The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
February 20, 2020 5:21 PM Subscribe
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. The family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways to live together.
Note: I know people will see the author's name and prepare to sneer (and I can't always blame them), but this seems miles away from his op-ed work and I found filled with insights.
Note: I know people will see the author's name and prepare to sneer (and I can't always blame them), but this seems miles away from his op-ed work and I found filled with insights.
One Big Commune!
posted by sammyo at 5:35 PM on February 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by sammyo at 5:35 PM on February 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
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.
Good lord!
Don't ever stop Bobo!
posted by Max Power at 5:47 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]
Good lord!
Don't ever stop Bobo!
posted by Max Power at 5:47 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]
Oh, I have got to check out that Huston book. I'm a massive fan of Coontz' scholarship of the history of familial structures, marriage, and close connections, and if it's anything like that I'm going to enjoy it.
No, seriously, everyone should read Stephanie Coontz. I also particularly liked Marriage, A History.
posted by sciatrix at 5:55 PM on February 20, 2020 [11 favorites]
No, seriously, everyone should read Stephanie Coontz. I also particularly liked Marriage, A History.
posted by sciatrix at 5:55 PM on February 20, 2020 [11 favorites]
Brooks’ main concern is not the breakdown of the nuclear family, but rather the breakdown of the extended family. The latter makes the former catastrophic.
posted by No Robots at 6:00 PM on February 20, 2020 [10 favorites]
posted by No Robots at 6:00 PM on February 20, 2020 [10 favorites]
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.
I am somewhat skeptical about how well big interconnected extended families actually succeed at this. My father came from a big, interconnected, extended family like this, and if you are relying on such a family for support and protection, you had better the hell hope you were lucky enough to be born into one that was healthy. Otherwise--you might get the help, but it will come at one hell of a price, and that price might be so high that you would rather die than take it. And if you do trust in that support, it might well be withdrawn from you at your most vulnerable point, leaving you far worse off than before.
Any proposal to use the family to provide a bulwark for the vulnerable in society must have a plan in place for helping said vulnerable to escape highly connected and abusive patriarchs and matriarchs. The idea that extended families necessarily provide support to people being abused inside nuclear families is, er, optimistic but naive in the extreme.
That doesn't mean that big, interconnected families aren't a laudable social goal. But I think that reducing pressures to move frequently for work and supporting nontraditional family members (for example, creating a legal framework for more than two unrelated adults declaring themselves family at a time) is at least as helpful as scolding people. The extended family has broken in large part because of increased pressure on working adults and seismic changes in the predictability and location of jobs.
Brooks gets at this in a roundabout sort of way by pointing out that affluent people have much more stable lives because they can buy domestic labor from others that goes undone in working-class households. But I think he--being, of course, affluent himself--vastly underestimates the poverty of time for leisure and connection among working folks. This is especially true of unpredictable retail shift work, but it's generally true of many of us. Economic pressure spurs us to spend those long hours at work, and if you don't acquiesce--well, the student loan debt is coming for us whether we earn or not. It's not an option to not earn an income.
He does cycle around to families of choice--what he calls "forged families" as he moves through, and I think there's a lot to that. I get very little support from my family of origin, emotional or otherwise, these days. No, the people who I lean on and who lean on me are families of choice. If I--the worst thing about moving in a year or so is going to be uprooting the dense network of people who care about me and my partner and whom I care about in return, because a thriving family group transplants very poorly. If the goal is to create and promote extended families, minimizing frequent moves from city to city among Americans has to be a major plank of those efforts.
posted by sciatrix at 6:15 PM on February 20, 2020 [102 favorites]
I am somewhat skeptical about how well big interconnected extended families actually succeed at this. My father came from a big, interconnected, extended family like this, and if you are relying on such a family for support and protection, you had better the hell hope you were lucky enough to be born into one that was healthy. Otherwise--you might get the help, but it will come at one hell of a price, and that price might be so high that you would rather die than take it. And if you do trust in that support, it might well be withdrawn from you at your most vulnerable point, leaving you far worse off than before.
Any proposal to use the family to provide a bulwark for the vulnerable in society must have a plan in place for helping said vulnerable to escape highly connected and abusive patriarchs and matriarchs. The idea that extended families necessarily provide support to people being abused inside nuclear families is, er, optimistic but naive in the extreme.
That doesn't mean that big, interconnected families aren't a laudable social goal. But I think that reducing pressures to move frequently for work and supporting nontraditional family members (for example, creating a legal framework for more than two unrelated adults declaring themselves family at a time) is at least as helpful as scolding people. The extended family has broken in large part because of increased pressure on working adults and seismic changes in the predictability and location of jobs.
Brooks gets at this in a roundabout sort of way by pointing out that affluent people have much more stable lives because they can buy domestic labor from others that goes undone in working-class households. But I think he--being, of course, affluent himself--vastly underestimates the poverty of time for leisure and connection among working folks. This is especially true of unpredictable retail shift work, but it's generally true of many of us. Economic pressure spurs us to spend those long hours at work, and if you don't acquiesce--well, the student loan debt is coming for us whether we earn or not. It's not an option to not earn an income.
He does cycle around to families of choice--what he calls "forged families" as he moves through, and I think there's a lot to that. I get very little support from my family of origin, emotional or otherwise, these days. No, the people who I lean on and who lean on me are families of choice. If I--the worst thing about moving in a year or so is going to be uprooting the dense network of people who care about me and my partner and whom I care about in return, because a thriving family group transplants very poorly. If the goal is to create and promote extended families, minimizing frequent moves from city to city among Americans has to be a major plank of those efforts.
posted by sciatrix at 6:15 PM on February 20, 2020 [102 favorites]
From the excerpt in the post, I already agree 100% and you can get a bit of a sense of some advantages of extended family living almost any time you visit any developing country.
OTOH, I feel that we've become too accustomed to the independence of the current Western model, and it would take some friction to transition back to a situation where, for example, multiple different people were giving your kids guidance, advice and moral instruction...because everybody has that cliched crazy racist uncle, right?
And a fair amount of family drama can result from a new member (typically, a bride) from elsewhere suddenly being plonked right in the middle of an entire clan, usually with a matriarch calling all the shots.
But overall I think it is a great model for kids especially, because instead of being farmed out to childcare or helicoptered to extracurricular activities just to give the parents some time do do administrative tasks, there's always an aunt or cousin or great uncle or whatever around to supervise *all* the kids. Plus, the adults get to share the load more.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]
OTOH, I feel that we've become too accustomed to the independence of the current Western model, and it would take some friction to transition back to a situation where, for example, multiple different people were giving your kids guidance, advice and moral instruction...because everybody has that cliched crazy racist uncle, right?
And a fair amount of family drama can result from a new member (typically, a bride) from elsewhere suddenly being plonked right in the middle of an entire clan, usually with a matriarch calling all the shots.
But overall I think it is a great model for kids especially, because instead of being farmed out to childcare or helicoptered to extracurricular activities just to give the parents some time do do administrative tasks, there's always an aunt or cousin or great uncle or whatever around to supervise *all* the kids. Plus, the adults get to share the load more.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:20 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]
Is there a cultural example of an extended family system with an equitable distribution of labor between men and women? Part of the effectiveness of some western variants of the system was based on drafting “spinster” relatives with limited earning ability to do caretaking for the old and the young.
posted by Selena777 at 6:44 PM on February 20, 2020 [66 favorites]
posted by Selena777 at 6:44 PM on February 20, 2020 [66 favorites]
I dunno, I think this article is super white, and begs the question somewhat by its definition of extended vs nuclear family. He references a lot of experts, but not all of them support some of his bolder assertions.
E.g I"f 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."
No one can seriously argue that family structure is fucking worse for children now than it was in the 1920s, say. Beating children was widespread ffs, and most of them were working by time they were 12.
I dunno, I feel this article is a bit dewy eyed, I mean, he's like "men between 18-34 are living at home with their parents, and they're loving it!". I think not. Also, though he skirts around it, he doesn't really address the collapse of a functioning welfare state in America and skyrocketing inequality. Extended families, whatever that means in his book, can't rejuvenate a denuded state. Indeed, perhaps the reason why extended families were so critical in that time was because the state was unable to provide.
He also skirts around what happens when people cannot leverage an extended family where that is the norm. Weber, one of the fathers of sociology, highlights that prior to urban life, the punishment of exile and punishment through social forces (gemeinschaft) was far, far more destructive than it is today.
So for me, this is less about the structure of families and more about the structure of society that increases precarity and fails families of all descriptions.
posted by smoke at 6:53 PM on February 20, 2020 [71 favorites]
E.g I"f 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."
No one can seriously argue that family structure is fucking worse for children now than it was in the 1920s, say. Beating children was widespread ffs, and most of them were working by time they were 12.
I dunno, I feel this article is a bit dewy eyed, I mean, he's like "men between 18-34 are living at home with their parents, and they're loving it!". I think not. Also, though he skirts around it, he doesn't really address the collapse of a functioning welfare state in America and skyrocketing inequality. Extended families, whatever that means in his book, can't rejuvenate a denuded state. Indeed, perhaps the reason why extended families were so critical in that time was because the state was unable to provide.
He also skirts around what happens when people cannot leverage an extended family where that is the norm. Weber, one of the fathers of sociology, highlights that prior to urban life, the punishment of exile and punishment through social forces (gemeinschaft) was far, far more destructive than it is today.
So for me, this is less about the structure of families and more about the structure of society that increases precarity and fails families of all descriptions.
posted by smoke at 6:53 PM on February 20, 2020 [71 favorites]
this seems miles away from his op-ed work
It is not miles away from his op-ed work. Everything David Brooks has ever written, from "The Organization Kid" on, is about how the values and practices typical of moderately liberal Americans with money and advanced degrees who live in suburbs -- values, that is, typical of people like David Brooks -- are empty and doomed and ultimately lethal to the soul, and the reason David Brooks keeps writing that again and again is that he kind of hates himself, he feels his own soul is dead by his own hand, and can't find any other way to express it.
posted by escabeche at 6:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [113 favorites]
It is not miles away from his op-ed work. Everything David Brooks has ever written, from "The Organization Kid" on, is about how the values and practices typical of moderately liberal Americans with money and advanced degrees who live in suburbs -- values, that is, typical of people like David Brooks -- are empty and doomed and ultimately lethal to the soul, and the reason David Brooks keeps writing that again and again is that he kind of hates himself, he feels his own soul is dead by his own hand, and can't find any other way to express it.
posted by escabeche at 6:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [113 favorites]
No one can seriously argue that family structure is fucking worse for children now than it was in the 1920s, say. Beating children was widespread ffs, and most of them were working by time they were 12.
