Family (4) Alternative

Brooks claims that the solution is the emergence of broader social groups that can provide an alternative to extended families.

In the beginning was the band. For tens of thousands of years, people commonly lived in small bands of, say, 25 people, which linked up with perhaps 20 other bands to form a tribe. People in the band went out foraging for food and brought it back to share. They hunted together, fought wars together, made clothing for one another, looked after one another’s kids. In every realm of life, they relied on their extended family and wider kin.

Except they didn’t define kin the way we do today. We think of kin as those biologically related to us. But throughout most of human history, kinship was something you could create.

In other words, for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with.

Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin. It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.

Brooks describes a number of social institutions that are emerging as an alternative to the nuclear family.

Because Christians are supposed to be experts on “loving one another”, we should be leading these efforts. In an article called Tens, Hundreds and Thousands, I explain how God wants to re-create society from the bottom up, starting with extended families at the bottom, and then connecting them together to establish stronger groups.

God wanted the Israelites who left Egypt to be organised this way. With the gospel and the outpouring of the Spirit, this approach became even more effective and powerful. The Tens and Hundreds that Moses described, and expanded in the gospels and Acts are the equivalent of the bands that David Brooks described, but more effective, because they are united by love and empowered by the Holy Spirit. They will provide a safe place for families to shelter.

Family (3) Collapse and Confusion

The collapse of marriage has created social problems.

When you put everything together, we’re likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once. People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mind-set than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan. People with an individualistic mind-set tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption. People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don’t have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.

Many people growing up in this era have no secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood. For those who have the human capital to explore, fall down, and have their fall cushioned, that means great freedom and opportunity—and for those who lack those resources, it tends to mean great confusion, drift, and pain.

Brooks explains that there is no way back. Both conservatives and progressives are confused about where to go.

As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality.

Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; “go live in a nuclear family” is really not relevant advice. If only a minority of households are traditional nuclear families, that means the majority are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families, serial partnerships, and so on. Conservative ideas have not caught up with this reality.

Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people—and while progressive elites say that all family structures are fine, their own behavior suggests that they believe otherwise...

In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can’t operationalize, because it no longer is relevant, progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don’t want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say—and so for decades things have been falling apart.

Family (2) Nuclear Family

The nuclear family had its heyday between 1950 and 1965, but it was relatively rare in terms of history.

During this period, a certain family ideal became engraved in our minds: a married couple with 2.5 kids. When we think of the American family, many of us still revert to this ideal. When we have debates about how to strengthen the family, we are thinking of the two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street. We take it as the norm, even though this wasn’t the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before 1950, and it isn’t the way most humans have lived during the 55 years since 1965.

Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly and not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.

Several unique factors made the nuclear possible during this period.

• Women were obliged to stay at home and look after their children.

• Post-war labour shortages pushed up wages, making a single income family viable.
  

  By 1961, the median American man aged 25 to 29 was earning nearly 400 percent more than his father had earned at about the same age...
  

Disintegration

But these conditions did not last. The constellation of forces that had briefly shored up the nuclear family began to fall away, and the sheltered family of the 1950s was supplanted by the stressed family of every decade since. Some of the strains were economic. Starting in the mid-’70s, young men’s wages declined, putting pressure on working-class families in particular. The major strains were cultural. Society became more individualistic and more self-oriented. People put greater value on privacy and autonomy...

In the 1950s: “Love means self-sacrifice and compromise.” In the 1960s and ’70s, putting self before family was prominent: “Love means self-expression and individuality”...

Since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.”
Marriage is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment”...

We’re likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once...

These cultural changes have brought about serious changes in relationships.

Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage—they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more...

Over the past two generations, families have also gotten a lot smaller. The general American birth rate is half of what it was in 1960. In 2012, most American family households had no children. There are more American homes with pets than with kids. In 1970, about 20 percent of households had five or more people. As of 2012, only 9.6 percent did...

Over the past two generations, the physical space separating nuclear families has widened...

Family (1)

I recently read an article in the Atlantic Magazine by David Brooks called The Nuclear Family was a Mistake. He has an important message for people who are interested in family life and the structure of society. Brooks begins by describing the disintegration of family life in the Western World.

This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

Extended Families

He explains that the nuclear family is a very recent phenomenon.

In 1800, 90 percent of American families were corporate families. Until 1850, roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids. Nuclear families existed, but they were surrounded by extended or corporate families.

An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people.

The second great strength of extended families is their socializing force. Multiple adults teach children right from wrong, how to behave toward others, how to be kind. Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, industrialization and cultural change began to threaten traditional ways of life. Many people in Britain and the United States doubled down on the extended family in order to create a moral haven in a heartless world. The prevalence of extended families living together roughly doubled from 1750 to 1900, and this way of life was more common than at any time before or since.

The collapse of the extended family began at the end of the 19th century.

As factories opened in the big U.S. cities, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, young men and women left their extended families to chase the American dream. These young people married as soon as they could… The families they started were nuclear families. The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment.

By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the dominant family form. By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.

I presume that the extended family lasted longer in the US, because the industrial revolution came later than in England.