Nuclear Family vs Extended Family

[justme]

I found an article that is very interesting, and i thought maybe some of you all would be interested in reading it as well.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... 00-Qw_q8MQ

[barnhart]

Excellent. David Brooks is always worth the time.

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

The society we have created is anti-poor and anti-natalist since children are naturally without resources.

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.

I see this in action on a daily basis.

[barnhart]

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.

This seems true to me.

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.

Interesting. I wasn't expecting the article to go in this direction...

[HondurasKeiser]

The Institute for Family Studies has done a series of responses to Brooks' piece. I found their analysis of the increase in multigenerational homes quite interesting.

Here are three data points on extended family relationships in America today:

1. A majority of Americans with children who live with extended families are not married.
2. Intergenerational transfers happen more often between never-married adults and their parents.
3. Adults who live with their parents are less happy than others.
- Wang & Wilcox

Another of the responses points to a correlation between the society-wide deschristianization that the West has experienced and the breakdown of the family. Essentially, Mary Eberstadt's thesis in How the West Really Lost God.

In talking with my own Christian friends struggling in their marriages, it is clear that in almost all cases—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—the institutional church is not a meaningful part of shoring up their commitment to marriage, except in an abstract sense. For most, congregational life is the thinnest of communities. Catholics, for example, lament that their parishes are impersonal “sacrament factories.” Evangelicals tell me that their congregations may be somewhat thicker, but like all other American Christian churches, are so saturated by individualism that they can’t persuasively frame marriage as much more than a lightly sacralized contract between willing parties. There is no escaping modernity.

We will not have a revival of the family without a revival of religion—and not just sentimental, therapeutic Christianity, but a rigorous, disciplined, countercultural form of the faith that can impart to people the hope they need to embrace suffering and choose life amid the dissipation and decadence of the world. - Dreher

[Josh]

Perhaps David Brooks could have helped by not divorcing his wife of 28 years. I can’t trust someone like that to tell me how we should arrange our families.

[MaxPC]

Perhaps David Brooks could have helped by not divorcing his wife of 28 years. I can’t trust someone like that to tell me how we should arrange our families.

[Josh]

More specifically, David Brook's first wife converted to Judaism so that she could marry him and was by his side for 28 years. They met when they were students at university. She changed her name from Jane to Sarah as part of her conversion.

They divorced 7 years ago, and then he married his research assistant who is 23 years younger than he is.

This person has no place talking about "family" to anyone, other than as an example of what not to do. If you want to understand the reasons for family breakdown - look no further than David Brooks' selfishness. He needs to repent, accept the gospel, and reconcile with his first wife, and apologise in sackcloth and ashes to his second "wife".

"Whosever divorces his wife, except for fornication, and marries another, commits adultery with her."

[Josh]

David Brooks:



... and his "wife":



I find it quite troubling when a man marries someone young enough to be his daughter. She's 35 and his son is 29!

[RZehr]

Data is compelling. However data is also able to be cherry picked or manipulated. Very few people have the time or inclination to dig into all the date in this article and see if it is being used fairly or not. Without knowing the author enough to trust his integrity and without knowing his motivations and ends, I'm not really well equipped to agree or disagree with his data. So how do I decide whether to buy what he is selling? I simply look at how his claims line up with what the Bible says. I find biblical support for a father, mother, and children. I see teaching on respecting and honoring old people, taking care of each other. I see the church playing an actual role in peoples lives. I see certain values that people should hold, and I see others that Gods people should oppose.

I see this article promoting ideas that are contrary to Gods instructions for living. And so on that basis, I cannot really endorse this article.

The nuclear family was not a mistake, sin is a mistake. And anytime a society discard this blue print for living in exchange for selfishness, for sexual fornication, for wealth seeking, for "liberation", it will not turn out well. All the factory jobs and economic shifts in the worlds are not powerful enough to justify sin, and it is truly, in a nut shell, sin that is causing the fall of families. Not all this other peripheral stuff that is written about. Economics is not justification to sin.

[HondurasKeiser]

This quote jumped out at me as I find myself having recurring conversations about the purpose of marriage and sex:

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.”