That's nothing to do with family structure and everything to do with the values and attitudes of the broader society.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [9 favorites]
That's nothing to do with family structure and everything to do with the values and attitudes of the broader society.
posted by UbuRoivas at 6:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [9 favorites]
It's possible I've read too much David Brooks.
posted by escabeche at 6:58 PM on February 20, 2020 [21 favorites]
posted by escabeche at 6:58 PM on February 20, 2020 [21 favorites]
Oh goody. More “back in the good ‘ol days” nonsense from notorious rightwing apologist turned sad sack David Brooks. Since he fucked up his marriages he’s gone full “the kids ruined relationships!”
posted by Everyone Expects The Spanish Influenza at 7:04 PM on February 20, 2020 [22 favorites]
posted by Everyone Expects The Spanish Influenza at 7:04 PM on February 20, 2020 [22 favorites]
For a view of an extended family from a non-white perspective, I recommend Gustavo Arellano's Orange County: A personal history, he traces his extended family's story from Mexico, through growing up in suburban Orange county
posted by CostcoCultist at 7:04 PM on February 20, 2020 [12 favorites]
posted by CostcoCultist at 7:04 PM on February 20, 2020 [12 favorites]
THere were usually class structures within the extended families. ("Usually." We're drifting into the Brookish undefined past which seems to be cod black-and-white movies, and never discusses whether the constraints then are like the constraints now) Certainly spinster aunt and youngest daughter and widow unpaid caretakers, and also poor male relatives alone in the hills every summer to keep the herds safe, or down the mine, or of course away to war to satisfy the levy. All those fairy tales in which the youngest brother gets the princess are countering a huge historical tendency the other way.
The Prospect Before Her* is really good on the subsistence/economic reasons for why women could do what they could do, as well as the sexual and romantic politics, and historical inheritances that come out in interesting ways. Just enough personal histories to keep it from being really dry, and also to show variety of experience against the big historical tendencies.
*Olwen Hufton, I misspelled it above.
There's a game-theory argument that cooperative, cautious strategies will be effective over time when resources are unpredictable, and solitary competiton effective when resources are more nearly constant. Nicely explanatory when comparing fossorial rodents, and LLoyd Demetrius was (I think) working on it in other circumstances.
posted by clew at 7:08 PM on February 20, 2020 [15 favorites]
The Prospect Before Her* is really good on the subsistence/economic reasons for why women could do what they could do, as well as the sexual and romantic politics, and historical inheritances that come out in interesting ways. Just enough personal histories to keep it from being really dry, and also to show variety of experience against the big historical tendencies.
*Olwen Hufton, I misspelled it above.
There's a game-theory argument that cooperative, cautious strategies will be effective over time when resources are unpredictable, and solitary competiton effective when resources are more nearly constant. Nicely explanatory when comparing fossorial rodents, and LLoyd Demetrius was (I think) working on it in other circumstances.
posted by clew at 7:08 PM on February 20, 2020 [15 favorites]
That's nothing to do with family structure and everything to do with the values and attitudes of the broader society.
This is what I mean by begging the question, if you define your argument so narrowly, and remove society from an inherently social construct, what's left? You cannot talk about family structure without talking about economics, healthcare, working age, governments etc etc. It is not divisible.
Indeed, Brooks himself talks about all those things - but only when they support his argument.
posted by smoke at 7:17 PM on February 20, 2020 [18 favorites]
This is what I mean by begging the question, if you define your argument so narrowly, and remove society from an inherently social construct, what's left? You cannot talk about family structure without talking about economics, healthcare, working age, governments etc etc. It is not divisible.
Indeed, Brooks himself talks about all those things - but only when they support his argument.
posted by smoke at 7:17 PM on February 20, 2020 [18 favorites]
Just take your kids to visit their grandparents. Sheesh.
posted by No Robots at 7:22 PM on February 20, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by No Robots at 7:22 PM on February 20, 2020 [7 favorites]
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.
to be fair to David Brooks parts of this are as close as he's ever come to Getting It, but I think as long as he sees himself as primarily a critic of cultural, rather than economic and political trends, he's not going to get all the way there
posted by atoxyl at 7:30 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]
to be fair to David Brooks parts of this are as close as he's ever come to Getting It, but I think as long as he sees himself as primarily a critic of cultural, rather than economic and political trends, he's not going to get all the way there
posted by atoxyl at 7:30 PM on February 20, 2020 [5 favorites]
I read this earlier this week. He also kinda glosses over the thousands of people kicked out by their kin for being pregnant, or lgbtq, or dating outside your race.
posted by nakedmolerats at 7:32 PM on February 20, 2020 [46 favorites]
posted by nakedmolerats at 7:32 PM on February 20, 2020 [46 favorites]
I mean he does discuss the idea of chosen family, but fails to connect that even the "better" extended family model historically was, by design, a place to enact social order by denying the family to anyone who didn't fit in. It was the opposite of a loving support network for many.
posted by nakedmolerats at 7:36 PM on February 20, 2020 [24 favorites]
posted by nakedmolerats at 7:36 PM on February 20, 2020 [24 favorites]
I think both things are true that both ways of living have pros and cons and that this shift led to a lot of bad stuff to happen that might not have otherwise. Or maybe some different but equally bad stuff would have happened.
posted by bleep at 7:43 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by bleep at 7:43 PM on February 20, 2020 [3 favorites]
Cannot shake my paranoia that essays like this are the first step in putting us all back in "Fiddler on the Roof" villages, and I would take modern alienation, or, if it came to it, death, over that.
posted by officer_fred at 7:43 PM on February 20, 2020 [21 favorites]
posted by officer_fred at 7:43 PM on February 20, 2020 [21 favorites]
The question he isn’t asking is why did the nuclear family split from the larger extended family in the first place? Because most of the time, if you’re no longer relying on your extended family or helping them yourself, there’s generally a damn good reason. The ma/pa/triarchs have a lot to answer for.
posted by Jubey at 8:13 PM on February 20, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by Jubey at 8:13 PM on February 20, 2020 [8 favorites]
not found: ``all that is solid melts into air''
``The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.''
posted by clew at 8:14 PM on February 20, 2020 [7 favorites]
``The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.''
posted by clew at 8:14 PM on February 20, 2020 [7 favorites]
Guys, it's David Brooks - we can just safely move on without troubling ourselves here.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:24 PM on February 20, 2020 [36 favorites]
posted by ryanshepard at 8:24 PM on February 20, 2020 [36 favorites]
you had better the hell hope you were lucky enough to be born into one that was healthy. Otherwise--you might get the help, but it will come at one hell of a price, and that price might be so high that you would rather die than take it
Yeah, a solid third of my (quite large by modern standards) extended family, especially in the generations above mine, is angry, violent Trump death-cultists, and another third are very narrow-minded if less nasty. If I'd had to depend on and take care of those people, I would be leading a very sad life right now--I'd be the spinster doing unpaid caregiving for an old woman who hates everything I value. I suspect I have at least one gay cousin who will never come out. If any of them are trans, it must be insanely difficult for them.
Also, "large families" = "constantly pregnant women," with all that entails for our freedom, but I imagine for Brooks that's more of a feature than a bug.
posted by praemunire at 8:46 PM on February 20, 2020 [29 favorites]
Yeah, a solid third of my (quite large by modern standards) extended family, especially in the generations above mine, is angry, violent Trump death-cultists, and another third are very narrow-minded if less nasty. If I'd had to depend on and take care of those people, I would be leading a very sad life right now--I'd be the spinster doing unpaid caregiving for an old woman who hates everything I value. I suspect I have at least one gay cousin who will never come out. If any of them are trans, it must be insanely difficult for them.
Also, "large families" = "constantly pregnant women," with all that entails for our freedom, but I imagine for Brooks that's more of a feature than a bug.
posted by praemunire at 8:46 PM on February 20, 2020 [29 favorites]
Yeah but could a 5 year old David Brooks work a Stamp Machine on a Saturday for two nickels.
posted by clavdivs at 8:47 PM on February 20, 2020 [9 favorites]
posted by clavdivs at 8:47 PM on February 20, 2020 [9 favorites]
What is this nonsense about the industrial revolution? Nuclear families have been the norm in north-western Europe since at least the late middle ages, if not earlier. Except for some aristocracy, English families did not live with or have very close ties to their extended families. They might be in the same village, but poor families often moved for work. If parents lived with their adult children, it was more likely as dependents (as happens today). The nuclear households led to unique marriage patterns where women tended to be closer in age to their husbands than in regions which had multigenerational households.
If all this was a mistake, it's one that western European culture made about 700 years ago.
posted by jb at 8:51 PM on February 20, 2020 [13 favorites]
If all this was a mistake, it's one that western European culture made about 700 years ago.
posted by jb at 8:51 PM on February 20, 2020 [13 favorites]
David Brooks sometimes lets his issues hang out. For example, after he separated from his wife, he wrote this column.
Brooks later married his former research assistant, who is much younger than him.
This is exactly the essay that David Brooks would write if his new spouse wanted to start a nuclear family and he did not.
Was there really a shift from extended to nuclear families in recent times? If so, did it cause more harm than good? Those are serious questions. David Brooks is not now in a position to provide serious answers.
posted by compartment at 8:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [57 favorites]
Brooks later married his former research assistant, who is much younger than him.
This is exactly the essay that David Brooks would write if his new spouse wanted to start a nuclear family and he did not.
