essay on nuclear family

The Nuclear Family Was No Mistake: A Response to David Brooks

We're growing more disconnected, but the nuclear familly isn't at fault..

Posted February 27, 2020 | Reviewed by Matt Huston

In a thought-provoking article covering an array of societal challenges, David Brooks declares that “ The Nuclear Family was a Mistake .” I share many of the concerns he articulates about social fragmentation, but I believe he errs by implying that—in a maelstrom of change and growing disconnection—the nuclear family is the villain in our story.

From the standpoint of biology, sociology, psychology, or of different faiths, it is widely accepted that little humans have advantages if they are looked after by two adults sharing a bond. Although scholars can argue the reasons why, and there are plenty of exceptions to the general case, a strong commitment between two parents is a fundamental good. That will often take the form of a nuclear family, which may or may not be further connected in a community. Further, I believe there is substantial evidence that the nuclear family has been around a lot longer than implied in Brook’s piece (e.g., see this brief overview by European historian, Peter Laslett). The nuclear family is one of the fundamental building blocks of family, extended families, and communities.

Brooks acknowledges the benefits of two-parent families and of marriage , refining his focus from the sweeping accusation of the title to detached nuclear families. Disconnection and isolation are his real targets, and those are deeply important problems. But, in his article, the nuclear family seems like a passenger along for the ride in a car leaving the scene of the crimes Brooks describes—when the car is driven by us. By us, I mean most all of us, motivated by our desires for autonomy and freedom.

In fact, Brooks states, “We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families.” That is a profound truth, and it describes what gets too little attention from Brooks. He says the market wants us to live in greater isolation, but maybe it’s us doing the wanting. He is especially disturbed that autonomy and separated living is so clearly displayed in countries with the most concentrated wealth. A lot of the problems we see may be caused by what most people want—even if those things also have downsides for individuals and society.

I remember being in a room of scholars 20 or more years ago when family historian Barbara Dafoe Whitehead argued that much of the increase in family fragmentation then observed was driven by growing affluence. She was not referring to wealth inequality but to the growing affluence across America that gave wings to autonomy.

Brooks gives the example of how many fewer elderly Americans now live with kin than in the past. An unasked question is, how many elderly Americans want to have less autonomy and live with their kin? Many elderly adults in America are isolated and at increased risk. More than a few want increased connection with family and a growing number simply have no kin . But many others cling to their autonomy and will fight to keep it until reality forces them to do otherwise. In the past, few people had the option to preserve autonomy in this way. Some forms of living that Brooks extols as better in the past were quite likely, and largely, driven by poverty, fear , and necessity.

I am not arguing that there is virtue in isolation and atomization. I do think we are losing, or letting go of, common spaces for connection in our lives. Many of us want what may not actually be best for us or those around us. Paul Amato and colleagues wrote an insightful book on the growing trend for couples to isolate and be Alone Together . It’s Bowling Alone for two. This trend toward isolation has many causes, and, as Brooks notes, the consequences are different for those with and without means. As Sarah Halpern-Meekin has written, those in poverty are not merely suffering from economic poverty but also from Social Poverty . She suggests this is a growing problem for all, with particular challenges for those struggling with economic hardship.

What do people seem to want? You can infer the most about what people truly desire when they have more options and fewer constraints. As a group, those with higher education and incomes—those with the most options—are now over-represented among those with stable marriages and nuclear families. Although it might have changed since they first wrote on the subject, Katherine Edin and Maria Kefalas found that the desire to marry exists among the poor despite barriers in reaching that goal. People have preferences, the expression of which is affected by their quality of opportunity.

Not only are those with more education choosing marriage, they are increasingly sorting into two-parent families with the best odds for a stable family life. Many scholars, including Andrew Cherlin and Brad Wilcox and Wendy Wang , have remarked on the resulting chasm between the haves and have nots. Not everyone wants marriage, and fewer adults than ever before desire to be parents, but those with the best options seem to be the most likely to choose a marriage-based, nuclear family. As Cherlin suggests and Brooks implies, this fact is becoming a multiplier of income and wealth inequality, but I do not think having fewer nuclear families is going to lead to having more extended families with connections. Brooks errs in making the nuclear family the fall guy for very real and complex problems in family inequality and individual opportunity.

I strongly agree with Brooks that isolation is winning out over community. Along with detailing various types of government efforts that he believes may help in the broader context, he brings his essay home by focusing on ways we can work toward creating more social connection, partly by forged families. This is, in part, the province of commitment on a personal level, where we can choose to connect and share our lives with others. While we naturally eschew constraints in favor of freedom, commitment is making a choice to give up some choices—it is choosing to be constrained for something better. There is more than one way to forge connectedness rooted in commitment.

Note: This essay is adapted slightly from one that was published as part of a series of article organized by the Institute of Family Studies in reaction to the article by Brooks.

Scott Stanley, Ph.D. , is a psychologist and a research professor at the University of Denver, where he conducts studies on marriage, cohabitation, and commitment.

• Find a Therapist
• Find a Treatment Center
• Find a Psychiatrist
• Find a Support Group
• Find Online Therapy
• United States
• Brooklyn, NY
• Chicago, IL
• Houston, TX
• Los Angeles, CA
• New York, NY
• Portland, OR
• San Diego, CA
• San Francisco, CA
• Seattle, WA
• Washington, DC
• Asperger's
• Bipolar Disorder
• Chronic Pain
• Eating Disorders
• Passive Aggression
• Personality
• Goal Setting
• Positive Psychology
• Stopping Smoking
• Low Sexual Desire
• Relationships
• Child Development
• Therapy Center NEW
• Diagnosis Dictionary
• Types of Therapy

Understanding what emotional intelligence looks like and the steps needed to improve it could light a path to a more emotionally adept world.

• Emotional Intelligence
• Gaslighting
• Affective Forecasting
• Neuroscience

The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

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.

T he scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,” says one, remembering his first day in America. “There were lights everywhere … It was a celebration of light! I thought they were for me.”

The oldsters start squabbling about whose memory is better. “It was cold that day,” one says about some faraway memory. “What are you talking about? It was May, late May,” says another. The young children sit wide-eyed, absorbing family lore and trying to piece together the plotline of the generations.

After the meal, there are piles of plates in the sink, squads of children conspiring mischievously in the basement. Groups of young parents huddle in a hallway, making plans. The old men nap on couches, waiting for dessert. It’s the extended family in all its tangled, loving, exhausting glory.

This particular family is the one depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1990 film, Avalon , based on his own childhood in Baltimore. Five brothers came to America from Eastern Europe around the time of World War I and built a wallpaper business. For a while they did everything together, like in the old country. But as the movie goes along, the extended family begins to split apart. Some members move to the suburbs for more privacy and space. One leaves for a job in a different state. The big blowup comes over something that seems trivial but isn’t: The eldest of the brothers arrives late to a Thanksgiving dinner to find that the family has begun the meal without him.

“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,” Levinson told me recently when I asked him about that scene. “That was the real crack in the family. When you violate the protocol, the whole family structure begins to collapse.”

As the years go by in the movie, the extended family plays a smaller and smaller role. By the 1960s, there’s no extended family at Thanksgiving. It’s just a young father and mother and their son and daughter, eating turkey off trays in front of the television. In the final scene, the main character is living alone in a nursing home, wondering what happened. “In the end, you spend everything you’ve ever saved, sell everything you’ve ever owned, just to exist in a place like this.”

“In my childhood,” Levinson told me, “you’d gather around the grandparents and they would tell the family stories … Now individuals sit around the TV, watching other families’ stories.” The main theme of Avalon , he said, is “the decentralization of the family. And that has continued even further today. Once, families at least gathered around the television. Now each person has their own screen.”

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

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

Annie Lowrey: The great affordability crisis breaking America

This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.

The Era of Extended Clans

Through the early parts of American history, most people lived in what, by today’s standards, were big, sprawling households. In 1800, three-quarters of American workers were farmers. Most of the other quarter worked in small family businesses, like dry-goods stores. People needed a lot of labor to run these enterprises. It was not uncommon for married couples to have seven or eight children. In addition, there might be stray aunts, uncles, and cousins, as well as unrelated servants, apprentices, and farmhands. (On some southern farms, of course, enslaved African Americans were also an integral part of production and work life.)

Steven Ruggles, a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, calls these “corporate families”—social units organized around a family business. According to Ruggles, in 1800, 90 percent of American families were corporate families. Until 1850, roughly three-quarters of Americans older than 65 lived with their kids and grandkids. Nuclear families existed, but they were surrounded by extended or corporate families.

Read: What number of kids makes parents happiest?

Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. If a mother dies, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents are there to step in. If a relationship between a father and a child ruptures, others can fill the breach. Extended families have more people to share the unexpected burdens—when a kid gets sick in the middle of the day or when an adult unexpectedly loses a job.

