Hacker News Reader

Comment by protocolture | Hacker News Reader

You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.

>throughout most of human history, people grew up with their mother, father, and siblings being the most important people in their lives.

Throughout most of history people grew up with their mother, 3 aunts, their dad, 5 uncles, and grandparents if they are lucky, learning the single trade of their entire family. The "Nuclear" family is the atomisation of this corporate family through modern practices (Finance, Tertiary Education, Suburbia)

View on HN

> You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.

I’m a simple man, so I like to use the dictionary when there’s a disagreement about what something means. In this case, my phone’s dictionary, which cites the Oxford American dictionary as its source, has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit” and I’m not seeing how anything I wrote is in disagreement with that.

Sure, people often grow up with other relatives. But we have other terms for them, which belies their reduced importance in our lives vs our parents and siblings.

It's the basic social unit part. In society that actually exists, they're not a basic unit. You can obviously find couples and their dependent children, just like maybe you can find a monad in a Java program, but they're not basic units.

If nuclear families were not of fundamental importance, you would not see “mother” and “father” universally conserved across all languages as the first words that people learn. This is like the thing with the two fish who don’t know what water is; nuclear families are so pervasively important that you just can’t see it.

This is both a non-sequitor and a confabulation.

Kids that don’t grow up with their parents do not learn them as first words. Kids that do grow up with their parents, often still learn something else as their first words.

Learning X as your first word does not prove that X is a foundational unit of society, it simply does not follow.

This doesnt even seem like you are arguing for nuclear families.

I feel like you have conflated the nuclear family (a method of organising the basic social unit of a society) with "The importance of parents". The nuclear family simply isnt the only basic social unit with parents in it.

>nuclear families are so pervasively important

Parents are very important. The nuclear family does not have a monopoly on parents.

>has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit”

This doesnt agree with anything I said lmao. A corporate family is much larger than a nuclear family.

>Sure, people often grow up with other relatives.

Not in the same house, as the basic social unit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com