Was there really a shift from extended to nuclear families in recent times? If so, did it cause more harm than good? Those are serious questions. David Brooks is not now in a position to provide serious answers.
posted by compartment at 8:57 PM on February 20, 2020 [57 favorites]
Seems like a lot of different ways to do intentional "extended families". And no, they are not all "communes".
posted by aleph at 9:04 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by aleph at 9:04 PM on February 20, 2020 [1 favorite]
i’m a bit unfashionably suspicious of the “chosen family” idea, just because i like my friends too much to call them family. it’d be an insult.
they’re, i dunno, chosen crechemates? something like that.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:44 PM on February 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
they’re, i dunno, chosen crechemates? something like that.
posted by Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon at 9:44 PM on February 20, 2020 [6 favorites]
Cannot shake my paranoia that essays like this are the first step in putting us all back in "Fiddler on the Roof" villages, and I would take modern alienation, or, if it came to it, death, over that.
I find myself aligning with those pushing back on the basic thesis here. Not because the so-called Nuclear Family is worthy of much praise, but it is perhaps a necessary part of the path to something far more functional, possibly even hopeful. Just talk to my mother, sister, various nieces -- I don't see any of them looking back on previous models with any fondness.
Not that I don't see any positives in a re-emergence of the notion of an extended family -- I just think it has to be a move forward, not backward.
posted by philip-random at 10:39 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]
I find myself aligning with those pushing back on the basic thesis here. Not because the so-called Nuclear Family is worthy of much praise, but it is perhaps a necessary part of the path to something far more functional, possibly even hopeful. Just talk to my mother, sister, various nieces -- I don't see any of them looking back on previous models with any fondness.
Not that I don't see any positives in a re-emergence of the notion of an extended family -- I just think it has to be a move forward, not backward.
posted by philip-random at 10:39 PM on February 20, 2020 [2 favorites]
this is probably the closest I've ever come to defending David Brooks but I actually thought he was pretty clear in his support of nontraditional structures that are "like" extended family
Now if you want to argue we actually had to dismantle one thing to put something else together that's certainly one way you could go.
posted by atoxyl at 12:41 AM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]
Now if you want to argue we actually had to dismantle one thing to put something else together that's certainly one way you could go.
posted by atoxyl at 12:41 AM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]
Hey, we could like, take the concept of an extended family, and the concept of constructed families, and kind of smoosh them together! With an emphasis on equality and not excluding anyone! We could make it really big, rather than have several of them where your quality of life and the opportunities available to you depend on which family you're born into. Make everyone one big extended family! I call it: the welfare state.
posted by Dysk at 2:13 AM on February 21, 2020 [24 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 2:13 AM on February 21, 2020 [24 favorites]
So, there's actually quite the history of feminist critique of the modern nuclear family structure. Apologies for not having time to add references at present and just making a drive-by comment. I haven't read the Brooks article yet. Given his past work, it does indeed seem likely that he misses many important and relevant details and that his article is not a particularly important contribution to the literature on family structure and it's pros and cons for different individuals. But there is a literature on this topic, including specifically from feminist and LGBTQ writers.
posted by eviemath at 3:56 AM on February 21, 2020 [14 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 3:56 AM on February 21, 2020 [14 favorites]
I'm surprised at all the pushback to this article. Yeah, you may have to deal with shitty extended families--but isn't that the case for nuclear families, too? Are we arguing that more isolated structures are MORE resistant to toxicity? It seems to me that an extended family structure is more likely to put someone in contact with a sympathetic family member, just by dint of there being more people. From personal experience, I sure wish my immediate family had been closer to my extended, because then maybe my dad would've been willing to take my aunt up on her offer to take me in when I was a teen.
And what eviemath said about social justice critiques of the primacy of the nuclear family in our culture. They put MORE of the onus of childcare and housework on individual women, discriminate against people who form non-blood-based family bonds, and force LGBTQ+ people to bend the knee to toxic parents lest they be kicked out from their main source of support. Nobody's saying all extended families are perfect but in general they're better than the alternative.
posted by Anonymous at 5:07 AM on February 21, 2020
And what eviemath said about social justice critiques of the primacy of the nuclear family in our culture. They put MORE of the onus of childcare and housework on individual women, discriminate against people who form non-blood-based family bonds, and force LGBTQ+ people to bend the knee to toxic parents lest they be kicked out from their main source of support. Nobody's saying all extended families are perfect but in general they're better than the alternative.
posted by Anonymous at 5:07 AM on February 21, 2020
I mean on a fundamental level all Brooks is saying is that community is important and I'm not sure what is the problem with that.
posted by Anonymous at 5:10 AM on February 21, 2020
posted by Anonymous at 5:10 AM on February 21, 2020
Are we supposed to avoid moving thousands of miles from family to live our own lives? Anyhow, my parents are assholes and I don’t have kids, so I don’t need free babysitters. As a though experiment, imagine if David Brooks was extended family and had access to you children and could vomit his idea garbage into their ear holes.
posted by snofoam at 5:22 AM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by snofoam at 5:22 AM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]
Could he and Tara Westover (memoir: Educated) read each other’s work and have a public discussion of family, chosen family and community? Navigating harm within the systems is important.
posted by childofTethys at 5:41 AM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by childofTethys at 5:41 AM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]
It seems to me that an extended family structure is more likely to put someone in contact with a sympathetic family member, just by dint of there being more people.
From my own observations, this is not necessarily true. Toxicity in extended families tends to spread to infect the whole of the people who remain, because of the way that extended families form--usually tracing back to one pair of grandparents or great-grandparents. Common dynamics in toxic households include favoritism ("golden children") and scapegoating, and children who grow up in those households are likely to either leave the whole of the extended family or else subscribe to and validate the source or sources of the toxicity. Children who learn to appease one toxic parent and stay may marry partners who are comfortingly familiar and remind them of that toxic parent. For their part, abusive people marrying into close and supportive extended families often attempt to cut partners off from them, reducing those potential avenues of escape. Sometimes these folks don't get on, but the result of that is rarely actually all that great.
Having a large unified group as a primary social support for people may increase the numbers of people in the group, but once someone who is abusive to other people sets up shop in the center of that group, the toxicity tends to infect the whole thing. Members of large extended families are not independent samples.
posted by sciatrix at 5:45 AM on February 21, 2020 [29 favorites]
From my own observations, this is not necessarily true. Toxicity in extended families tends to spread to infect the whole of the people who remain, because of the way that extended families form--usually tracing back to one pair of grandparents or great-grandparents. Common dynamics in toxic households include favoritism ("golden children") and scapegoating, and children who grow up in those households are likely to either leave the whole of the extended family or else subscribe to and validate the source or sources of the toxicity. Children who learn to appease one toxic parent and stay may marry partners who are comfortingly familiar and remind them of that toxic parent. For their part, abusive people marrying into close and supportive extended families often attempt to cut partners off from them, reducing those potential avenues of escape. Sometimes these folks don't get on, but the result of that is rarely actually all that great.
Having a large unified group as a primary social support for people may increase the numbers of people in the group, but once someone who is abusive to other people sets up shop in the center of that group, the toxicity tends to infect the whole thing. Members of large extended families are not independent samples.
posted by sciatrix at 5:45 AM on February 21, 2020 [29 favorites]
I am inclined to suspect that someone who claims to experience generic nostalgia for a society of big, extended families has never lived in one.
posted by Seaweed Shark at 6:22 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
posted by Seaweed Shark at 6:22 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
Wow, is this thread the best illustration of MetaFilter's very narrow white, middle-class, educated, American demographic.
The last thing I expected to see here was an implicit defense of the nuclear family, which is basically only slightly less worse than patriarchal polygamy — it's sort of a patriarchy in miniature. It's the whole fucking point.
But this truth is somehow missed by people who think primarily in terms of the bold individual going out into the world and defining themselves on their own terms. Which would be reasonable if that world existed for more than a tiny, highly privileged minority!
I mean, sure, fuck David Brooks. I'll defend this thesis that the nuclear family is terrible compared to the kinds of larger familial/communal structures that have been dominant through most of human history. I won't defend this insofar as he's doing his usual semi-contrarian, vaguely traditionalist humbug shtick — I have no doubt that it's a very particular kind of extended family he prefers, itself as much a whitey mcwhite fable as the nuclear family he disdains.
There are a wide variety of forms an extended familial structure might take, some of them much better and some of them much worse with regard to the progressive values that most of us share here. I'm certainly not defending extended families indiscriminately.
But the nuclear family is far, far more limited in its variation; and the heterosexual version, in this patriarchal society with less pay and opportunities for women, and with high rates of sexual violence committed by men against women and children, is pretty much the worst. By design. It's an abomination.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:39 AM on February 21, 2020 [22 favorites]
The last thing I expected to see here was an implicit defense of the nuclear family, which is basically only slightly less worse than patriarchal polygamy — it's sort of a patriarchy in miniature. It's the whole fucking point.
But this truth is somehow missed by people who think primarily in terms of the bold individual going out into the world and defining themselves on their own terms. Which would be reasonable if that world existed for more than a tiny, highly privileged minority!
I mean, sure, fuck David Brooks. I'll defend this thesis that the nuclear family is terrible compared to the kinds of larger familial/communal structures that have been dominant through most of human history. I won't defend this insofar as he's doing his usual semi-contrarian, vaguely traditionalist humbug shtick — I have no doubt that it's a very particular kind of extended family he prefers, itself as much a whitey mcwhite fable as the nuclear family he disdains.
There are a wide variety of forms an extended familial structure might take, some of them much better and some of them much worse with regard to the progressive values that most of us share here. I'm certainly not defending extended families indiscriminately.