A detached nuclear family, by contrast, is an intense set of relationships among, say, four people. If one relationship breaks, there are no shock absorbers. In a nuclear family, the end of the marriage means the end of the family as it was previously understood.

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. According to Ruggles, the prevalence of extended families living together roughly doubled from 1750 to 1900 , and this way of life was more common than at any time before or since.

During the Victorian era, the idea of “hearth and home” became a cultural ideal. The home “is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receive with love,” the great Victorian social critic John Ruskin wrote. This shift was led by the upper-middle class, which was coming to see the family less as an economic unit and more as an emotional and moral unit, a rectory for the formation of hearts and souls.

But while extended families have strengths, they can also be exhausting and stifling. They allow little privacy; you are forced to be in daily intimate contact with people you didn’t choose. There’s more stability but less mobility. Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life. In the Victorian era, families were patriarchal, favoring men in general and first-born sons in particular.

As factories opened in the big U.S. cities, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, young men and women left their extended families to chase the American dream. These young people married as soon as they could. A young man on a farm might wait until 26 to get married; in the lonely city, men married at 22 or 23. From 1890 to 1960, the average age of first marriage dropped by 3.6 years for men and 2.2 years for women.

From September 2019: Daniel Markovits on how life became an endless, terrible competition

The families they started were nuclear families. The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment. Children were no longer raised to assume economic roles—they were raised so that at adolescence they could fly from the nest, become independent, and seek partners of their own. They were raised not for embeddedness but for autonomy. By the 1920s, the nuclear family with a male breadwinner had replaced the corporate family as the dominant family form. By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.

The Short, Happy Life of the Nuclear Family

For a time, it all seemed to work. From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy. In these years, a kind of cult formed around this type of family—what McCall’s , the leading women’s magazine of the day, called “togetherness.” Healthy people lived in two-parent families. In a 1957 survey , more than half of the respondents said that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic.”

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

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

For one thing, most women were relegated to the home. Many corporations, well into the mid-20th century, barred married women from employment: Companies would hire single women, but if those women got married, they would have to quit. Demeaning and disempowering treatment of women was rampant. Women spent enormous numbers of hours trapped inside the home under the headship of their husband, raising children.

For another thing, nuclear families in this era were much more connected to other nuclear families than they are today—constituting a “ modified extended family ,” as the sociologist Eugene Litwak calls it, “a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.” Even as late as the 1950s, before television and air-conditioning had fully caught on, people continued to live on one another’s front porches and were part of one another’s lives. Friends felt free to discipline one another’s children.

In his book The Lost City , the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt describes life in mid-century Chicago and its suburbs:

To be a young homeowner in a suburb like Elmhurst in the 1950s was to participate in a communal enterprise that only the most determined loner could escape: barbecues, coffee klatches, volleyball games, baby-sitting co-ops and constant bartering of household goods, child rearing by the nearest parents who happened to be around, neighbors wandering through the door at any hour without knocking—all these were devices by which young adults who had been set down in a wilderness of tract homes made a community. It was a life lived in public.

Finally, conditions in the wider society were ideal for family stability. The postwar period was a high-water mark of church attendance, unionization, social trust, and mass prosperity—all things that correlate with family cohesion. A man could relatively easily find a job that would allow him to be the breadwinner for a single-income family. By 1961, the median American man age 25 to 29 was earning nearly 400 percent more than his father had earned at about the same age.

In short, the period from 1950 to 1965 demonstrated that a stable society can be built around nuclear families—so long as women are relegated to the household, nuclear families are so intertwined that they are basically extended families by another name, and every economic and sociological condition in society is working together to support the institution.

Video: How the Nuclear Family Broke Down

Disintegration

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

Read: Gen-X women are caught in a generational tug-of-war

A study of women’s magazines by the sociologists Francesca Cancian and Steven L. Gordon found that from 1900 to 1979, themes of putting family before self dominated in the 1950s: “Love means self-sacrifice and compromise.” In the 1960s and ’70s, putting self before family was prominent: “Love means self-expression and individuality.” Men absorbed these cultural themes, too. The master trend in Baby Boomer culture generally was liberation—“Free Bird,” “Born to Run,” “Ramblin’ Man.”

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written , “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas , “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.”

Read: An interview with Eli Finkel on how we expect too much from our romantic partners

This cultural shift was very good for some adults, but it was not so good for families generally. Fewer relatives are around in times of stress to help a couple work through them. If you married for love, staying together made less sense when the love died. 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.”

Americans today have less family than ever before. From 1970 to 2012, the share of households consisting of married couples with kids has been cut in half. In 1960, according to census data, just 13 percent of all households were single-person households. In 2018, that figure was 28 percent. In 1850, 75 percent of Americans older than 65 lived with relatives; by 1990, only 18 percent did.

Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage—they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more. In 1950, 27 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, about 45 percent do. In 1960, 72 percent of American adults were married. In 2017, nearly half of American adults were single. According to a 2014 report from the Urban Institute, roughly 90 percent of Baby Boomer women and 80 percent of Gen X women married by age 40, while only about 70 percent of late-Millennial women were expected to do so—the lowest rate in U.S. history. And while more than four-fifths of American adults in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey said that getting married is not essential to living a fulfilling life, it’s not just the institution of marriage they’re eschewing: In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.

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

Over the past two generations, the physical space separating nuclear families has widened. Before, sisters-in-law shouted greetings across the street at each other from their porches. Kids would dash from home to home and eat out of whoever’s fridge was closest by. But lawns have grown more expansive and porch life has declined, creating a buffer of space that separates the house and family from anyone else. As Mandy Len Catron recently noted in The Atlantic , married people are less likely to visit parents and siblings, and less inclined to help them do chores or offer emotional support. A code of family self-sufficiency prevails: Mom, Dad, and the kids are on their own, with a barrier around their island home.

Finally, over the past two generations, families have grown more unequal. America now has two entirely different family regimes. Among the highly educated, family patterns are almost as stable as they were in the 1950s; among the less fortunate, family life is often utter chaos. There’s a reason for that divide: Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up. Think of all the child-rearing labor affluent parents now buy that used to be done by extended kin: babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs. (For that matter, think of how the affluent can hire therapists and life coaches for themselves, as replacement for kin or close friends.) These expensive tools and services not only support children’s development and help prepare them to compete in the meritocracy; by reducing stress and time commitments for parents, they preserve the amity of marriage. Affluent conservatives often pat themselves on the back for having stable nuclear families. They preach that everybody else should build stable families too. But then they ignore one of the main reasons their own families are stable: They can afford to purchase the support that extended family used to provide—and that the people they preach at, further down the income scale, cannot.

Read: ‘Intensive’ parenting is a strategy for an age of inequality

In 1970, the family structures of the rich and poor did not differ that greatly. Now there is a chasm between them. As of 2005, 85 percent of children born to upper-middle-class families were living with both biological parents when the mom was 40. Among working-class families, only 30 percent were. According to a 2012 report from the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women ages 22 to 44 have a 78 percent chance of having their first marriage last at least 20 years. Women in the same age range with a high-school degree or less have only about a 40 percent chance. Among Americans ages 18 to 55, only 26 percent of the poor and 39 percent of the working class are currently married. In her book Generation Unbound , Isabel Sawhill, an economist at the Brookings Institution, cited research indicating that differences in family structure have “increased income inequality by 25 percent.” If the U.S. returned to the marriage rates of 1970, child poverty would be 20 percent lower. As Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, once put it, “It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged.”

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

Read: The working-to-afford-child-care conundrum

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

Over the past 50 years, federal and state governments have tried to mitigate the deleterious effects of these trends. They’ve tried to increase marriage rates, push down divorce rates, boost fertility, and all the rest. The focus has always been on strengthening the nuclear family, not the extended family. Occasionally, a discrete program will yield some positive results, but the widening of family inequality continues unabated.

The people who suffer the most from the decline in family support are the vulnerable—especially children. In 1960, roughly 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now about 40 percent are. The Pew Research Center reported that 11 percent of children lived apart from their father in 1960. In 2010, 27 percent did. Now about half of American children will spend their childhood with both biological parents. Twenty percent of young adults have no contact at all with their father (though in some cases that’s because the father is deceased). American children are more likely to live in a single-parent household than children from any other country.

Read: The divorce gap

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. According to work by Richard V. Reeves , a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

It’s not just the lack of relationships that hurts children; it’s the churn. According to a 2003 study that Andrew Cherlin cites , 12 percent of American kids had lived in at least three “parental partnerships” before they turned 15. The transition moments, when mom’s old partner moves out or her new partner moves in, are the hardest on kids, Cherlin shows.

While children are the vulnerable group most obviously affected by recent changes in family structure, they are not the only one.

