The following are excerpts from David Brooks’ excellent article, “The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake,”  in the March 2020 issue of The Atlantic. I urge you to look the article up online and read the whole thing.

 

“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.    …

From 1950 to 1965… 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 or not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.   …

[Lots of data and examples of sociological shifts from 1970 on. He did a thorough amount of scholarship.]  …

In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family they can’t operationalize, because it is no longer 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.   …

When hyper-individualism kicked into gear in the 1960s, people experimented with new ways of living that embraced individualistic values. Today we are crawling out from the wreckage of that hyper-individualism — which left many families detached and unsupported — and people are experimenting with more connected ways of living, with new shapes and varieties of extended families. Government support can help nurture this experimentation, particularly for the working-class and the poor, with things like child tax credits, coaching programs to improve parenting skills in struggling families, subsidized early education, and expanded parental leave. While the most important shifts will be cultural, and driven by individual choices, family life is under so much social stress and economic pressure in the poorer reaches of American society that no recovery is likely without some government action.   …

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems — with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force — stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. And for most people it’s not coming back. ”  …

 

–excerpts taken from “The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake,” by David Brooks, The Atlantic, March 2020