But the nuclear family is far, far more limited in its variation; and the heterosexual version, in this patriarchal society with less pay and opportunities for women, and with high rates of sexual violence committed by men against women and children, is pretty much the worst. By design. It's an abomination.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:39 AM on February 21, 2020 [22 favorites]
I think that some of the pushback to Brooks is simply that, the subject having caught his attention, he acts as if no one has thought as deeply or seriously about the subject as he has. When I read the FPP description, literally the first thing that I thought about was that old Barry Levinson film that pointed out this exact thing, and sure enough, Brooks brings up Avalon. Which came out thirty years ago, and the phenomenon that it describes was hardly unremarked on before that, but now Brooks seems to get it, so it's a thing now. He's even got his own brand version of communitarianism, "Weave", as if he came up with the whole idea. I mean, it's cool that he seems to want to do something meaningful with his life or leave some kind of legacy or something, but I'm just imagining him buttonholing me at some party (not that I'd ever get into the sort of parties that Brooks would go to, but anyway) and laying this whole thing on me, and interpreting my slightly slack-jawed expression as astonishment at his brilliance, and not realizing that I was trying to find a way to politely say, David, didn't people start experimenting with this sort of thing, I dunno, back in the sixties? And, boy, some of the examples you give sound, I dunno, a little cultish, maybe?
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:48 AM on February 21, 2020 [16 favorites]
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:48 AM on February 21, 2020 [16 favorites]
I'm pretty sure Brooks likes large extended families-by-blood who are beholden to the wealth of their eldest members and the obligations of "blood" all sharing living space because they're a network by which old men (which, shockingly, Brooks is) can pretty much dominate the behaviours of dozens of people rather than just one or two. So, you know, 100% in line with everything else Brooks says. [ insolently flips handle on toilet ]
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:52 AM on February 21, 2020 [22 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 6:52 AM on February 21, 2020 [22 favorites]
Weave immediately made me think of Kurt Vonnegut's Slapstick. I don't know if anybody reads that book anymore, considering that it is Problematique, but in it, the President creates a system of extended families by randomly assigning all Americans to one of a number of arbitrarily named groups, all of whom are supposed to consider each other family. The program is called "Lonesome No More!"
People were failed by their extended families back in the Day, and constantly. The young people who were physically able to escape abusive families found some way to do it. For boys and men, that mean sailing, soldiering, migrant labor, itinerant craftsmanship, the proverbial circus. For girls and women, the road was riskier--there was entertainment, domestic labor, migrant working, sex work, and the old standby, marrying the first man who would get you out from under your parents' roof. But that last one put you in the way of entering (or starting) a new abusive family structure.
This kind of family disagreement may have been an invisible driver of a lot of major human endeavors, providing cannon fodder for wars and early settlers for, well, pretty much everywhere. Possibly the ultimate reason that Homo left the continent of Africa is because someone would not put up with somebody else's shit for a moment longer.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:45 AM on February 21, 2020 [37 favorites]
People were failed by their extended families back in the Day, and constantly. The young people who were physically able to escape abusive families found some way to do it. For boys and men, that mean sailing, soldiering, migrant labor, itinerant craftsmanship, the proverbial circus. For girls and women, the road was riskier--there was entertainment, domestic labor, migrant working, sex work, and the old standby, marrying the first man who would get you out from under your parents' roof. But that last one put you in the way of entering (or starting) a new abusive family structure.
This kind of family disagreement may have been an invisible driver of a lot of major human endeavors, providing cannon fodder for wars and early settlers for, well, pretty much everywhere. Possibly the ultimate reason that Homo left the continent of Africa is because someone would not put up with somebody else's shit for a moment longer.
posted by Countess Elena at 7:45 AM on February 21, 2020 [37 favorites]
Brooks can go fuck a football.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:23 AM on February 21, 2020 [8 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:23 AM on February 21, 2020 [8 favorites]
I am sure I am not the only person who first learned what discrimination was thanks to the culture of my particular extended family.
And I am sure I am not the only person who also noticed that the person lobbying for this return to private, highly unregulated, mutual obligation is a wealthy white cishet man who can take advantage of ingrained societal patterns to ensure that all social interactions provide him with maximum benefit and minimum obligation toward others.
(Given a choice between cleaving to the extended family with its endemic mental illness, addiction and toxic social attitudes and creating/maintaining a family of choice with people who bring mindfulness, integrity and accountability to their social interactions, I know what I'm going for. Nobody ever remembers the woman who sets herself on fire to keep everyone else warm; they only look for more kindling when the fire burns out.)
posted by sobell at 8:37 AM on February 21, 2020 [13 favorites]
And I am sure I am not the only person who also noticed that the person lobbying for this return to private, highly unregulated, mutual obligation is a wealthy white cishet man who can take advantage of ingrained societal patterns to ensure that all social interactions provide him with maximum benefit and minimum obligation toward others.
(Given a choice between cleaving to the extended family with its endemic mental illness, addiction and toxic social attitudes and creating/maintaining a family of choice with people who bring mindfulness, integrity and accountability to their social interactions, I know what I'm going for. Nobody ever remembers the woman who sets herself on fire to keep everyone else warm; they only look for more kindling when the fire burns out.)
posted by sobell at 8:37 AM on February 21, 2020 [13 favorites]
This article is horseshit on so many levels, omg.
- Extended families are cesspools of misogynistic oppression. Womenfolk stripped of all power, menfolk waited on hand and foot by us.
- What this asshole means by "things have gotten better for individuals" is that things have gotten better for women. And he hates that. He'd prefer it if women were back at home barefoot and pregnant, being abused and controlled by a cadre of mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, which left her desperately at the mercy of her husband's good graces in order to survive - his favor was the only semblance of power she could have in the household. Life was great for men! Brooks wants it back!
- CHILDHOOD DIDN'T EVEN EXIST 120ish YEARS AGO. Child labor was the norm, nobody got to go to school for long except the exceptionally wealthy MALES, and girls were married off at puberty or slightly later. Child abuse was normal, statutory rape was the law of the land, and incest wasn't even recognized as a crime. What the fuck does this guy mean by "We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children." We've literally invented childhood in this past century. Child psychology as a field came into existence in the early 1900s with Melanie Klein: before her, we didn't even think children had feelings! And it's only down to the work of feminists in the 1970s and 1980s that we recognize the impact of childhood trauma on the psyche and the importance of attuned parenting to healthy adult psychology.
- I can't even muster up the number of FUCK YOUs this article deserves. If someone will volunteer to be my defense attorney I will happily pay my own train fare to go punch this man in the face. My mother broke away from her extended family setup with great struggle and was able to get me karate lessons all through my childhood against the extended family's wishes. It's time I put the karate to some use.
posted by MiraK at 8:41 AM on February 21, 2020 [36 favorites]
- Extended families are cesspools of misogynistic oppression. Womenfolk stripped of all power, menfolk waited on hand and foot by us.
- What this asshole means by "things have gotten better for individuals" is that things have gotten better for women. And he hates that. He'd prefer it if women were back at home barefoot and pregnant, being abused and controlled by a cadre of mothers-in-law and sisters-in-law, which left her desperately at the mercy of her husband's good graces in order to survive - his favor was the only semblance of power she could have in the household. Life was great for men! Brooks wants it back!
- CHILDHOOD DIDN'T EVEN EXIST 120ish YEARS AGO. Child labor was the norm, nobody got to go to school for long except the exceptionally wealthy MALES, and girls were married off at puberty or slightly later. Child abuse was normal, statutory rape was the law of the land, and incest wasn't even recognized as a crime. What the fuck does this guy mean by "We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children." We've literally invented childhood in this past century. Child psychology as a field came into existence in the early 1900s with Melanie Klein: before her, we didn't even think children had feelings! And it's only down to the work of feminists in the 1970s and 1980s that we recognize the impact of childhood trauma on the psyche and the importance of attuned parenting to healthy adult psychology.
- I can't even muster up the number of FUCK YOUs this article deserves. If someone will volunteer to be my defense attorney I will happily pay my own train fare to go punch this man in the face. My mother broke away from her extended family setup with great struggle and was able to get me karate lessons all through my childhood against the extended family's wishes. It's time I put the karate to some use.
posted by MiraK at 8:41 AM on February 21, 2020 [36 favorites]
Are we supposed to avoid moving thousands of miles from family to live our own lives?
This is going to be an unfair sort of generalization, but I would guess most people would prefer to live more than zero miles from their family but a lot less than thousands.
posted by atoxyl at 8:42 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
This is going to be an unfair sort of generalization, but I would guess most people would prefer to live more than zero miles from their family but a lot less than thousands.
posted by atoxyl at 8:42 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
I think this article is super white
is this thread the best illustration of MetaFilter's very narrow white, middle-class, educated, American demographic
a whitey mcwhite fable as the nuclear family he disdains
Yep. The article and the reactions are from a pretty narrow point of view.
The opening sentence itself irritated me.
The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history
And then to segue into an anecdote that doesn't apply to recent immigrants from developing nations, or black Americans who arrived by way of slavery, never mind Native Americans or even descendants of the first American settlers -- talk about self-centered, out-of-touch media elites.
posted by Borborygmus at 8:49 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
is this thread the best illustration of MetaFilter's very narrow white, middle-class, educated, American demographic
a whitey mcwhite fable as the nuclear family he disdains
Yep. The article and the reactions are from a pretty narrow point of view.
The opening sentence itself irritated me.
The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history
And then to segue into an anecdote that doesn't apply to recent immigrants from developing nations, or black Americans who arrived by way of slavery, never mind Native Americans or even descendants of the first American settlers -- talk about self-centered, out-of-touch media elites.
posted by Borborygmus at 8:49 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
>>>Are we arguing that more isolated structures are MORE resistant to toxicity?
No, but isolation is not the only difference between extended families and nuclear families. Nuclear families are built on VASTLY more egalitarian foundations than traditional models for extended families (lip service to "chosen family" notwithstanding). We have also steadily built a social and legal framework in larger society to make that commitment to egalitarianism within nuclear families more robust: outlawed marital rape, outlawed domestic violence, outlawed child abuse, legalized and normalized divorce for any reason (not only reasons judged "worthy" by patriarchs), given women equal rights to be heads of households, given women equal rights to marital property, invented concepts like alimony and child support, etc. etc. etc.