Consider single men. Extended families provided men with the fortifying influences of male bonding and female companionship. Today many American males spend the first 20 years of their life without a father and the next 15 without a spouse. Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute has spent a good chunk of her career examining the wreckage caused by the decline of the American family , and cites evidence showing that, in the absence of the connection and meaning that family provides, unmarried men are less healthy—alcohol and drug abuse are common—earn less, and die sooner than married men.

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.

Read: The loneliness of early parenthood

Without extended families, older Americans have also suffered. According to the AARP, 35 percent of Americans over 45 say they are chronically lonely . Many older people are now “elder orphans,” with no close relatives or friends to take care of them. In 2015, The New York Times ran an article called “ The Lonely Death of George Bell ,” about a family-less 72-year-old man who died alone and rotted in his Queens apartment for so long that by the time police found him, his body was unrecognizable.

Finally, because groups that have endured greater levels of discrimination tend to have more fragile families, African Americans have suffered disproportionately in the era of the detached nuclear family. Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.) According to census data from 2010, 25 percent of black women over 35 have never been married, compared with 8 percent of white women. Two-thirds of African American children lived in single-parent families in 2018, compared with a quarter of white children. Black single-parent families are most concentrated in precisely those parts of the country in which slavery was most prevalent. Research by John Iceland, a professor of sociology and demography at Penn State, suggests that the differences between white and black family structure explain 30 percent of the affluence gap between the two groups.

In 2004, the journalist and urbanist Jane Jacobs published her final book , an assessment of North American society called Dark Age Ahead . At the core of her argument was the idea that families are “rigged to fail.” The structures that once supported the family no longer exist, she wrote. Jacobs was too pessimistic about many things, but for millions of people, the shift from big and/or extended families to detached nuclear families has indeed been a disaster.

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

Read: How politics in Trump’s America divides families

Progressives, meanwhile, still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them. And, of course, they should. But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people—and while progressive elites say that all family structures are fine, their own behavior suggests that they believe otherwise. As the sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox has pointed out, highly educated progressives may talk a tolerant game on family structure when speaking about society at large, but they have extremely strict expectations for their own families. When Wilcox asked his University of Virginia students if they thought having a child out of wedlock was wrong, 62 percent said it was not wrong. When he asked the students how their own parents would feel if they themselves had a child out of wedlock, 97 percent said their parents would “freak out.” In a recent survey by the Institute for Family Studies, college-educated Californians ages 18 to 50 were less likely than those who hadn’t graduated from college to say that having a baby out of wedlock is wrong. But they were more likely to say that personally they did not approve of having a baby out of wedlock.

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

Read: Why is it hard for liberals to talk about ‘family values’?

The good news is that human beings adapt, even if politics are slow to do so. When one family form stops working, people cast about for something new—sometimes finding it in something very old.

Redefining Kinship

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

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

Anthropologists have been arguing for decades about what exactly kinship is. Studying traditional societies, they have found wide varieties of created kinship among different cultures. For the Ilongot people of the Philippines, people who migrated somewhere together are kin. For the New Guineans of the Nebilyer Valley, kinship is created by sharing grease —the life force found in mother’s milk or sweet potatoes. The Chuukese people in Micronesia have a saying: “My sibling from the same canoe”; if two people survive a dangerous trial at sea, then they become kin. On the Alaskan North Slope, the Inupiat name their children after dead people, and those children are considered members of their namesake’s family.

In other words, for vast stretches of human history people lived in extended families consisting of not just people they were related to but people they chose to cooperate with. An international research team recently did a genetic analysis of people who were buried together —and therefore presumably lived together—34,000 years ago in what is now Russia. They found that the people who were buried together were not closely related to one another. In a study of 32 present-day foraging societies , primary kin—parents, siblings, and children—usually made up less than 10 percent of a residential band. Extended families in traditional societies may or may not have been genetically close, but they were probably emotionally closer than most of us can imagine. In a beautiful essay on kinship, Marshall Sahlins, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago, says that kin in many such societies share a “mutuality of being.” The late religion scholar J. Prytz-Johansen wrote that kinship is experienced as an “inner solidarity” of souls. The late South African anthropologist Monica Wilson described kinsmen as “mystically dependent” on one another. Kinsmen belong to one another, Sahlins writes, because they see themselves as “members of one another.”

Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, when European Protestants came to North America, their relatively individualistic culture existed alongside Native Americans’ very communal culture. In his book Tribe , Sebastian Junger describes what happened next: While European settlers kept defecting to go live with Native American families, almost no Native Americans ever defected to go live with European families. Europeans occasionally captured Native Americans and forced them to come live with them. They taught them English and educated them in Western ways. But almost every time they were able, the indigenous Americans fled. European settlers were sometimes captured by Native Americans during wars and brought to live in Native communities. They rarely tried to run away. This bothered the Europeans. They had the superior civilization, so why were people voting with their feet to go live in another way?

When you read such accounts, you can’t help but wonder whether our civilization has somehow made a gigantic mistake.

We can’t go back, of course. Western individualists are no longer the kind of people who live in prehistoric bands. We may even no longer be the kind of people who were featured in the early scenes of Avalon . We value privacy and individual freedom too much.

Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose. We want close families, but not the legal, cultural, and sociological constraints that made them possible. We’ve seen the wreckage left behind by the collapse of the detached nuclear family. We’ve seen the rise of opioid addiction, of suicide, of depression, of inequality—all products, in part, of a family structure that is too fragile, and a society that is too detached, disconnected, and distrustful. And yet we can’t quite return to a more collective world. The words the historians Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg wrote in 1988 are even truer today: “Many Americans are groping for a new paradigm of American family life, but in the meantime a profound sense of confusion and ambivalence reigns.”

From Nuclear Families to Forged Families

Yet recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging. Many of the statistics I’ve cited are dire. But they describe the past—what got us to where we are now. In reaction to family chaos, accumulating evidence suggests, the prioritization of family is beginning to make a comeback. Americans are experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

Usually behavior changes before we realize that a new cultural paradigm has emerged. Imagine hundreds of millions of tiny arrows. In times of social transformation, they shift direction—a few at first, and then a lot. Nobody notices for a while, but then eventually people begin to recognize that a new pattern, and a new set of values, has emerged.

That may be happening now—in part out of necessity but in part by choice. Since the 1970s, and especially since the 2008 recession, economic pressures have pushed Americans toward greater reliance on family. Starting around 2012, the share of children living with married parents began to inch up. And college students have more contact with their parents than they did a generation ago. We tend to deride this as helicopter parenting or a failure to launch, and it has its excesses. But the educational process is longer and more expensive these days, so it makes sense that young adults rely on their parents for longer than they used to.

In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans— 64 million people, an all-time high —live in multigenerational homes.

The revival of the extended family has largely been driven by young adults moving back home. In 2014, 35 percent of American men ages 18 to 34 lived with their parents . In time this shift might show itself to be mostly healthy, impelled not just by economic necessity but by beneficent social impulses ; polling data suggest that many young people are already looking ahead to helping their parents in old age.

Another chunk of the revival is attributable to seniors moving in with their children. The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn’t count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

Immigrants and people of color—many of whom face greater economic and social stress—are more likely to live in extended-family households. More than 20 percent of Asians, black people, and Latinos live in multigenerational households, compared with 16 percent of white people. As America becomes more diverse, extended families are becoming more common.

African Americans have always relied on extended family more than white Americans do. “Despite the forces working to separate us—slavery, Jim Crow, forced migration, the prison system, gentrification—we have maintained an incredible commitment to each other,” Mia Birdsong, the author of the forthcoming book How We Show Up , told me recently. “The reality is, black families are expansive, fluid, and brilliantly rely on the support, knowledge, and capacity of ‘the village’ to take care of each other. Here’s an illustration: The white researcher/social worker/whatever sees a child moving between their mother’s house, their grandparents’ house, and their uncle’s house and sees that as ‘instability.’ But what’s actually happening is the family (extended and chosen) is leveraging all of its resources to raise that child.”

Read: Why black families struggle to build wealth

The black extended family survived even under slavery, and all the forced family separations that involved. Family was essential in the Jim Crow South and in the inner cities of the North, as a way to cope with the stresses of mass migration and limited opportunities, and with structural racism. But government policy sometimes made it more difficult for this family form to thrive. I began my career as a police reporter in Chicago, writing about public-housing projects like Cabrini-Green. Guided by social-science research, politicians tore down neighborhoods of rickety low-rise buildings—uprooting the complex webs of social connection those buildings supported, despite high rates of violence and crime—and put up big apartment buildings. The result was a horror: violent crime, gangs taking over the elevators, the erosion of family and neighborly life. Fortunately, those buildings have since been torn down themselves, replaced by mixed-income communities that are more amenable to the profusion of family forms.

