“The nuclear family was a mistake,” declared David Brooks back in March.
“We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” declared a New York City teachers union group affiliated with Black Lives Matter.
“Parent is an oppressive class,” declared Noah Berlatsky, an opinion writer published at places such as NBC and CNN.
These arguments can sound like radical Year Zero, hyperrationalist insanity. It could sound like someone who read too much Kant too poorly and decided it was unethical to love his own children more than anyone else. Or it sounds like some French Revolution- or Leninist-inspired attempt to overthrow all pre-existing social order and start afresh and enlightened.
Some of these arguments are that stuff. But read the brief “against” the nuclear family closely enough, and rather than radical, it can read reactionary. As conservative commentators rush to defend the nuclear family (and maybe the nuclear family with a sole breadwinner), we should ask if we are standing to the left of some of the anti-nuclear family crowd.
I just read this essay by Ian Marcus Corbin in which he argues that “money culture” is incompatible with the good life, which includes family and community. It’s a very socially conservative argument, and it’s another argument “against” the nuclear family. (Today, at AEI, Corbin and I will talk about this issue. Join us.)
More precisely, Corbin argues that the current norm of two working parents struggling in outside-the-home jobs to get by while outsourcing child-rearing to “professionals” is simply the logical next step. The previous step was the adoption of the 1955 norm of a father working outside the home, leaving all child-rearing to the mother — and that this is all part of an unnatural progression from families and communities toward an inhuman atomization and isolation.
“Our contemporary ways of organizing family life are not the first, original, default settings of humanity,” writes Corbin, “and neither are our grandparents’, nor their grandparents’. The nuclear family — a home populated by mother, father and children alone — is now often considered the human norm, but this is not so; it’s actually of comparatively recent vintage.”
Corbin argues that the Industrial Revolution created an unnatural cleave between home and work life and home life, creating a very modern and very capitalistic system of specialization. “As any modern economist will tell you, division of labor leads to specialization and efficiency. Whether it leads to well-rounded, flourishing humans is an entirely separate question. … There is in fact precious little reason to believe that a family structure led by work-consumed public father and child-consumed private mother is natural, necessary or even healthy.”
Corbin’s critique of the 21st-century Western nuclear family then is not a radical one, but a very paleo one — and similarly, his case for a bigger, alternative structure for raising children. Corbin calls it “extended family.” It’s the same sort of thing, frankly, I called “community.”
Children need neighborhoods. Children need schools, libraries, churches, playgrounds, and pickup basketball courts. Parents need other parents for sanity, comfort, and companionship. Parents need other people’s teenagers as babysitters and neighborhood adults to yell at, check on, rehydrate, feed, and help all the children in the neighborhood.
In much of modern America, that bustling complex ecosystem of community is lacking, and parents are given too much of the burden of raising their own children.
That’s the truth behind the statements that white American culture leans too heavily on the nuclear family.
“Disrupt the nuclear family structure” and “the nuclear family was a mistake,” however, both imply that the nuclear family is the problem and is at odds with strong communities. This is false. In truth, the nuclear family is a necessary but insufficient condition for the good life. People need mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and so on. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think David Brooks disagrees with me.)
But the nuclear family, contrary to some of the pro-“village” rhetoric, isn’t a rival to strong communities or strong extended families. A strong nuclear family is a necessary building block of strong communities.
In Alienated America, I argue that strong communities need strong families and vice versa. Where community breakdown occurs, it’s often the fruit of family breakdown. Children raised by only a mother are at a disadvantage, but their neighbors suffer, too, because that mother (probably working full time and charged with all household duties) is less available to coach, volunteer, or just sit on the front porch keeping an eye on things.
Marriage implies permanence, dedication, and commitment. Communities need those things. Less marriage means weaker communities.
Raj Chetty’s research, in fact, suggests that having many households with two married parents is the best way to guarantee the upward mobility of children.
It takes a village to raise a child because it takes a village to support a nuclear family, and it takes a nuclear family to build a village.