What this adds up to is: the nuclear family headed by married people is far and away the most egalitarian domestic institution for women to participate in. No other structure guarantees as many protections for women's legal, financial, social, and maternal wellbeing as modern-day nuclear families headed by married people do. Like, how do you get divorced from an extended family? What counts as marital property there? Where are your protections? Who pays alimony and child support?
And that is in spite of the HORREDOUS issues that are from society in general which the nuclear family fails to solve, and also the unique to issues generated by nuclear family structures. My comment is not in praise of nuclear families formed by marriage -- not at all. It is meant as an indictment of how absolutely abysmal every other option is. Nuclear families are bad, but holy shit, has anyone here ever TRIED living in an extended family as a woman, as a disabled person, as a queer person, etc.?
>>>But the nuclear family is far, far more limited in its variation; and the heterosexual version, in this patriarchal society with less pay and opportunities for women, and with high rates of sexual violence committed by men against women and children, is pretty much the worst. By design. It's an abomination.
That's a very good description of what patriarchy was designed to do by default, which extended families throughout history have been spectacularly successful at implementing..... which is what nuclear families were invented to escape! Nuclear families happened and succeeded BECAUSE extended families were so great at oppressing women and children, and we wanted out. Sure, nuclear families didn't solve patriarchy, but they're a damned sight better than extended families in all the ways you just mentioned.
posted by MiraK at 9:05 AM on February 21, 2020 [10 favorites]
No, but isolation is not the only difference between extended families and nuclear families. Nuclear families are built on VASTLY more egalitarian foundations than traditional models for extended families (lip service to "chosen family" notwithstanding). We have also steadily built a social and legal framework in larger society to make that commitment to egalitarianism within nuclear families more robust: outlawed marital rape, outlawed domestic violence, outlawed child abuse, legalized and normalized divorce for any reason (not only reasons judged "worthy" by patriarchs), given women equal rights to be heads of households, given women equal rights to marital property, invented concepts like alimony and child support, etc. etc. etc.
What this adds up to is: the nuclear family headed by married people is far and away the most egalitarian domestic institution for women to participate in. No other structure guarantees as many protections for women's legal, financial, social, and maternal wellbeing as modern-day nuclear families headed by married people do. Like, how do you get divorced from an extended family? What counts as marital property there? Where are your protections? Who pays alimony and child support?
And that is in spite of the HORREDOUS issues that are from society in general which the nuclear family fails to solve, and also the unique to issues generated by nuclear family structures. My comment is not in praise of nuclear families formed by marriage -- not at all. It is meant as an indictment of how absolutely abysmal every other option is. Nuclear families are bad, but holy shit, has anyone here ever TRIED living in an extended family as a woman, as a disabled person, as a queer person, etc.?
>>>But the nuclear family is far, far more limited in its variation; and the heterosexual version, in this patriarchal society with less pay and opportunities for women, and with high rates of sexual violence committed by men against women and children, is pretty much the worst. By design. It's an abomination.
That's a very good description of what patriarchy was designed to do by default, which extended families throughout history have been spectacularly successful at implementing..... which is what nuclear families were invented to escape! Nuclear families happened and succeeded BECAUSE extended families were so great at oppressing women and children, and we wanted out. Sure, nuclear families didn't solve patriarchy, but they're a damned sight better than extended families in all the ways you just mentioned.
posted by MiraK at 9:05 AM on February 21, 2020 [10 favorites]
I thought this article was 500% more interesting than most Brooks articles. It has an interesting thesis that is considerably more concrete than "the world is flat". It marshals statistics to make an argument for that thesis. It presents specific critiques of political ideas about how things should be. It has individual anecdotes to tell a just-so story but at least it does not rely entirely on the pearls of macroeconomic wisdom from a taxi driver that Brooks had a conversation with while traveling somewhere in Asia.
posted by allegedly at 9:11 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by allegedly at 9:11 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
Is Brooks arguing for a legal structure to enforce extended family ties? Or is he merely arguing that they could be helpful and good and are underappreciated?
I would really need to see the research showing that nuclear families are better for women, because everything I've read says the opposite.
posted by Anonymous at 9:22 AM on February 21, 2020
I would really need to see the research showing that nuclear families are better for women, because everything I've read says the opposite.
posted by Anonymous at 9:22 AM on February 21, 2020
For women, the nuclear-family structure imposes different pressures. Though women have benefited greatly from the loosening of traditional family structures—they have more freedom to choose the lives they want—many mothers who decide to raise their young children without extended family nearby find that they have chosen a lifestyle that is brutally hard and isolating. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that women still spend significantly more time on housework and child care than men do, according to recent data. Thus, the reality we see around us: stressed, tired mothers trying to balance work and parenting, and having to reschedule work when family life gets messy.
I think what bugs me about this paragraph in particular, and the larger piece, is that he seems to be arguing from this paragraph that "the solution" is to appreciate and foster larger extended networks again (which, Mefi knows from the Emotional Labor FPP, is often maintained and run by women), rather than "men within and beyond the nuclear family need to DO MORE WORK." Certainly, both of these are worthy goals, but it feels like he's rather deliberately missing a big lurking variable here that women feel stressed because male partners aren't carrying an equal load of nuclear family work. And yeah, extended family usually means "grandmothers and aunts" when it comes to 'the village', let's poke that a little bit.
posted by nakedmolerats at 9:28 AM on February 21, 2020 [24 favorites]
I think what bugs me about this paragraph in particular, and the larger piece, is that he seems to be arguing from this paragraph that "the solution" is to appreciate and foster larger extended networks again (which, Mefi knows from the Emotional Labor FPP, is often maintained and run by women), rather than "men within and beyond the nuclear family need to DO MORE WORK." Certainly, both of these are worthy goals, but it feels like he's rather deliberately missing a big lurking variable here that women feel stressed because male partners aren't carrying an equal load of nuclear family work. And yeah, extended family usually means "grandmothers and aunts" when it comes to 'the village', let's poke that a little bit.
posted by nakedmolerats at 9:28 AM on February 21, 2020 [24 favorites]
Is Brooks arguing for a legal structure to enforce extended family ties? Or is he merely arguing that they could be helpful and good and are underappreciated?
It's precisely the lack of a legal structure that makes extended families such a bad deal for women. Extended families as they exist in the real world informally exploit the unpaid labor of women, and owe no obligations to the woman whatsoever if she decides to leave the family. Her labor may have made it possible for the family to skip out on hiring nurses for the sick and elderly, for example, but lol, seeya! A nuclear family based on marriage, on the other hand, also exploits women's unpaid labor but offers some semblance of a protection if she leaves: alimony, an equal share of the marital property, and so on. Her labor is understood, legally, to have made it possible for the family to work, and she gets her investment back (in theory).
posted by MiraK at 9:29 AM on February 21, 2020 [13 favorites]
It's precisely the lack of a legal structure that makes extended families such a bad deal for women. Extended families as they exist in the real world informally exploit the unpaid labor of women, and owe no obligations to the woman whatsoever if she decides to leave the family. Her labor may have made it possible for the family to skip out on hiring nurses for the sick and elderly, for example, but lol, seeya! A nuclear family based on marriage, on the other hand, also exploits women's unpaid labor but offers some semblance of a protection if she leaves: alimony, an equal share of the marital property, and so on. Her labor is understood, legally, to have made it possible for the family to work, and she gets her investment back (in theory).
posted by MiraK at 9:29 AM on February 21, 2020 [13 favorites]
In theory, Brooks transitions in the end of the article to talking about extended families not in the context of blood kin but in the context of extended chosen family, along the lines of what queer folks have been doing all along.
Let's be very careful not to talk past each other about what "extended family" means in this context: are we talking about historical extended families based on kinship ties, or are we speaking of non-nuclear families of choice in which adults who may be unrelated to one another choose to define each other as family anyway?
posted by sciatrix at 9:50 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
Let's be very careful not to talk past each other about what "extended family" means in this context: are we talking about historical extended families based on kinship ties, or are we speaking of non-nuclear families of choice in which adults who may be unrelated to one another choose to define each other as family anyway?
posted by sciatrix at 9:50 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
I feel like the lip service the article paid to chosen families is a feint he cooked up in order to dodge the hard questions about women's oppression. Given that the bulk of the article was focused on nostalgia for ye olde blood-kin extended families, it's disingenuous to say he means chosen families when he talks about extended families.
But, I mean, fuck Brooks - it's a great idea for us right here to dwell on extended families of choice. Polyamorous families and queer families seem to be leading the way with viable, working models for the rest of us to look to. I'm interested in seeing THEM talk about how they're breaking away from nuclear families and how it works for them and what the challenges are. In particular, I'm so here for queer-people-led discussions of how we can amend/update legal statues surrounding marriage in order to move into a new era of legal protections extending beyond merely nuclear families/ het marriages for those classes of people who bear the brunt of domestic oppressions.
posted by MiraK at 10:08 AM on February 21, 2020 [12 favorites]
But, I mean, fuck Brooks - it's a great idea for us right here to dwell on extended families of choice. Polyamorous families and queer families seem to be leading the way with viable, working models for the rest of us to look to. I'm interested in seeing THEM talk about how they're breaking away from nuclear families and how it works for them and what the challenges are. In particular, I'm so here for queer-people-led discussions of how we can amend/update legal statues surrounding marriage in order to move into a new era of legal protections extending beyond merely nuclear families/ het marriages for those classes of people who bear the brunt of domestic oppressions.
posted by MiraK at 10:08 AM on February 21, 2020 [12 favorites]
If families had enough protection from economic forces that extended ones didn't dissolve, and persons had enough protection from economic and interpersonal forces that extended families didn't turn into extractive hierarchies, then nuclear families also would be much better off.
Without those protections, Brooksian nostalgia is pointing at a symptom and calling it a cause.
posted by clew at 10:13 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
Without those protections, Brooksian nostalgia is pointing at a symptom and calling it a cause.
posted by clew at 10:13 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
No one can seriously argue that family structure is fucking worse for children now than it was in the 1920s, say. Beating children was widespread ffs, and most of them were working by time they were 12.
Personally, I don't think this is a feature of the family structure. I would differentiate between an extended family and a traditional family. I don't think he's talking about the latter. A lot of people in this thread seem to be making a similar conflation.