The return of multigenerational living arrangements is already changing the built landscape. A 2016 survey by a real-estate consulting firm found that 44 percent of home buyers were looking for a home that would accommodate their elderly parents, and 42 percent wanted one that would accommodate their returning adult children. Home builders have responded by putting up houses that are what the construction firm Lennar calls “two homes under one roof.” These houses are carefully built so that family members can spend time together while also preserving their privacy. Many of these homes have a shared mudroom, laundry room, and common area. But the “in-law suite,” the place for aging parents, has its own entrance, kitchenette, and dining area. The “Millennial suite,” the place for boomeranging adult children, has its own driveway and entrance too. These developments, of course, cater to those who can afford houses in the first place—but they speak to a common realization: Family members of different generations need to do more to support one another.

The most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode , single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common , a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way. Common also recently teamed up with another developer, Tishman Speyer, to launch Kin , a co-housing community for young parents. Each young family has its own living quarters, but the facilities also have shared play spaces, child-care services, and family-oriented events and outings.

Read: The hot new Millennial housing trend is a repeat of the Middle Ages

These experiments, and others like them, suggest that while people still want flexibility and some privacy, they are casting about for more communal ways of living, guided by a still-developing set of values. At a co-housing community in Oakland, California, called Temescal Commons , the 23 members, ranging in age from 1 to 83, live in a complex with nine housing units. This is not some rich Bay Area hipster commune. The apartments are small, and the residents are middle- and working-class. They have a shared courtyard and a shared industrial-size kitchen where residents prepare a communal dinner on Thursday and Sunday nights. Upkeep is a shared responsibility. The adults babysit one another’s children, and members borrow sugar and milk from one another. The older parents counsel the younger ones. When members of this extended family have suffered bouts of unemployment or major health crises, the whole clan has rallied together.

Courtney E. Martin, a writer who focuses on how people are redefining the American dream, is a Temescal Commons resident. “I really love that our kids grow up with different versions of adulthood all around, especially different versions of masculinity,” she told me. “We consider all of our kids all of our kids.” Martin has a 3-year-old daughter, Stella, who has a special bond with a young man in his 20s that never would have taken root outside this extended-family structure. “Stella makes him laugh, and David feels awesome that this 3-year-old adores him,” Martin said. This is the kind of magic, she concluded, that wealth can’t buy. You can only have it through time and commitment, by joining an extended family. This kind of community would fall apart if residents moved in and out. But at least in this case, they don’t.

Read: The extended family of my two open adoptions

As Martin was talking, I was struck by one crucial difference between the old extended families like those in Avalon and the new ones of today: the role of women. The extended family in Avalon thrived because all the women in the family were locked in the kitchen, feeding 25 people at a time. In 2008, a team of American and Japanese researchers found that women in multigenerational households in Japan were at greater risk of heart disease than women living with spouses only, likely because of stress. But today’s extended-family living arrangements have much more diverse gender roles.

And yet in at least one respect, the new families Americans are forming would look familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eons ago. That’s because they are chosen families—they transcend traditional kinship lines.

The modern chosen-family movement came to prominence in San Francisco in the 1980s among gay men and lesbians, many of whom had become estranged from their biological families and had only one another for support in coping with the trauma of the AIDS crisis. In her book, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship , the anthropologist Kath Weston writes, “The families I saw gay men and lesbians creating in the Bay Area tended to have extremely fluid boundaries, not unlike kinship organization among sectors of the African-American, American Indian, and white working class.”

She continues:

Like their heterosexual counterparts, most gay men and lesbians insisted that family members are people who are “there for you,” people you can count on emotionally and materially. “They take care of me,” said one man, “I take care of them.”

These groups are what Daniel Burns, a political scientist at the University of Dallas, calls “forged families.” Tragedy and suffering have pushed people together in a way that goes deeper than just a convenient living arrangement. They become, as the anthropologists say, “fictive kin.”

Over the past several decades, the decline of the nuclear family has created an epidemic of trauma—millions have been set adrift because what should have been the most loving and secure relationship in their life broke. Slowly, but with increasing frequency, these drifting individuals are coming together to create forged families. These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment. The members of your chosen family are the people who will show up for you no matter what. On Pinterest you can find placards to hang on the kitchen wall where forged families gather: “Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs; the ones who accept you for who you are. The ones who would do anything to see you smile & who love you no matter what.”

Two years ago , I started something called Weave: The Social Fabric Project . Weave exists to support and draw attention to people and organizations around the country who are building community. Over time, my colleagues and I have realized that one thing most of the Weavers have in common is this: They provide the kind of care to nonkin that many of us provide only to kin—the kind of support that used to be provided by the extended family.

Lisa Fitzpatrick, who was a health-care executive in New Orleans, is a Weaver . One day she was sitting in the passenger seat of a car when she noticed two young boys, 10 or 11, lifting something heavy. It was a gun. They used it to shoot her in the face. It was a gang-initiation ritual. When she recovered, she realized that she was just collateral damage. The real victims were the young boys who had to shoot somebody to get into a family, their gang.

She quit her job and began working with gang members. She opened her home to young kids who might otherwise join gangs. One Saturday afternoon, 35 kids were hanging around her house. She asked them why they were spending a lovely day at the home of a middle-aged woman. They replied, “You were the first person who ever opened the door.”

In Salt Lake City, an organization called the Other Side Academy provides serious felons with an extended family. Many of the men and women who are admitted into the program have been allowed to leave prison, where they were generally serving long sentences, but must live in a group home and work at shared businesses, a moving company and a thrift store. The goal is to transform the character of each family member. During the day they work as movers or cashiers. Then they dine together and gather several evenings a week for something called “Games”: They call one another out for any small moral failure—being sloppy with a move; not treating another family member with respect; being passive-aggressive, selfish, or avoidant.

Games is not polite. The residents scream at one another in order to break through the layers of armor that have built up in prison. Imagine two gigantic men covered in tattoos screaming “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” At the session I attended, I thought they would come to blows. But after the anger, there’s a kind of closeness that didn’t exist before. Men and women who have never had a loving family suddenly have “relatives” who hold them accountable and demand a standard of moral excellence. Extreme integrity becomes a way of belonging to the clan. The Other Side Academy provides unwanted people with an opportunity to give care, and creates out of that care a ferocious forged family.

I could tell you hundreds of stories like this, about organizations that bring traumatized vets into extended-family settings, or nursing homes that house preschools so that senior citizens and young children can go through life together. In Baltimore, a nonprofit called Thread surrounds underperforming students with volunteers, some of whom are called “grandparents.” In Chicago, Becoming a Man helps disadvantaged youth form family-type bonds with one another. In Washington, D.C., I recently met a group of middle-aged female scientists—one a celebrated cellular biologist at the National Institutes of Health, another an astrophysicist—who live together in a Catholic lay community, pooling their resources and sharing their lives. The variety of forged families in America today is endless.

You may be part of a forged family yourself. I am. In 2015, I was invited to the house of a couple named Kathy and David, who had created an extended-family-like group in D.C. called All Our Kids , or AOK-DC. Some years earlier, Kathy and David had had a kid in D.C. Public Schools who had a friend named James, who often had nothing to eat and no place to stay, so they suggested that he stay with them. That kid had a friend in similar circumstances, and those friends had friends. By the time I joined them, roughly 25 kids were having dinner every Thursday night, and several of them were sleeping in the basement.

I joined the community and never left—they became my chosen family. We have dinner together on Thursday nights, celebrate holidays together, and vacation together. The kids call Kathy and David Mom and Dad. In the early days, the adults in our clan served as parental figures for the young people—replacing their broken cellphones, supporting them when depression struck, raising money for their college tuition. When a young woman in our group needed a new kidney, David gave her one of his.

We had our primary biological families, which came first, but we also had this family. Now the young people in this forged family are in their 20s and need us less. David and Kathy have left Washington, but they stay in constant contact. The dinners still happen. We still see one another and look after one another. The years of eating together and going through life together have created a bond. If a crisis hit anyone, we’d all show up. The experience has convinced me that everybody should have membership in a forged family with people completely unlike themselves.

Ever since I started working on this article, a chart has been haunting me . It plots the percentage of people living alone in a country against that nation’s GDP. There’s a strong correlation. Nations where a fifth of the people live alone, like Denmark and Finland, are a lot richer than nations where almost no one lives alone, like the ones in Latin America or Africa. Rich nations have smaller households than poor nations. The average German lives in a household with 2.7 people. The average Gambian lives in a household with 13.8 people.

That chart suggests two things, especially in the American context. First, the market wants us to live alone or with just a few people. That way we are mobile, unattached, and uncommitted, able to devote an enormous number of hours to our jobs. Second, when people who are raised in developed countries get money, they buy privacy.

