Reimagining Family

Our discussion article suggests the whole idea of the nuclear family in America was a "mistake," or least an aberration (click HERE). That's quite a statement given the arrangement was pretty much what so many of us grew up knowing. Indeed, in the suburban world of the American fifties, the concept of the household containing married parents and their children was enveloped in a cherishing mythology. Our discussion topic is the examination of this narrative -- its origin, its reality, and its relevance going forward. 

David Brooks leads us through the background of what family meant over the preceding two centuries. He starts with the early 1800s and the era of extended multiple-generational units, themselves linked for compelling economic reasons with other such units in a coalition. The coalitions then began to break apart in the 1900s leaving the units to slowly become more autonomous as agriculture gave way to the factory environment. This led to the family "ideal" of 1950 through 1965 being the detached nuclear family: male sole breadwinner, stay-at-home mom, 2.5 children. (Unmarried people were somehow deemed at the time to be "sick, immoral, or neurotic".) We took this model as the norm at the time (and as mythologized thereafter) ignoring the fact it was not the way most humans lived during the tens of thousands of years before.  

Nor is it necessarily the arrangement we have applied in its idealized form during the 55 years since that era. Even during its high-water mark, the nuclear family could be somewhat less than the myth, at least for the women who were relegated to the house. The nuclear family then became somewhat less stable, at least compared to the imagined heights -- a result of some underlying dynamics: the economic strain; opportunity and need for women to work outside the home; breakdown of certain social and supportive networks; marriage itself being seen more in terms of adult fulfillment. While the causes have been economic, cultural, and institutional, the result has been "we're likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history."

With reference to the article (the synopsis above being the barest of bones) we'll discuss the dynamics of our own experience in order to judge whether we are witnessing the "wreckage caused by the decline of the American family." Individual economic circumstances certainly play a huge role as wealthier households are better able to preserve the detached nuclear family ideal by "outsourcing" so much of the needed support (previously supplied by the extended family).

The question that then looms large, covered in Part II of the article, is the extent to which the whole idea of family really becomes one of definition. History teaches human bonding need not be a function of biological relationships. We'll go back to our session on the Harari book Sapiens, and the notion of man being essentially tribal in nature. Instead of bemoaning the devolution of the detached nuclear family, maybe we'll talk about some of that structure's shortcomings, tap into some ancient wisdom, and entertain the possibility of new forms of kinship and extended family.