In fact, he specifically criticizes the patriarchal nature of extended families as they were. He also discusses sexist practices within and around the nuclear family.
{many other posts}
Brooks has made me roll my eyes more than anyone since Thomas Friedman, but the white-hot hatred of him I'm seeing here - wow! I didn't know the man walked around kicking dogs but now I do.
It has an interesting thesis that is considerably more concrete than "the world is flat".
(In fairness, that was Friedman. It's easy to get them mixed up because they both write a lot of trash.)
One benefit of the nuclear family may be a reduction of nepotism and a strengthening of civil society. I think that in cultures with extremely tight familial relations, nepotism is much more common and one's allegiance to the state will be reduced. That's just a theory, though.
But overall I think there is some value to what he is saying. There's actually some eye-opening data he comes with; for instance:
This attenuation of marital ties may have begun during the late 1800s: The number of divorces increased about fifteenfold from 1870 to 1920, and then climbed more or less continuously through the first several decades of the nuclear-family era. As the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch noted in the late 1970s, the American family didn’t start coming apart in the 1960s; it had been “coming apart for more than 100 years.”
I don't know about you, but that's totally new to me.
Anyway, it's a pretty interesting topic and worth discussing even if it was written by David Brooks.
posted by Edgewise at 10:47 AM on February 21, 2020
Personally, I don't think this is a feature of the family structure. I would differentiate between an extended family and a traditional family. I don't think he's talking about the latter. A lot of people in this thread seem to be making a similar conflation.
In fact, he specifically criticizes the patriarchal nature of extended families as they were. He also discusses sexist practices within and around the nuclear family.
{many other posts}
Brooks has made me roll my eyes more than anyone since Thomas Friedman, but the white-hot hatred of him I'm seeing here - wow! I didn't know the man walked around kicking dogs but now I do.
It has an interesting thesis that is considerably more concrete than "the world is flat".
(In fairness, that was Friedman. It's easy to get them mixed up because they both write a lot of trash.)
One benefit of the nuclear family may be a reduction of nepotism and a strengthening of civil society. I think that in cultures with extremely tight familial relations, nepotism is much more common and one's allegiance to the state will be reduced. That's just a theory, though.
But overall I think there is some value to what he is saying. There's actually some eye-opening data he comes with; for instance:
This attenuation of marital ties may have begun during the late 1800s: The number of divorces increased about fifteenfold from 1870 to 1920, and then climbed more or less continuously through the first several decades of the nuclear-family era. As the intellectual historian Christopher Lasch noted in the late 1970s, the American family didn’t start coming apart in the 1960s; it had been “coming apart for more than 100 years.”
I don't know about you, but that's totally new to me.
Anyway, it's a pretty interesting topic and worth discussing even if it was written by David Brooks.
posted by Edgewise at 10:47 AM on February 21, 2020
We all know stable and loving single-parent families. But on average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents.
There he is, there's our Davy Boy. Way to cut right to the heart of the heterosexist narrative my dude.
This is a really interesting read, nonetheless. As a meme I once scrolled said, "A committed relationship used to be between a man and a woman and they raised kids together. Now, a committed relationship is one person who has a Hulu password, one person who has a Netflix password, one person who can cook, and one person who has a full time job. Together, they raise a house plant."
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:56 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
There he is, there's our Davy Boy. Way to cut right to the heart of the heterosexist narrative my dude.
This is a really interesting read, nonetheless. As a meme I once scrolled said, "A committed relationship used to be between a man and a woman and they raised kids together. Now, a committed relationship is one person who has a Hulu password, one person who has a Netflix password, one person who can cook, and one person who has a full time job. Together, they raise a house plant."
posted by Made of Star Stuff at 10:56 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
If that's totally new to you, Edgewise, you just weren't paying a lot of attention, which is absolutely fine (cf xkcd). Infuriating thing 1 about Brooks is that he's writing as though being a newbie makes him more likely to be right not less. Infuriating thing 2 is that even with the bit you quote he manages to get in digs at the hippies and ignore the fact that every critic of the economic system he has been so well paid to defend has pointed this out. Since at least Marx! And Kipling! Brooks may be inoculated against Marx, but a whole lot of Kipling's stories are about how traditional English family structures dissolve in the spread of British capitalism, and I am somehow sure Brooks has read Kipling.
posted by clew at 10:57 AM on February 21, 2020 [6 favorites]
posted by clew at 10:57 AM on February 21, 2020 [6 favorites]
"Brooks has made me roll my eyes more than anyone since Thomas Friedman, but the white-hot hatred of him I'm seeing here - wow! I didn't know the man walked around kicking dogs but now I do."
It's not so much that he walks around kicking dogs, but that in the heartland, he tells us, people regularly kick their dogs while dining at Applebee's and that, while he himself is adamantly opposed to animal cruelty, those of us who eat granola in soy milk for breakfast and create special Instagram accounts that "belong" to our cats are in danger of irreversibly alienating the dog-kickers who form the backbone of American life.
I feel unclean for defending Brooks in any form; but I do feel comfortably certain that my ideas for alternatives to the nuclear family are quite unlike his.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:05 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
It's not so much that he walks around kicking dogs, but that in the heartland, he tells us, people regularly kick their dogs while dining at Applebee's and that, while he himself is adamantly opposed to animal cruelty, those of us who eat granola in soy milk for breakfast and create special Instagram accounts that "belong" to our cats are in danger of irreversibly alienating the dog-kickers who form the backbone of American life.
I feel unclean for defending Brooks in any form; but I do feel comfortably certain that my ideas for alternatives to the nuclear family are quite unlike his.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:05 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
Infuriating thing 2 is that even with the bit you quote he manages to get in digs at the hippies and ignore the fact that every critic of the economic system he has been so well paid to defend has pointed this out.
Basically all of your comments in this thread are unpacking the major subtext of my coyly snarky initial comment - he even pays some lip service to the idea that changes in family structure over the years may have been driven by changes in the economic paradigm, but he always just seems to come off a bit like... "of course that was inevitable, so what we need to do now is just try harder to have community."
(Plus the basic irony of a guy who has taken various digs at the hippies over the years rediscovering the idea of intentional community etc.)
posted by atoxyl at 11:08 AM on February 21, 2020 [4 favorites]
Basically all of your comments in this thread are unpacking the major subtext of my coyly snarky initial comment - he even pays some lip service to the idea that changes in family structure over the years may have been driven by changes in the economic paradigm, but he always just seems to come off a bit like... "of course that was inevitable, so what we need to do now is just try harder to have community."
(Plus the basic irony of a guy who has taken various digs at the hippies over the years rediscovering the idea of intentional community etc.)
posted by atoxyl at 11:08 AM on February 21, 2020 [4 favorites]
Almost like David Brooks doesn t deserve me posting this in this thread, but the shift away from multi-generational housing, worldwide, has been noted and commented on by conservation biologists as a significant driver of habitat loss for earth's species.
I remember reading about this in school in the nineties, specifically in regards to China, as everyone seems to live there now, but the trend is global, that it takes more habitat to house fewer humans in the late 20th/ 21st century.
It was also kind of a rebuttal to the population bomb hypothesis, that human cultural and technological changes matter more than the number of people.
posted by eustatic at 11:14 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]
The Atlantic's run a counterargument to the Brooks piece, those canny site-traffic-generating wizards!
From W. Bradford Wilcox, "The Nuclear Family Is Still Indispensible." Interesting quote here:
posted by sobell at 11:17 AM on February 21, 2020
From W. Bradford Wilcox, "The Nuclear Family Is Still Indispensible." Interesting quote here:
Americans should not presume that society can successfully replace families headed by married parents with models oriented more around kith and kin. Caution is especially warranted as extended families and communities struggle to foster upward mobility or to raise the next generation successfully in circumstances where the family once anchored by marriage has broken down in their midst.It's still extremely anti-singleparenthood and pro-marriage, but there's a nice digression into what extended kinship networks can/cannot do compared to two adults in a parental role for a child.
It turns out that the relationship between nuclear families and larger communities is more symbiotic than substitutionary; more interdependent than interchangeable. Whatever the merits of extended or other nonnuclear forms of family life, research has yet to show that they are entirely equipped to shoulder the unique role of a child’s two parents.
posted by sobell at 11:17 AM on February 21, 2020
Capstone vs. cornerstone marriage, Atlantic article by Andrew Cherlin. Not about extended vs nuclear families, has a lot to do with the bit Made of Star Stuff quotes: a spreading pattern of getting married only when basically otherwise successful, including often successfully having children. Obviously if that's the pattern married people are more likely to be successful. Big question about what *causes* the pattern, also if it causes other damage or just writes it into the census record. (Grass widows weren't single mothers. Technically.)
Historically, marriage only after economic stability is not unusual. It's unusual that we think all children deserve something better than sweeping streets or clapping crows, even if they weren't born to rich married parents.
posted by clew at 11:25 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]
Historically, marriage only after economic stability is not unusual. It's unusual that we think all children deserve something better than sweeping streets or clapping crows, even if they weren't born to rich married parents.
posted by clew at 11:25 AM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]
There's the apocryphal story of some public works people tasked with revamping a town who come across a random wall in a strange spot, and one guy says, "Let's tear that wall down, it seems totally useless and it's just sitting there weirdly." And another dude goes, "If we have no idea what it's used for, then we definitely shouldn't tear it down."
If humans gave up this so-called paradise of extended families en masse the world over, with all its supposedly awesome outcomes for the health of children and lifelong communal wellbeing, we did so for REASONS. If people currently resist going back to communal living, we are resisting for REASONS. They may or may not be good reasons, but the reasons deserve examination. Nobody who thinks no compelling reason exists for the way we are and the way we have ended up has any business telling us to go back to the older better ways.