For the privileged, this sort of works. The arrangement enables the affluent to dedicate more hours to work and email, unencumbered by family commitments. They can afford to hire people who will do the work that extended family used to do. But a lingering sadness lurks, an awareness that life is emotionally vacant when family and close friends aren’t physically present, when neighbors aren’t geographically or metaphorically close enough for you to lean on them, or for them to lean on you. Today’s crisis of connection flows from the impoverishment of family life.

I often ask African friends who have immigrated to America what most struck them when they arrived. Their answer is always a variation on a theme—the loneliness. It’s the empty suburban street in the middle of the day, maybe with a lone mother pushing a baby carriage on the sidewalk but nobody else around.

For those who are not privileged, the era of the isolated nuclear family has been a catastrophe. It’s led to broken families or no families; to merry-go-round families that leave children traumatized and isolated; to senior citizens dying alone in a room. All forms of inequality are cruel, but family inequality may be the cruelest. It damages the heart. Eventually family inequality even undermines the economy the nuclear family was meant to serve: Children who grow up in chaos have trouble becoming skilled, stable, and socially mobile employees later on.

Recommended Reading

The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss

Family Reunions: Not Just for Grandparents

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration

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

The two-parent family, meanwhile, is not about to go extinct. For many people, especially those with financial and social resources, it is a great way to live and raise children. But a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values.

When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling. We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.

This article appears in the March 2020 print edition with the headline “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic .

Is the Nuclear Family Means?

This essay about the nuclear family defines it as a household consisting typically of a heterosexual couple and their biological or adopted children. It discusses the historical rise of this family model during the mid-20th century, particularly in Western societies, influenced by economic and societal shifts post-World War II. The essay critiques the nuclear family for placing excessive pressures on parents and isolating them from extended community support. Additionally, it addresses the evolution of family structures, highlighting the diversity in modern family forms such as single-parent households, blended families, and same-sex couples with children. The text underscores that while the nuclear family has been idealized as a stable unit, contemporary society recognizes a variety of family models that reflect current economic conditions, social norms, and cultural values, demonstrating that family stability and support can come from various structures.

How it works

The term “nuclear family” commonly denotes a household comprising a heterosexual pair and their biological or adopted progeny. This archetype has historically represented the conventional familial arrangement, notably in Western cultures, and frequently emerges in media, literature, and policymaking as the quintessential family unit.

Historically, the concept of the nuclear family gained traction post-World War II and the ensuing economic upturn. During this epoch, societal norms and economic paradigms advocated for a familial structure wherein the father typically engaged in extramural labor, the mother oversaw domestic affairs, and their offspring were nurtured under their direct tutelage and guardianship.

This model was extolled for furnishing a secure and structured milieu for child-rearing, emblematic of moral and societal decorum.

Nevertheless, the nuclear family is neither a ubiquitous standard nor a stagnant institution. Its ascendancy is relatively modern when juxtaposed against the broader expanse of human history. Antecedent to the industrial era, extended family cohabitation—encompassing grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins sharing habitation and resources—prevailed and was frequently economically requisite. The transition to nuclear family living arrangements transpired concurrently with urbanization and industrial employment, fostering geographic mobility, with diminished accommodations for expansive extended families in burgeoning urban locales.

Despite its idealization, the nuclear family comprises merely one among manifold familial configurations and is not devoid of impediments. Detractors of the nuclear family model posit that it confers disproportionate burdens upon progenitors and estranges them from broader communal support networks. They highlight that this seclusion can engender considerable strain, as the obligations of childcare, education, and emotional sustenance primarily devolve upon a mere duo of adults. Moreover, economic exigencies, shifts in societal mores, and heightened divorce rates have engendered evolutionary changes in the nuclear family model, occasionally diminishing its prevalence.

In contemporary society, familial structures evince heightened diversity. Single-parent households, cohabiting couples sans progeny, blended families, and same-sex couples rearing offspring exemplify familial units that contravene the traditional confines of the nuclear family. Sociologists and scholars in family studies contend that these diverse configurations possess the potential to furnish the same stability and sustenance conventionally associated with nuclear families.

Furthermore, the escalating acknowledgment of diverse familial paradigms mirrors broader societal transitions towards inclusivity and validation of disparate cultural norms regarding family. Many non-Western societies accentuate extended familial bonds that play pivotal roles in nurturing and support, diverging significantly from the Western nuclear model.

In summation, while the nuclear family has historically been touted as the archetypal linchpin of societal frameworks in numerous regions, it neither reigns supreme nor necessarily represents the predominant form of family any longer. The metamorphosis of familial structures serves as a reflection of shifts in economic landscapes, societal norms, and cultural principles. Embracing the validity and merits of sundry familial configurations is imperative in addressing the genuine requisites of individuals and communities within a diverse and dynamic society.

Cite this page

Is The Nuclear Family Means?. (2024, Apr 29). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/is-the-nuclear-family-means/

"Is The Nuclear Family Means?." PapersOwl.com , 29 Apr 2024, https://papersowl.com/examples/is-the-nuclear-family-means/

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Is The Nuclear Family Means? . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/is-the-nuclear-family-means/ [Accessed: 3 May. 2024]

"Is The Nuclear Family Means?." PapersOwl.com, Apr 29, 2024. Accessed May 3, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/is-the-nuclear-family-means/

"Is The Nuclear Family Means?," PapersOwl.com , 29-Apr-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/is-the-nuclear-family-means/. [Accessed: 3-May-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Is The Nuclear Family Means? . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/is-the-nuclear-family-means/ [Accessed: 3-May-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

clock This article was published more than  4 years ago

Opinion An unlikely cause of our bitterness: The nuclear family

When the history of our era is written, scholars will search for larger causes to explain its bitterness and contradictions, despite so much wealth. Was it globalization? Populism? Economic inequality? Polarization? Greed? To this list you can now add an unlikely candidate: the nuclear family.

In a powerful essay for the Atlantic — “ The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake ” — New York Times columnist David Brooks argues that the family structure we’ve held up as the cultural ideal for the past half century has been a catastrophe for many.

By “nuclear family,” he means a married mother and father and some kids. The alternative arrangement was “the extended family,” which included not only Mom, Dad and the children but also close relatives — cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents — as well as family friends.

The great defect of the nuclear family, Brooks asserts, is that if there’s a crisis — a death, divorce, job loss, poor school grades — there’s no backup team. Children are most vulnerable to these disruptions and often are left to fend for themselves. There’s a downward spiral. “In many sectors of society,” Brooks writes, “nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, [and] single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.”

People could increasingly go their own way. The advent of the birth-control pill encouraged people to have sex outside of marriage. Women’s entrance into the labor market made it easier for them to support themselves. Modern appliances (washing machines, dryers) made housework simpler.

As Brooks sees it, almost everyone loses under this system. The affluent can best cope with it, because they can usually afford what’s needed (day care, tutors) to support their children. Otherwise, the picture is bleak.

Children have it worst. Brooks cites an avalanche of statistics. In 1960, about 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now that’s about 40 percent. In 1960, about 11 percent of children lived apart from their fathers; in 2010, the figure was 27 percent.

But adult men and women also have their share of troubles. There’s a vicious circle at work, notes Brooks: “People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don’t have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families. . . . The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.”

Brooks says he wrote the article to stimulate experiments that aim to stabilize family life using the extended family — not the nuclear family — as the model. Granted, the problem may not be as big as Brooks imagines. Estimates by the Census Bureau and others indicate that about 60 percent of Americans live in the state where they were born. Presumably, many of these people stayed put because they valued nearby family ties.

Still, whatever the figures, there’s little doubt that reversing the breakdown of families, and its consequences, is one of the urgent tasks of social policy in the 21st century. We have been struggling unsuccessfully with it since the “ Moynihan Report ” in 1965. (Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who later became a U.S. senator, warned that the breakdown of black marriage rates would have a devastating effect on African Americans’ well-being.) The report proved highly controversial, and some branded Moynihan a racist.

But even if we could magically eliminate all considerations of class and race, it’s not clear that a workable model would emerge. The conditions needed to broach a debate over family policies strike at the heart of Americans’ political and cultural conflicts. Brooks put it this way:

“We value privacy and individual freedom too much. Our culture is oddly stuck. We want stability and rootedness, but also mobility, dynamic capitalism, and the liberty to adopt the lifestyle we choose.”

Brooks finds both liberals and conservatives unequal to the task of dealing candidly with family breakdown. “Social conservatives insist that we can bring the nuclear family back. But the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning. Conservatives have nothing to say to the kid whose dad has split, whose mom has had three other kids with different dads; ‘go live in a nuclear family’ is really not relevant advice. . . . the majority [of households] are something else: single parents, never-married parents, blended families, grandparent-headed families.” He’s just as tough on progressives. They “still talk like self-expressive individualists of the 1970s: People should have the freedom to pick whatever family form works for them . . . . But many of the new family forms do not work well for most people.”

