Was the Nuclear Family a Mistake?

>In 1970, the family structures of the rich and poor did not differ that greatly. Now there is a chasm between them. As of 2005, 85 percent of children born to upper-middle-class families were living with both biological parents when the mom was 40. Among working-class families, only 30 percent were. According to a 2012 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women ages 22 to 44 have a 78 percent chance of having their first marriage last at least 20 years. Women in the same age range with a high-school degree or less have only about a 40 percent chance. Among Americans ages 18 to 55, only 26 percent of the poor and 39 percent of the working class are currently married. In her book Generation Unbound, Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, cited research indicating that differences in family structure have “increased income inequality by 25 percent.” If the U.S. returned to the marriage rates of 1970, child poverty would be 20 percent lower. As Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, once put it, “It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged.”

I think this paragraph has a lot to say about how marital cooperation helps wealth creation. I've seen statistics (a long time ago) that a married couple only consumes 1.4 times the living expenses of a single person. The rest can go in the bank or into a higher standard of living. This also has the economic benefit of diversification, where the family can still make ends meet if one income is lost.

"Marriage inequality" does not seem to be a category of inequality that can ever be addressed through government led redistributive efforts.

This title is pretty misleading. The article is actually recommending larger extended families which include nuclear families, not recommending that nuclear families be dissolved or otherwise done without.

As retro as that might sound, I agree with it. I wish I'd had access to multiple adults other than my parents growing up, but I didn't. Still feeling the lack of it.

This article pits individual freedom/empowerment against the family unit and argues the latter is vanishing and we need it back. A familiar topic lately.

I’m afraid this is a false dichotomy. If we’re actually trading the family unit for free self-empowered individuals, there are positive effects like decreased susceptibility to influence and belief in unlikely things.

But that’s not what’s actually happening. Signs point to social cohesion being traded for an uprooted, uninformed individualism that is susceptible to targeting and influence on mass scale.

I’d say what we want for social resilience is not the family unit back, but to nurture individuals as highly informed skeptics.

I’ve seen a number of pieces like this that argue that the nuclear family is an aberration in history compared to the extended family. They are of course right, but almost inevitable fail to address the fact that the “nuclear” family is/was generally a part of those extended family structures. The reason it is called the “nuclear” family is the metaphor that the parents + child is the smallest divideable unit of family. The idea that nuclear family should exist in isolation is probably mistaken, but I arguments it shouldn’t exist at all completely uncompelling.

The evidence I saw presented was more along the lines that the nuclear family is “necessary but not generally sufficient” rather than something to be completed supplanted by a new paradigm, at least in the case of those that chose/are able to have children.

The nuclear family wasn't a choice, it was pushed on us by the economic elites who wanted to refine the old extended families (and, left unsaid, the old ethnic neighborhoods and towns) down into a more homogeneous group of consumers, with less overall political power. Catholic power, in particular, was of deep concern[1].

This has been further refined down to hyper-individualism, ideally childless, to maximize labor supply and flexibility.

The elites want relatively powerless, bickering identity groups composed of random individuals, that will not demonstrate solidarity with one another, and that will fall into line on elite issues (banking, war, etc.). One must say that they are doing a very good job of getting it.

This article is typical, well done elite propaganda, as one would expect from The Atlantic: it points out a real problem and then presents an even worse solution that appeals to our modern sensibilities, but that in fact furthers the elite goals.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Freedom_and_Catholic_...

>You have less space to make your own way in life

I'd say that this has to be emphasized, especially if the extended family has a lot of conservative people.

I find these sort of articles incredibly short-sighted and little more than a reminiscing of the "good old times". Those times are not coming back. The last sentence is particularly comical in its detachment from reality.

In the age of the network, the notion of family to say nothing about our notion of self, is a cultural relic fast on the road to extinction. Decoherence and disintegration is all around us. We will adapt but we need to look forward, towards a new kind of synthesis, not behind.