosen to live in proximity to one another, assisting one another. But many members of the clan, community, or congregation were not kin relations in this sense. Rather, they were members of an alliance of families, who together formed a kind of adopted and extended family, which came together to celebrate sabbaths and festivals, to teach and train the community’s children, to provide relief to those in distress, to improve their communal economic assets, and, where needed, to establish security and justice as well.
Of course, not every family was successful along all five of these dimensions. Nevertheless, once these principles are examined together, it becomes clear that the traditional Jewish or Christian family was a far more active, extensive, and powerful organisation than the family as it exists today.
As anyone who has lived among such families can immediately see, the nuclear family is a weakened and much diminished version of the traditional family, one that is lacking most of the resources needed effectively to pursue the purposes of the traditional family. When this conception of the family became normative in America and elsewhere after the Second World War, it gave birth to a world of detached suburban homes connected to distant places of employment and schools by trains, automobiles, and buses. In other words, the physical design of large portions of the country reflected a newly rationalised conception of what a family is.
In this new reality, there were no longer any business enterprises in the home for the family to pursue together. Instead, fathers would “go to work”, seceding from their families during their productive hours each day. Children were required to “go to school”, seceding from the family during their own productive hours. Young adults would then “go away to college”, cutting themselves off from family influence during the critical years in which they were supposed to reach maturity. Similarly, grandparents were excised from this vision of the home, being “retired” to “retirement communities” or “nursing homes”.
Under this new division of labour, mothers were assigned the task of remaining by themselves in the house each day, attempting to “make a home” using the minimalist ingredients that the structure of the nuclear family had left them. Much of this involved increasingly desperate efforts to keep adolescents somehow attached to the family — even though they now shared virtually no productive purposes with their parents, grandparents, and broader community or congregation; and instead spent their days seeking honour among other adolescents. The resulting rupture between parents and their children was poignantly described in numerous books and films beginning in the Fifties. But these works rarely touched upon the reconstruction of the family, which had done so much to inflame the natural tendency of adolescents toward agonised rebellion, while depriving parents of the tools necessary to emerge from these years with the family hierarchy strengthened.
But mothers had the worst of this new family life. Some did succeed in maintaining the cohesion of their families in a world in which grandparents and other family relations had grown impossibly distant, the family business had disappeared from the home, and the congregation or community with its sabbaths and festivals had likewise been reduced to something accessed by automobile once each week, like a drive-in movie. However, many other “housewives” despaired and turned to the feminist movement, which, not without reason, declared the nuclear family to be a tomb for women.
Feminist writers were mistaken in supposing that the reconstructed household of the post-War era was itself the traditional family. But they were right that the life of a woman spending most of her productive hours in an empty house, which had been stripped of most of the human relationships, activities, and purposes that had filled the life of the traditional family, was one that many women found too painful and difficult to bear. Many of these mothers quickly joined their husbands and children in leaving the home during the day — thus completing the final transformation of the post-traditional “nuclear family” into a hollowed out shell, a failed imitation of the traditional institution of the family.
Much has been said about the dissolution of the family in liberal societies. Both scholarship and polemical treatments tend to focus on a number of important symptoms of this dissolution: marriage now happens later in life or not at all; the birth rate has declined; divorce, childbirth outside marriage and fatherless households are now all common.
These and many other indicators reflect a widespread failure to hand down the traditional institution of the family to future generations. But very little is said about the disease itself, which is the removal from the physical household of much of what the family was a little more than a century ago. Now that the household is no longer the location of a common business enterprise, of devotion to God and the study of Scripture, of a direct responsibility for the education of the young, of a direct responsibility for honouring and caring for the old, and of significant responsibilities for the establishment and growth of the community and congregation, why should anyone be surprised that what remains is neither terribly sturdy nor especially attractive to the young?
If I had been writing this a few years ago, I would have assumed that most of my readers would have had few experiences that confirm my argument. But the Covid-19 pandemic has changed this. The extended closings of businesses and schools, churches and synagogues, have offered many people some insight into the potential power of the traditional family. Suddenly, they have found themselves conducting their business at home, their schooling at home, and their religious life at home. Suddenly, many young adults have found themselves returning, over great distances, to live with older and younger family members or to be in close proximity to them. Suddenly, many families have discovered the healing joys of preparing and eating meals together according to a regular routine, and the unparalleled riches that conversations in such contexts can bring into our lives.
I know that in many cases, these experiences were not always pleasant. Not everyone lives in a physical home that was built for such an experiment, and having to make a living and educate one’s children under such conditions has often been a genuine hardship. Yet in spite of these challenges, or rather, because of them, many have had their first glimpse of what a family, thrown together and having to rely on its own resources, is capable of achieving when it takes on a more extensive array of common purposes. In particular, many have experienced the kind of heightened cohesion that can come of it. In other words, many have had their first glimpse of what the family was like when it was a strong political institution, in which generations worked together to create a permanent community, very much resembling a little tribe or nation.
Perhaps this difficult event has paved the way for us to think more carefully about what has been lost — and about what each of us can do to make restoration a reality.
***
This essay is adapted from Yoram Hazony’s new book Conservatism: A Rediscovery (Regnery).
Yoram Hazony is an Israeli philosopher, political theorist and author, most recently, of Conservatism: A Rediscovery.
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SubscribeInteresting 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?