Brooks: "The Nuclear Family was a Mistake"
Posted: Thu Feb 13, 2020 9:07 am
David Brooks' new article in The Atlantic ... 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.
It's long but definitely worth a read. It touches on some cultural and political aspects that I'm hesitant to get into here. Even Brooks acknowledges that no one has the answer ... "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."
There are some points in the article, however, that definitely relate to the ERE lifestyle. They also echo some complaints and issues that are mentioned frequently when pursuing ERE -- complaints that may actually be making people unintentionally less resilient. The gist is that extended families worked because we had a network of social capital that helped us through good times and bad, that the nuclear family arose out of a particularly wealthy/stable period in our [American] history, and that it's no longer viable unless you have the money to 'buy' your extended family through other means.
Here are some excerpts (notice the language Brooks uses, including 'web' and 'resilience' ...
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Over the past two generations, the physical space separating nuclear families has widened. ...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."
"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.) "
"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."
Here Brooks talks about how we're stuck, and how it lowers our 'human capital' ...
"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."
"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. "
"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."
Brooks goes on to argue for 'forged families' and rebuilding extended families in a loose sense (he mentions Tribe). The goal of the new extended family would be the same as the old, without the stifling social constructs and biases.
The lack of a forged family strikes me as a danger of FIRE/ERE people, and we falsely assume that independence is inherently secure because we can always buy other types of capital. I know families are annoying and getting married risks a messy divorce, and I'm not really advocating for either per se. I'm only pointing out that the lone wolf we tend to romanticize here might skew our thinking towards independence. As a group, we seem more willing to withstand market downturns than emotional ones related to the people in our lives.
I think this is what's bugging me in the Boyle thread ... he's giving up too much social capital to, in his case, acquire material and skill capital. If he'd started with this approach, he might not have been able to survive his moneyless phase because he wouldn't have had enough social capital to do it. He built up a huge cache of social capital when he was younger and he's been spending it down through his moneyless and now technology-less experiments. Maybe what he's doing is necessary to help him find his tribe (Brooks calls it a 'band') that will ultimately prove to be more resilient than the rest of us. I don't know. I guess I worry that the social capital will run out before the tribe is formed or before he needs it for something important, similar to when people's bankrolls run out before the market recovers. What's the baseline nut that one should maintain in all areas to maintain resiliency?
Maybe the strongest/toughest person amongst us isn't the one who can live alone in the woods, it's the one who can withstand the drama at Thanksgiving dinner to maintain close ties with those they've chosen to call family?
It's long but definitely worth a read. It touches on some cultural and political aspects that I'm hesitant to get into here. Even Brooks acknowledges that no one has the answer ... "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."
There are some points in the article, however, that definitely relate to the ERE lifestyle. They also echo some complaints and issues that are mentioned frequently when pursuing ERE -- complaints that may actually be making people unintentionally less resilient. The gist is that extended families worked because we had a network of social capital that helped us through good times and bad, that the nuclear family arose out of a particularly wealthy/stable period in our [American] history, and that it's no longer viable unless you have the money to 'buy' your extended family through other means.
Here are some excerpts (notice the language Brooks uses, including 'web' and 'resilience' ...
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Over the past two generations, the physical space separating nuclear families has widened. ...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."
"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.) "
"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."
Here Brooks talks about how we're stuck, and how it lowers our 'human capital' ...
"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."
"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. "
"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."
Brooks goes on to argue for 'forged families' and rebuilding extended families in a loose sense (he mentions Tribe). The goal of the new extended family would be the same as the old, without the stifling social constructs and biases.
The lack of a forged family strikes me as a danger of FIRE/ERE people, and we falsely assume that independence is inherently secure because we can always buy other types of capital. I know families are annoying and getting married risks a messy divorce, and I'm not really advocating for either per se. I'm only pointing out that the lone wolf we tend to romanticize here might skew our thinking towards independence. As a group, we seem more willing to withstand market downturns than emotional ones related to the people in our lives.
I think this is what's bugging me in the Boyle thread ... he's giving up too much social capital to, in his case, acquire material and skill capital. If he'd started with this approach, he might not have been able to survive his moneyless phase because he wouldn't have had enough social capital to do it. He built up a huge cache of social capital when he was younger and he's been spending it down through his moneyless and now technology-less experiments. Maybe what he's doing is necessary to help him find his tribe (Brooks calls it a 'band') that will ultimately prove to be more resilient than the rest of us. I don't know. I guess I worry that the social capital will run out before the tribe is formed or before he needs it for something important, similar to when people's bankrolls run out before the market recovers. What's the baseline nut that one should maintain in all areas to maintain resiliency?
Maybe the strongest/toughest person amongst us isn't the one who can live alone in the woods, it's the one who can withstand the drama at Thanksgiving dinner to maintain close ties with those they've chosen to call family?
but at some point you have to realize that social engagement has been proven (over and over again) to make people healthier and happier. I'm not saying to deny your I-ness (I'm an 'I' -- 77% on MBTI), I'm only saying that you have to admit that it's needed albeit challenging and figure out a way to engage that doesn't make you crazy. Everyone does. That was kind of my initial point in the Boyle thread. I'm not a social butterfly so I need technology to communicate with people and maintain connections that are necessary to my well-being because that's how I make it work.