The larger issue is how we judge our times. We are constantly deluged with economic studies and statistics, implying that economic outcomes are the only ones that matter. The reality is that any national scorecard of well-being must take a much broader view. How well families do in preparing children for adulthood and how well they transmit important values is a much higher standard for success.

Read more from Robert Samuelson’s archive .

David Von Drehle: Politics has become the raw embodiment of joylessness

David Byler: Conservatives already won the culture war. They just don’t know it.

Catherine Rampell: Ivanka Trump claims her father’s administration is ‘pro-family.’ That’s rich.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Subscriber-only Newsletter

Jessica Grose

The nuclear family is no longer the norm. good..

By Jessica Grose

Opinion Writer

Over 20 years ago, the sociologist Vern Bengtson gave a lecture in which he predicted that multigenerational bonds would be ascendant in the 21st century. Bengtson, who spent decades studying generations of 300 California families , pushed back against the idea that the decline of the nuclear family model was bad for society.

Even two decades ago, Americans were increasingly moving away from the “mom, dad and two kids” family structure that corresponded with the norms and pop culture of the 1950s. As years went on, more people got divorced, more people were having children outside marriage, and older generations were living longer. Some, like David Popenoe of Rutgers University, saw this as a crisis for children, writing in 1993, “I see the family as an institution in decline and believe that this should be a cause for alarm.” But Bengtson theorized that these changes could be positive and protective, economically and emotionally. He wrote, “For many Americans, multigenerational bonds are becoming more important than nuclear family ties for well-being and support over the course of their lives.”

This argument was “a little scoffed at at the time,” said Merril Silverstein, a professor of sociology at Syracuse University who researches aging and was a colleague of Bengtson’s at the University of Southern California. But Bengtson, who died in 2019, was prescient: A new report from Pew Research Center found that “multigenerational living has grown sharply in the U.S. over the past five decades and shows no sign of peaking.”

Analyzing census data, Pew found that the population living in multigenerational households in the United States has quadrupled since 1971. In March 2021, nearly 60 million people were living “with multiple generations under one roof.” According to Pew, while these living arrangements are more common in Asian, Black and Hispanic households, they are also rising among non-Hispanic white Americans. (Immigration accounts for part of the increase in the U.S., Pew said, with extended families still the norm in many regions and countries, save for parts of North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, according to the U.N.’s population division .)

As part of the same report, Pew examined data from its own nationally representative survey of 9,676 adults, including 1,548 living in multigenerational households, to see why they were choosing to live with extended family and how they felt about their living situations. The top two reasons for multigenerational living were financial issues and caregiving needs. And overall, Americans who live with relatives from other generations feel good about it: “More adults living in multigenerational households say the experience has been very positive (30 percent) or somewhat positive (27 percent) than say it has been somewhat negative (14 percent) or very negative (3 percent),” Pew noted.

As the historian Stephanie Coontz wrote, the idealized American nuclear family, with a father as breadwinner and mother as caregiver, living atomized from the rest of their community, was a “ historical fluke ,” and throughout history, parents have always relied on relatives and friends for help with the caregiving of children.

You don’t even have to share a residence to realize major benefits; they just need to live nearby. The Times’s Quoctrung Bui and Claire Cain Miller discovered in 2015 that American adults lived a median distance of just 18 miles from their mothers , and they cited a 2013 paper by the economists Janice Compton and Robert Pollak , who found that “labor force participation by married women with children increased by as much as 10 percentage points when they lived near their mothers or mothers-in-law and unanticipated child care needs seemed to play a big role.”

I’ve personally found this to be true. We live about 10 miles from my parents, and they’ve saved my bacon in the child care department more times than I can count. If we hadn’t lived with them during part of 2020 when child care was unavailable and we had two kids at home, my husband or I would have had to take a leave from work. Beyond the child care piece of it, my children see my parents once a week for dinner, which everyone enjoys. Sometimes for kids, grandparental relationships can be a little less fraught than those with parents: Grandma doesn’t have to be the one dropping the hammer, making you do homework and brush your teeth every night. She can be a source of support with less rancor.

Despite the upsides, living with your parents into adulthood is sometimes still portrayed as something embarrassing, a failure to launch, but it shouldn’t be. In fact, it’s now the norm.

“In 2014, for the first time in more than 130 years, adults ages 18 to 34 were slightly more likely to be living in their parents’ home than they were to be living with a spouse or partner in their own household,” Pew found , and that remained true in 2021 for men in that age group.

Steven Ruggles , a professor of history and population studies at the University of Minnesota, told me that this is happening, in part, because the relative incomes of young men have been steeply declining since the 1970s, and they are more likely than their female counterparts to be living at home. At the same time, housing prices are way up , availability is way down, and especially in big cities, buying a home is out of reach for most young people; this is an economic fact of life right now, and no one should be mocked for it.

That said, multigenerational living isn’t some kind of utopia. “Those with upper incomes were the most likely to say their experience had been positive,” Juliana Horowitz, an associate director of social trends research at Pew, told me, partly because “upper-income people are more likely to say there’s enough space for everyone to live comfortably.” It’s not surprising that it might be more relaxing to live with your mother when she has her own floor. And some of the growth in multigenerational households is due to more grandparents raising grandchildren , which has been fueled in part by the opioid crisis that is devastating the country. No one would say that’s a good thing.

Per Pew, “About a quarter of adults in multigenerational homes say it is stressful all or most of the time.” Bengtson predicted this years ago in his address. “There are potentially negative consequences of the longer years of shared lives across generations,” he said, one of which is “protracted conflict.” He quoted one mother who described “a lifelong lousy parent-child relationship” that just stretched out to infinity. No one said the new norm didn’t come with challenges — and no one, not me anyway, is against the nuclear family model. But we should acknowledge its fragility, which was made ever clearer by the Covid pandemic and the chaos it wrought in all of our infrastructures of care.

Which is why I think moving toward a more extended family model — what sociologists call a vertical rather than a horizontal family structure — is mostly to the good. During the pandemic, a Harvard study found that Americans ages 18 to 25 and mothers of young children were the demographic groups most likely to report “miserable degrees of loneliness,” and even before the pandemic, the Health Resources and Services Administration described a “ loneliness epidemic ,” which was particularly acute among seniors.

“I think it’s a net positive,” said Silverstein. “In gerontology, we like to say dependence is a double-edged sword. We want to rely on people, but we also resent them, and that’s part of the human condition.” Do I still act like a sulky teenager sometimes when I’m around my parents for more than 48 hours ? I do! Would I move away from them? Nope, not if I could help it.

Want More on Multigenerational Living?

One of my favorite essayists and thinkers, Kaitlyn Greenidge, wrote about living with her mother and sisters in what they jokingly call “the compound” and how it has offered her a new narrative about what it means to mature. “Living with all this noise has stirred up many emotions: gratitude to my family for their support, the irritation of adolescence as we sometimes catch ourselves in the dances of our older selves, a longing for sleep that can only be felt in a household full of children who are all awake and ready to play by 6:30 a.m. on a Saturday,” she wrote.

What happens when your family doesn’t want to or isn’t able to help you care for your children? It can feel very sour, Anne Helen Petersen explained , and force decisions about work and child care that can make you pretty unhappy.

In The Atlantic in 2020, my Times Opinion colleague David Brooks argued that “ the nuclear family was a mistake .” He went deep into the history of the family in the United States and agreed with Coontz that “the period when the nuclear family flourished was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired to obscure its essential fragility.”

“While new human mothers around the world are renowned for our pluck and adaptability, maternal grandmothers are the rare global constant in our lives,” Abigail Tucker pointed out in this Times piece from 2021 . She also noted that women who feel supported by their kin may have lower rates of postpartum depression.

Tiny Victories

Parenting can be a grind. Let’s celebrate the tiny victories.

My grandson was really upset by his first Covid shot, so I offered to teach him my tried-and-true pain-coping technique: Lamaze childbirth method. Before the second shot, two weeks of five-minute FaceTime practice doing slow deep breathing, relaxing his body, staring at one spot and reciting a mantra culminated in a triumphant phone call: “Grandma, it worked!” — Diana Zimmerman, Great Neck, N.Y.

If you want a chance to get your Tiny Victory published, find us on Instagram @NYTparenting and use the hashtag #tinyvictories; email us ; or enter your Tiny Victory at the bottom of this page . Include your full name and location. Tiny Victories may be edited for clarity and style. Your name, location and comments may be published, but your contact information will not. By submitting to us, you agree that you have read, understand and accept the Reader Submission Terms in relation to all of the content and other information you send to us.