In order to make a compelling argument for communal living, it is not enough to point out all the flaws in nuclear families. We also need to talk about why we cling to nuclear families in spite of the flaws.
posted by MiraK at 11:28 AM on February 21, 2020 [10 favorites]
If humans gave up this so-called paradise of extended families en masse the world over, with all its supposedly awesome outcomes for the health of children and lifelong communal wellbeing, we did so for REASONS. If people currently resist going back to communal living, we are resisting for REASONS. They may or may not be good reasons, but the reasons deserve examination. Nobody who thinks no compelling reason exists for the way we are and the way we have ended up has any business telling us to go back to the older better ways.
In order to make a compelling argument for communal living, it is not enough to point out all the flaws in nuclear families. We also need to talk about why we cling to nuclear families in spite of the flaws.
posted by MiraK at 11:28 AM on February 21, 2020 [10 favorites]
I hate having to read Brooks, he's the kind of clever author and every time I can't put my finger on what bothers me so much about his second-rate intellectualism
However, he is clearly only writing from a critical negative position: he's not suggesting about bringing back actually-existed extended families along with their concomitant patriarchal oppression, nor is he primarily envisioning queer families or leftist or alternative families (well because he thinks they don't generalize to other groups such as Republicans?).
He is talking about family from the perspective of the dependent child and/or elderly. And from that perspective, a nuclear-sized family doesn't add up. If it does add up, it only seems to due to obscured externalities (as he says, "privilege") (By the way I think this stance destroys the rebuttal's logic; nuclear families basically "pollute" and/or are products of pollution i.e. capitalism). That's the only thing that's central to the thesis of the article—the allowable magnitude, or size, of the family that truly socially sustains dependents is strictly > 4—and it forces a deconstruction of what a family is.
Negative critique is a fair technique, example Marx and Capital. There Marx wasn't saying communism was the answer or that people should return to prior societies; he wrote Capital to only show to his peer thinkers that capitalism and the market sucked.
posted by polymodus at 11:33 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
However, he is clearly only writing from a critical negative position: he's not suggesting about bringing back actually-existed extended families along with their concomitant patriarchal oppression, nor is he primarily envisioning queer families or leftist or alternative families (well because he thinks they don't generalize to other groups such as Republicans?).
He is talking about family from the perspective of the dependent child and/or elderly. And from that perspective, a nuclear-sized family doesn't add up. If it does add up, it only seems to due to obscured externalities (as he says, "privilege") (By the way I think this stance destroys the rebuttal's logic; nuclear families basically "pollute" and/or are products of pollution i.e. capitalism). That's the only thing that's central to the thesis of the article—the allowable magnitude, or size, of the family that truly socially sustains dependents is strictly > 4—and it forces a deconstruction of what a family is.
Negative critique is a fair technique, example Marx and Capital. There Marx wasn't saying communism was the answer or that people should return to prior societies; he wrote Capital to only show to his peer thinkers that capitalism and the market sucked.
posted by polymodus at 11:33 AM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
There's the apocryphal story of some public works people tasked with revamping a town who come across a wall in the middle of a town, and one guy says, "Let's tear that wall down, it seems totally useless and it's just sitting there weirdly." And another dude goes, "If we have no idea what it could be used for, then we definitely shouldn't tear it down."
It's from (or at least most famously employed by) G.K. Chesterton (for him a simple metaphorical defense of conservatism).
posted by atoxyl at 11:34 AM on February 21, 2020
It's from (or at least most famously employed by) G.K. Chesterton (for him a simple metaphorical defense of conservatism).
posted by atoxyl at 11:34 AM on February 21, 2020
The support of family (whether extended or nuclear) can help people weather the challenges of life in late capitalism, but many of the problems Brooks refers to could (and arguably) should be solved by the state. The lack of job opportunities for many people, the lack of public daycare, the lack of cradle-to-grave public healthcare. If we had these institutional support structures in place for all citizens, it would create a floor for how bad life could be and would save family members (often women) from having to martyr out to care for others. Other than cultural norms, there's nothing stopping people from living in the familial arrangements they wish to (extended, nuclear or "chosen" families.) So, as others have noted, the fact that most people do not live in extended family settings means that for whatever reason or reasons, they prefer other modes of living. That does not seem to be a problem in and of itself.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 11:40 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 11:40 AM on February 21, 2020 [9 favorites]
Other than cultural norms, there's nothing stopping people from living in the familial arrangements they wish to (extended, nuclear or "chosen" families.) So, as others have noted, the fact that most people do not live in extended family settings means that for whatever reason or reasons, they prefer other modes of living.
Brooks directly challenges this argument, so repeating the opposite doesn't address the issue. He states that it's not about cultural norms (unquestioned liberal cultural relativist assumptions), which my rewriting him is better construed as a challenge that liberals/progressives have not taken the further examination that based on our own science from psychology and sociology, nuclear-sized families are possibly suboptimal for child development as well as elderly flourishing, etc. So there are psychological and sociological principles at work and liberals should at the minimum use the science rather than believe that such decisions are merely "free" choices modulo the ideological constraints of market structure.
Which really goes to say, the fact that many people accept any given set of choices under capitalism doesn't mean we prefer that. Quite the inverse. In fact I think the concept of preference is precisely the give-away of neoliberal ideology.
posted by polymodus at 11:57 AM on February 21, 2020 [3 favorites]
Brooks directly challenges this argument, so repeating the opposite doesn't address the issue. He states that it's not about cultural norms (unquestioned liberal cultural relativist assumptions), which my rewriting him is better construed as a challenge that liberals/progressives have not taken the further examination that based on our own science from psychology and sociology, nuclear-sized families are possibly suboptimal for child development as well as elderly flourishing, etc. So there are psychological and sociological principles at work and liberals should at the minimum use the science rather than believe that such decisions are merely "free" choices modulo the ideological constraints of market structure.
Which really goes to say, the fact that many people accept any given set of choices under capitalism doesn't mean we prefer that. Quite the inverse. In fact I think the concept of preference is precisely the give-away of neoliberal ideology.
posted by polymodus at 11:57 AM on February 21, 2020 [3 favorites]
Thanks atoxyl! Apologies to Chesterton for appropriating his story for my pro-revolution, anti-traditionalist argument here: I see nuclear families as one of the first hammers humankind has thrown at the bulwark of patriarchy. (Capitalism was patriarchy's moment of hammering its own thumb.)
We're still in the nascent stages of bringing patriarchy down; it will take time for us to imagine and then reforge our communities in egalitarian ways. In the meantime, women are out here actually DOING almost all of the work of rebuilding community while men sit atop their bulwark, pining for the days when their walls were so much higher that the groundsfolk's moans of suffering could be reimagined by them as happy little working songs.
>>> nuclear-sized families are suboptimal for child development as well as elderly flourishing
As noted above, this thesis is patently absurd on its face. Child development/outcomes and senior wellbeing are both at their unprecedented best in nuclear families and in our era, by any matrices or measures. It's only Brooks's fuzzy nostalgia that allows him to imagine children or the elderly were happier in days of yore.
posted by MiraK at 12:03 PM on February 21, 2020
We're still in the nascent stages of bringing patriarchy down; it will take time for us to imagine and then reforge our communities in egalitarian ways. In the meantime, women are out here actually DOING almost all of the work of rebuilding community while men sit atop their bulwark, pining for the days when their walls were so much higher that the groundsfolk's moans of suffering could be reimagined by them as happy little working songs.
>>> nuclear-sized families are suboptimal for child development as well as elderly flourishing
As noted above, this thesis is patently absurd on its face. Child development/outcomes and senior wellbeing are both at their unprecedented best in nuclear families and in our era, by any matrices or measures. It's only Brooks's fuzzy nostalgia that allows him to imagine children or the elderly were happier in days of yore.
posted by MiraK at 12:03 PM on February 21, 2020
Brooks's fuzzy nostalgia
That's his whole schtick, right there. Well, that and imagining what people he's never met might be thinking.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:10 PM on February 21, 2020 [4 favorites]
That's his whole schtick, right there. Well, that and imagining what people he's never met might be thinking.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:10 PM on February 21, 2020 [4 favorites]
Moving from nuclear to extended family is bullshit. We must destroy the concept of "Family" as a genetic institution. Thatcher can fuck right off.
The forms of social reproduction must be smashed. Capitalism itself is the death-knell of the traditional family. As religion dies and Capital becomes the new god, we devote every waking our to work, and the "family" we now exist in is the familiy we form bonds with outside the enforced/arbitrary genetic code.
We don't live in a family. We don't live "in a society"... we live much further and farther beyond and the reactionaries who insist we just need "a more tightly integrated genetic community" only need look at the sexual abuse problems in the Amish Community (as one obvious more local to my region) to see why this is a problem. Replacing one "family" with a larger one (still based on genes) does nothing to resolve the insular, isolated, and atomistic individuals "A mans home is his kingdom"...
It's fiefdom all the way down. If humanity is to be free, they must be free to form the bonds they so choose (despite the so called 'freedom of association' the conservative Capitalists thrust upon us, they only want to limit it to certain "KINDS" of association).
We must smash the limits of their patriarchal structures and form new social modes beyond their limited and archaic forms, extended or nuclear...
That doesn't mean you abandon nuclear/extended IF IT WORKS FOR YOU.
But if it doesn't don't just use the extended as some liberatory excuse. Others above have stated it better and more eloquently than my rage filled rant here...
posted by symbioid at 12:27 PM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]
The forms of social reproduction must be smashed. Capitalism itself is the death-knell of the traditional family. As religion dies and Capital becomes the new god, we devote every waking our to work, and the "family" we now exist in is the familiy we form bonds with outside the enforced/arbitrary genetic code.
We don't live in a family. We don't live "in a society"... we live much further and farther beyond and the reactionaries who insist we just need "a more tightly integrated genetic community" only need look at the sexual abuse problems in the Amish Community (as one obvious more local to my region) to see why this is a problem. Replacing one "family" with a larger one (still based on genes) does nothing to resolve the insular, isolated, and atomistic individuals "A mans home is his kingdom"...
It's fiefdom all the way down. If humanity is to be free, they must be free to form the bonds they so choose (despite the so called 'freedom of association' the conservative Capitalists thrust upon us, they only want to limit it to certain "KINDS" of association).