There Is No Longer Any Such Thing as a Typical Family

P retty much everyone agrees that the era of the nuclear family, with a dad who went to work and the mom who stayed at home, has declined to the point of no return. The big question is: What is replacing it? Now a new study suggests that nothing is — or rather, that a whole grab bag of family arrangements are. More Americans are in families in which both parents work outside the home than in any other sort, but even so, that’s still only about a third.

University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen, the author of The Family: Diversity, Inequality, and Social Change , released his new study on Sept 4. He identifies the three biggest changes in family life in the past 50 years as the decline of marriage (in 2010, 45% of households were headed by a married couple, whereas in 1960 it was close to 66%); the rise of the number of women in the paid workforce; and the whole stew of blended, remarried and co-habiting families.

Families headed by single moms‚ whether divorced, widowed or never married, are now almost as numerous as families that have a stay-at-home mom and a breadwinner dad — about 22% and 23%, respectively. There’s been a marked in rise in people living alone and in unrelated people living together.

This is a huge change from the 1960s. “In 1960 you would have had an 80% chance that two children, selected at random, would share the same situation. By 2012, that chance had fallen to just a little more than 50-50,” says Cohen. “It is really impossible to point to a ‘typical’ family.”

To make his point, Cohen has created a chart, with what he calls a “peacock’s tail” of changes from 1960 to now, fanning out from a once dominant category:

As you can see, about as many children are being taken care of by grandparents as are by single dads. Co-habiting parents, who barely registered in 1960, now look after 7% of kids. Meanwhile married parents who are getting by on just dad’s income are responsible for about a third of the proportion of households they were responsible for in 1960.

And the diversity goes deeper than the chart suggests. “The increasing complexity of families means that even people who appear to fit into one category — for example, married parents — are often carrying with them a history of family diversity such as remarriage, or parenting children with more than one partner,” says Cohen.

All of this is important Cohen notes, because policy is sometimes based on a one-size-fits-all model, which is no longer viable. “Different families have different child-rearing challenges and needs, which means we are no longer well-served by policies that assume most children will be raised by married-couple families, especially ones where the mother stays home throughout the children’s early years,” writes Cohen.

He cites social security as one policy stuck in the past: legal marriage and the earnings of a spouse determine retirement security for so many people. “A more rational pension system for our times would be a universal system not tied to the earnings of other family members,” he says. He also thinks universal preschool is long overdue, now that so many children’s mothers are out working.

And what of same-sex parents? Why aren’t they in Cohen’s chart? Because, although they get a lot of the attention, there simply aren’t enough of them to register yet. According to Cohen fewer than 1% of kids belong in families of this category. Even that figure may not be accurate, he says, because “at least half of the apparently same-sex couples in census data are really the 1-in-1,000 straight couples in which someone mismarked the sex box.”

Gotta love statistics.

More Must-Reads From TIME

• The 100 Most Influential People of 2024
• How Far Trump Would Go
• Scenes From Pro-Palestinian Encampments Across U.S. Universities
• Saving Seconds Is Better Than Hours
• Why Your Breakfast Should Start with a Vegetable
• 6 Compliments That Land Every Time
• Welcome to the Golden Age of Ryan Gosling
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

The History of 'Nuclear Family'

What to Know Nuclear family refers to the core members of a family, usually parents and children. Nuclear had a long history of figurative use before its main association with "nuclear energy," as nucleus has senses meaning "kernel" or more simply "something essential."

Grandparents are grand; great-aunts are great; and nuclear families are … nuclear?

Well, yes. Nuclear families— the term refers to a family group that consists only of parents and children—are nuclear but in a sense of that word that's now much less common than today's most common uses of nuclear .

It has nothing to do with melting down.

Origin of 'Nuclear Family'

Nuclear family dates to the 1920s, when the academic fields of anthropology and sociology were both still young. The Oxford English Dictionary cites Bronisław Malinowski , considered a founder of social anthropology, as the coiner of the term.

At the time nuclear family was coined, the word nuclear inhabited contexts other than those most familiar to us now. Its use was broad and tied, as it still is, closely to uses of its parent word, nucleus , which had been a member of the language for 250 years.

Many Uses of 'Nucleus' and 'Nuclear'

Tracing the development of the word nucleus in the Oxford English Dictionary, we see that it was first applied in English in the mid-late 17th century to the brightest mass of matter in the head of a comet. Its origin is New Latin , from Latin nucleus , meaning "kernel." Other astronomy meanings followed, with the word referring to other bright and dazzling celestial sights, such as the relatively small, brighter, and denser portion of a galaxy, or the hot faint central star of a planetary nebula.

By the early 18th century, nucleus described other more earthly kernels in the fields of botany and pathology too, with a wide range of scientific applications active by the mid-19th century, including the one we all learn at some point from a science teacher, about the little ball at the center of an atom: that is, as this dictionary puts it, "the positively charged central portion of an atom that comprises nearly all of the atomic mass and that consists of protons and usually neutrons."

That meaning of nucleus is the source of most of the nuclear compound terms we have today, which typically relate to the nucleus of an atom—for example, nuclear membrane —or to the energy that is created when the nuclei of atoms are split apart or joined together— nuclear energy , nuclear fission , nuclear reactor . But the word nucleus didn't start referring in any concrete sense to atomic nuclei until the early part of the 20th century; for the preceding decades that meaning was a speculative one, based on unconfirmed ideas about atoms. Nuclear as we now most often encounter it is very much a child of the second half of the 20th century. At the time of Malinowski's coinage, the idea of atomic nuclei as actual entities was nascent.

The nuclear in nuclear family is figurative, and it comes from an extension of those varied scientific applications of nucleus . In addition to the astronomy, botany, and other technical applications, nucleus has also since the mid-18th century meant simply "a basic or essential part," with many examples of the term describing people considered core to some organization or effort. In coining nuclear family , Malinowski was hitching a sensible descriptor to the word family to create what is now one of our basic familial designators. No one could have known at the time that that descriptor would go nuclear.

More Familial Words

• Nibling: A Word for Your Sibling's Kids
• 8 Obscure Words for Family
• The People in Your Extended Family

Word of the Day

See Definitions and Examples »

Get Word of the Day daily email!

Games & Quizzes

Arts & Culture

If you like to complain about 'decimate'..., words of the week - may 3, 12 words and phrases for romantic relationships, where does the expression 'throw someone under the bus' come from, 'gaslighting,' 'woke,' 'democracy,' and other top lookups, 12 words for signs of spring, 12 more bird names that sound like insults (and sometimes are), 13 unusually long english words, 9 superb owl words, 10 words for lesser-known games and sports, grammar & usage, primary and caucus: what is the difference, words commonly mispronounced, merriam-webster’s great big list of words you love to hate, what’s the difference between ‘hillbilly’ and ‘redneck’, more commonly misspelled words.

The death of the nuclear family

The 'typical American family' was always a blip. It's time to rethink it.

For most of the 20th century, the word "family" in America evoked a predictable picture of cookie-cutter cleanliness: the happily married husband and wife, their 2.5 kids, and one improbably well-behaved golden retriever, all under the same roof. But the nuclear family has steadily eroded over the last 50 years.

The first major death knell came with the 1973 oil crisis and the two-year recession that followed, which signaled the end of the West's postwar prosperity boom. Since then, the nuclear family has crumbled piece by piece. In 1970, more than two-thirds of American adults between 25 and 49 lived with a spouse and at least one kid. By 2021, only 37% of adults fit the bill, Pew Research found.

Although it may be premature to declare the nuclear family officially over , the model is beginning to look more like a fringe lifestyle choice than the bedrock of American society.

The demise has sparked no shortage of (often racist , sexist , and homophobic ) political backlash. From Elon Musk , the father of 11 kids, to the failed GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy , defenders of so-called "traditional family values" decry the potential economic hazards of plummeting birth rates and the social disorder caused by unruly men without wives to rein them in . Some even argue that the nuclear family is the cornerstone of democracy itself.

Others, meanwhile, have eagerly cheered on the shift away from the stifling gender politics of the four-person norm. Critics include radical family-abolition scholars such as M.E. O'Brien, whose 2023 book "Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care" argues that the contained family structures "cannot carry the immense burden of work placed on them." On the other end of the political spectrum, in an early 2020 cover story for The Atlantic , the conservative columnist David Brooks declared the nuclear family "a mistake." Since the onset of the pandemic, the looming cloud of skepticism hanging over the whole concept of the " nuclear family " has only thickened.

Like it or hate it, the future of the family has never appeared so uncertain. For a society structured around the ideal of the nuclear family, its demise has left everyone wondering: What happens now?