We must smash the limits of their patriarchal structures and form new social modes beyond their limited and archaic forms, extended or nuclear...
That doesn't mean you abandon nuclear/extended IF IT WORKS FOR YOU.
But if it doesn't don't just use the extended as some liberatory excuse. Others above have stated it better and more eloquently than my rage filled rant here...
posted by symbioid at 12:27 PM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]
(And lest I need to point it to prevent a derail - I was only using the Amish as an example - there's plenty of good shit in the Amish community too, I am NOT anti-Amish, I just point out the problems with specific forms of insular communities - and I will readily admit this also exists in more "liberatory" spaces (say - BDSM communities, Socialist Orgs, etc...) This goes beyond the structural form. But by allowing the forms to be abolished we may work towards escape in some ways. Only with the destruction of the old can the new structure form.
posted by symbioid at 12:28 PM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
posted by symbioid at 12:28 PM on February 21, 2020 [1 favorite]
As noted above, this thesis is patently absurd on its face. Child development/outcomes and senior wellbeing are both at their unprecedented best in nuclear families and in our era, by any matrices or measures
To the extent that this is true - I think it's a statement that would benefit from being more explicit about one's measures - it feels like it has a lot to do with the intervention of the state. Which of course is one of the major problems with the way guys like Brooks view these issues, that they are always looking for that not to be one of the preferred solutions.
posted by atoxyl at 12:36 PM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]
To the extent that this is true - I think it's a statement that would benefit from being more explicit about one's measures - it feels like it has a lot to do with the intervention of the state. Which of course is one of the major problems with the way guys like Brooks view these issues, that they are always looking for that not to be one of the preferred solutions.
posted by atoxyl at 12:36 PM on February 21, 2020 [2 favorites]
When we finally got enough money to visit my cousins, I was shocked at how different their lives were.
I suspect that may have had something to do with not having an abusive, alcoholic patriarch over them, who would have leveraged his power to immiserate the entire group.
Yeah, Brooks is wrong (surprise!) that the nuclear family is essentially a recent invention in England. A marriage pattern where the partners generally delay until they are able to set up an independent household together tracks well back into the early modern period in England. This has been known for decades--basically since we started really digging systematically into parish records for non-elites. But he's not totally wrong in thinking we place more stress on it now, especially since other affiliative social structures like guilds and churches have dwindled in importance.
posted by praemunire at 1:03 PM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]
I suspect that may have had something to do with not having an abusive, alcoholic patriarch over them, who would have leveraged his power to immiserate the entire group.
Yeah, Brooks is wrong (surprise!) that the nuclear family is essentially a recent invention in England. A marriage pattern where the partners generally delay until they are able to set up an independent household together tracks well back into the early modern period in England. This has been known for decades--basically since we started really digging systematically into parish records for non-elites. But he's not totally wrong in thinking we place more stress on it now, especially since other affiliative social structures like guilds and churches have dwindled in importance.
posted by praemunire at 1:03 PM on February 21, 2020 [5 favorites]
but the white-hot hatred of him I'm seeing here - wow! I didn't know the man walked around kicking dogs but now I do.
Oh, it's actually worse by several magnitudes: Brooks was, of course, one of the primary cheerleaders for the Iraq war.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:07 PM on February 21, 2020 [11 favorites]
Oh, it's actually worse by several magnitudes: Brooks was, of course, one of the primary cheerleaders for the Iraq war.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 1:07 PM on February 21, 2020 [11 favorites]
>>>But he's not totally wrong in thinking we place more stress on it now, especially since other affiliative social structures like guilds and churches have dwindled in importance.
I, for one, would have had zero issues with this article if it had been about the need to build communal support structures in the here and now for the benefit of families, children, and the elderly.
The only reason anyone's reacting badly here is because this guy is waxing nostalgic for a flagrantly oppressive social system in the name of ~the children~. It's offensive in the same way as if a white person waxed nostalgic for the antebellum south as a "green" way to live.
posted by MiraK at 1:26 PM on February 21, 2020 [11 favorites]
I, for one, would have had zero issues with this article if it had been about the need to build communal support structures in the here and now for the benefit of families, children, and the elderly.
The only reason anyone's reacting badly here is because this guy is waxing nostalgic for a flagrantly oppressive social system in the name of ~the children~. It's offensive in the same way as if a white person waxed nostalgic for the antebellum south as a "green" way to live.
posted by MiraK at 1:26 PM on February 21, 2020 [11 favorites]
“You cut the turkey without me?” he cries. “Your own flesh and blood! … You cut the turkey?” The pace of life is speeding up. Convenience, privacy, and mobility are more important than family loyalty. “The idea that they would eat before the brother arrived was a sign of disrespect,”It takes real effort to treat this with respect and do something other than just nod and smile in the same way I would when encountering someone on the bus who's clearly interacting with people that aren't there. As a child of an isolated single parent and poorly funded public schools, I'm glad I was taught to write more coherent text than this while in elementary school. I've read it twice. I have no idea what it means.
posted by eotvos at 3:05 PM on February 21, 2020 [4 favorites]
Child development/outcomes and senior wellbeing are both at their unprecedented best in nuclear families and in our era, by any matrices or measures.
Mission accomplished! High-fives all 'round.
posted by No Robots at 4:10 PM on February 21, 2020
Mission accomplished! High-fives all 'round.
posted by No Robots at 4:10 PM on February 21, 2020
Except he couldn't, there. They called him out on it.
I'm not trying to argue with you about your family dynamic, but I think you're not quite getting my point. Yeah, if a brother who goes away and comes back to his peers doesn't conform to family norms, they might be able to push him to converge with them. But if Grandpa had been an abusive jerk, he would have used his even greater social authority to keep himself in power and probably traumatize his kids into compliance/perpetuation of the pattern.
posted by praemunire at 1:21 AM on February 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
I'm not trying to argue with you about your family dynamic, but I think you're not quite getting my point. Yeah, if a brother who goes away and comes back to his peers doesn't conform to family norms, they might be able to push him to converge with them. But if Grandpa had been an abusive jerk, he would have used his even greater social authority to keep himself in power and probably traumatize his kids into compliance/perpetuation of the pattern.
posted by praemunire at 1:21 AM on February 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
One thing that might be different with extended living situations is that the younger people could debunk some of the rage emails that get passed around among the elderly, radicalizing their politics.
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:01 AM on February 22, 2020
posted by bonobothegreat at 10:01 AM on February 22, 2020
I think there is some reason for hope in that yes, extended families can (and do!) develop very toxic dynamics/patterns. But there is less *force* nowadays than there used to be in a lot of things. Including the maintaining of those patterns against the "push-back" that always happens. And of course one of the ultimate push-backs is just leaving. And *that* is more possible nowadays.
Let's encourage that ability. Make these intentional patterns more fluid and hopefully more healthy ones will evolve. Healthcare, so you're not tied by that. A Basic living wage/dividend to also allow more mobility (if that is the wish).
Yeah, I know. Dream on.
posted by aleph at 10:52 AM on February 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
Let's encourage that ability. Make these intentional patterns more fluid and hopefully more healthy ones will evolve. Healthcare, so you're not tied by that. A Basic living wage/dividend to also allow more mobility (if that is the wish).
Yeah, I know. Dream on.
posted by aleph at 10:52 AM on February 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
The only time extended family lived with me during my childhood was when my alcoholic grandfather was brought home. He smelled like pee, fell down the stairs, was brought home by the cops after being found in the street in his underwear and made my mom cry a lot. It was way better off when it was just the three of us.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:21 PM on February 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:21 PM on February 22, 2020 [2 favorites]
That's the support they claim the old people (and kids) need. You know, the support the State *can't* provide. Bad for you though. :(
posted by aleph at 1:05 PM on February 22, 2020
posted by aleph at 1:05 PM on February 22, 2020
The problem with this kind of "in olden times" cod sociology is that the lack of rigour immediately makes a nonsense of the whole thesis.
A few other people have already mentioned the Western European Marriage Pattern. Essentially, if your ancestors come from West of the Hajnal line1 then your ancestors have been:
-Marrying late (women in late 20s)
-Starting neolocal (not in paternal nor maternal household) families
for centuries.
In other words for at least 700 years and potentially before (there is some weaker evidence for this pattern existing in some places in Roman times) this has been the norm for a substantial number of the ancestors of contemporary Americans.
(1) Originally, the theory was that this was true for everywhere West of the line except for fringe areas and was true continuously for this whole period. It turns out that when you look more closely it isn't as clear as that and that the pattern varies over time.
posted by atrazine at 7:13 AM on February 23, 2020 [2 favorites]
A few other people have already mentioned the Western European Marriage Pattern. Essentially, if your ancestors come from West of the Hajnal line1 then your ancestors have been:
-Marrying late (women in late 20s)
-Starting neolocal (not in paternal nor maternal household) families
for centuries.
In other words for at least 700 years and potentially before (there is some weaker evidence for this pattern existing in some places in Roman times) this has been the norm for a substantial number of the ancestors of contemporary Americans.
(1) Originally, the theory was that this was true for everywhere West of the line except for fringe areas and was true continuously for this whole period. It turns out that when you look more closely it isn't as clear as that and that the pattern varies over time.
posted by atrazine at 7:13 AM on February 23, 2020 [2 favorites]
If Brooks wrote a piece that the praised nuclear families, celebrated the movement away from the extended family structure, applauded the normalization of the two-person household among straight and LGBTQ+ alike, said the nuclear family and isolation from members outside of it was feminist and best for child development, called it best for society overall, would everyone here be nodding along?
posted by Anonymous at 9:45 AM on February 23, 2020
posted by Anonymous at 9:45 AM on February 23, 2020
Nah, I'd still be making a pitch for a decent welfare state rather than leaving anyone dependent on the luck of their birth family at whatever size or scope you like.
posted by Dysk at 10:31 AM on February 23, 2020 [7 favorites]
posted by Dysk at 10:31 AM on February 23, 2020 [7 favorites]
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posted by clew at 5:32 PM on February 20, 2020 [9 favorites]