Like many other social norms, the nuclear family was the product of the economic and cultural conditions of a particular time and place, upheld by policies and institutions for decades. Until the 19th century, marriage was less the union of two souls in love than the pragmatic, obligatory step in a long tradition of social and family organization. Most Americans at that time lived in extended, multigenerational "corporate families" that worked together to run a family farm or a business.

As the economy industrialized over the course of the 19th century, more young men and women left their family farms for jobs in factories and offices, usually in cities. Free from the watchful eyes of their parents and relatives, these young people began to go on dates, spending their discretionary income on outings to the local movie house or soda counter. In her 2016 book "Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating , " Moira Weigel traced this shift. "By bringing courtship out of the home and into the marketplace, dating became a lucrative business," she wrote. "For the first time in human history, dating made it necessary to buy things in order to get face time with a prospective partner."

As dating culture became more entrenched in the economy during the 20th century, a community-based way of life gave way to individuals focusing on their own wants and needs. The middle class expanded and children were no longer expected to work for their family's economic survival; in white, middle-class families, men earned the wages that supported the family and their wives raised the children and ran the home. The nuclear family became a microcosm of capitalist self-sufficiency and the consumerism that came with it.

It was also, in some respects, a fluke. As Brooks noted in The Atlantic , the nuclear family's status as the default household arrangement for American adults peaked during the relatively brief window between 1950 and 1965, when divorce rates plunged, fertility rates boomed, and the postwar economy flourished. It was during these years that "a kind of cult formed around this type of family," Brooks wrote, noting that those who broke the mold by opting out of marriage were often seen as deviant or "neurotic."

The obsession with the nuclear family masked its underlying instability. By the 1970s, social inequality and wage stagnation following the 1973 oil crisis and recession had made it impossible for many white, middle-income husbands to sustain entire broods on a single salary. More and more women entered the workforce, giving them greater economic autonomy and enabling some to leave unhappy marriages. After California legalized no-fault divorce in 1969, other states quickly followed. In turn, divorce rates soared . (To this day, women initiate the overwhelming majority of divorces.)

The nuclear family began to rapidly disintegrate. But it wasn't exactly the end of a golden era.

As more people have formed families that diverged from the nuclear-family norm, the weaknesses of the structure have become glaring. The biggest fallout we see today is in the childcare crisis, where the self-reliance inherent to the nuclear-family model resulted in women bearing the burden of raising children. Although an overwhelming majority of women now work outside the home, they continue to shoulder the bulk of unpaid caregiving labor for children and aging relatives. They also end up doing more household chores — laundry, cleaning, and cooking are all primarily done by women .

Without one partner focused on full-time housekeeping, the amount of work required to run a nuclear family isn't really feasible. "All families, without exception, are dependent on extensive outside support — whether that's state welfare programs, paid service people, or extended family members generously helping out," O'Brien, the family-abolition author, told me.

The segmentation of families can also "isolate vulnerable individuals, enabling abuse," Stephanie Coontz, the author of "Marriage, a History," told me. And "some such families consciously foster suspicion of those outside the family circle."

While this arrangement works nicely for the wealthiest "shareholders" in a capitalist economic system, it isn't a particularly enticing deal for most Americans, Kristen Ghodsee, an ethnographer at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of "Everyday Utopia: In Praise of Radical Alternatives to the Traditional Family Home," told me.

The nuclear family's guise of self-sufficiency only barely conceals its toxic codependence with the market economy. But that dynamic also makes the nuclear family particularly vulnerable to economic pressures.

"The declining birth rate in industrialized countries reflects the economic reality that children are a bad investment for families, and so many people are deciding not to have them," she said. Adjusting for future inflation, the Brookings Institution estimated that it would cost $310,605 to raise a child born in 2015 through age 17 — about $43,000 more in today's dollars than what it cost in 1960 after adjusting for inflation. In a 2021 Pew survey of child-free adults under 50, 44% said they are unlikely to ever have children. When asked why, most responded that they simply don't want to. Nearly one in five said it was due to the cost.

Ghodsee pointed out that while a smaller global population has its perks (the planet certainly isn't complaining), it poses a serious threat to long-term economic growth . "Shrinking GDPs in the future are a direct result of shrinking populations, and that will challenge the very foundations of American capitalism," she said. "This is one reason why conservatives are so keen to limit women's reproductive freedoms."

It doesn't take much of a mental leap to see why capitalism and the nuclear family make for such cozy bedfellows. Atomized family units produce more market labor and buy greater quantities of stuff than sprawling, communal kin groups that can lean on each other to share resources and manpower. The nuclear family's guise of self-sufficiency only barely conceals its toxic codependence with the market economy. But that dynamic also makes the nuclear family particularly vulnerable to economic pressures.

Over the years, people who departed from the nuclear norm stopped being seen as aberrations and became examples of the varied paths adulthood could take. Today, nearly a quarter of children in the US live in single-parent households, and a rising share of adults live without a spouse or romantic partner , either alone or with roommates. Where LGBTQ+ partnership was once criminalized across the country, same-sex unions are now sanctioned under federal law. As of 2020, even polyamorous families have gained legal protections in the municipality of Somerville, Massachusetts.

Despite the growing diversity of household types, the nuclear family of the 1950s continues to shape the economics and institutions of American life. By and large, policies that inform tax systems, housing, healthcare, and social services are designed to provide the greatest benefit to married couples and their children. When my partner and I file our annual income taxes in the coming weeks, we'll enjoy a sizable tax break thanks to our decision to tie the knot last fall. And as a dependent on his employer-provided health-insurance plan, I'm able to make a living as a freelancer without worrying about healthcare coverage. But that narrow policy focus leaves an increasing numbers of Americans behind.

Though it's unclear what the family of the future will look like, seeds of change are blowing in the breeze. Recent months have seen a deluge of magazine trend pieces , Reddit threads , and newspaper headline portmanteaus speculating about polyamorous families, platonic coparenting , and " mommunes " becoming the next big thing. Even the multigenerational household is quietly coming back into vogue, thanks in large part to ongoing cost-of-living increases and families' caregiving needs.

The pandemic seemed to accelerate a collective sense of urgency to come up with something better. "In order for families to function at all, they need lots and lots and lots of external supports," O'Brien said. "During COVID, as some of those external supports disappeared, that became dramatically and painfully obvious to huge numbers of people."

The lockdowns of the early pandemic also foregrounded the social and relational pitfalls endemic to the nuclear family — "the hot box of being around the same people all the time, the lack of feedback and broader social relationships, and the despair and depression that can go along with this type of social isolation, particularly for mothers of young children," O'Brien said.

Ghodsee agreed that the pandemic invigorated people's desire for collectivism and community. Overwhelmed nuclear families reached out to one another for mutual support and formed "pandemic pods." Communities set up mutual-aid groups to share goods and deliver groceries to elderly and immunocompromised neighbors. In the face of urgent necessity, people began to imagine pathways toward a more expansive definition of family. Suddenly, everyone was talking about how to recreate the "village ."

"A lot of people who lived alone and who used to think of having their own place as the ultimate symbol of personal autonomy and success became very lonely," Ghodsee said. "Things like co-living, co-housing, and intentional communities are now making a comeback." Two websites that match single adults for the purpose of platonically co-parenting children reported a 30% to 50% surge in traffic during the COVID lockdown, The Guardian reported .

Not everyone agrees that the grass is greener on the other side of the white picket fence. Coontz, a leading historian of the American family, notes that every family structure comes with its own set of distinct weaknesses, strengths, and possibilities. The extended families of yore guaranteed a measure of built-in support and community that was particularly beneficial for raising children. But the extended-family structure also made it "far easier for the older generation to control the younger ones," Coontz said, and tended to undermine the romantic couple relationships in their midst.

No family model is perfectly resilient, equitable, or sustainable in a vacuum. "It's the larger social context that counts most for how any institution functions, and any decent social system needs to put protections in place to minimize the chance of abuse and give people options when the institution fails or abuses them," Coontz said.

She remains unconvinced that rearranging the family structure will resolve its many ails. She also believes it unlikely that the typical American family will ever stray too far from the basic configuration of a romantic partnership and children. What she hopes for is "a society whose institutions and policies encourage personal security and trust beyond our families and friends — to make our lives better when we are in and when we are out of an intimate romantic relationship." This might include investments in " third places ," such as public libraries and parks where community members can freely gather, or more radical overhauls such as the provision of a universal basic income , which could reduce inequality and boost social cohesion.

Rather than changing families to be more like society, this vision of the future imagines a society that's more like a big, supportive family.

Kelli María Korducki  is a journalist whose work focuses on work, tech, and culture. She's based in New York City.

About Discourse Stories

Through our Discourse journalism, Business Insider seeks to explore and illuminate the day’s most fascinating issues and ideas. Our writers provide thought-provoking perspectives, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise. Read more Discourse stories here .

Related stories

More from Economy

Most popular

• Main content