14 February 2020

An interesting essay on the history of the family

Excerpts from a longread at The Atlantic:
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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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... 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...

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...

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...

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... Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage—they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more... 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...

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...

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...
Way more at The Atlantic.  Worth the read, IMHO.

7 comments:

  1. My entire family is extinct. I have no parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, spouse--literally no one. Since there' no real safety net in America (that would be socialism), I feel very scared, anxious, and alone. I'll probably end up on the street or dead before too long.

    I don't have any friends either, since 100% of people where I live (Wisconsin) are all raising their kids. I don't have a single friend to talk to. People don't talk to anyone outside of their limited social circle, and since people never leave and there are no new arrivals in Wisconsin, people only interact with their childhood friends and family. Family is literally the only reason people live here in my experience. I've never met anyone for whom that wasn't the case.

    Since I grew up with little family and financially disadvantaged, I never wanted to have kids. I always felt that he "American Dream" was a sham that I wanted no part of. But since a wife and kids are a package deal, I have zero change of ever finding a significant other given my lifestyle, especially since 100% of the women here are married and have a bunch kids by age 25. There are also 20 single men for every woman.

    It's impossible to get anywhere or have even a modicum of security unless you have extensive family resources due to the extreme costs of education and housing in the U.S. There's no way you can compete for the shrinking number of decent-paying jobs with people whose families can provide them with unlimited funds for education, interning, studying abroad. You're just out of luck unless you're willing to take on massive debt and risk getting a job that can pay it all back; quite a gamble. With the head start well-off families can give their kids, you'll never catch up no matter how hard you work.

    Oh, and One single misfortune (health care, job loss, car accident) and you will be down and out forever. No wonder the suicide rate is increasing. I'll probably end up as a statistic myself.

    I feel so very alone. Alone and afraid. Out in the cold.

    I always fantasized about being a part of an loving extended family structure instead of what happened to me. I've always admired and been envious of a lot of the people whom I've encountered from cultures where extended families are still the norm (Greece, Serbia, Mexico, etc.). They don't realize how lucky they are. I only wish I had been born into one of those cultures instead of my own. So I really feel this.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Recent Neatorama post:

      https://www.neatorama.com/2020/02/22/Tips-On-How-To-Make-Friends-Even-When-You-re-An-Adult/

      Delete
  2. I had a friend who moved to Wisconsin for her job. She hated it. No one would talk to her unless she joined their church, which was a problem given the fact she was pegan. In the 10 years she was there, she never had one friend.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I moved to Wisconsin for a job; realistically, it's hard to make new friends as an adult. If you can do so through a job, that's helpful. Otherwise, you really have to put yourself out there in the community in some way to meet people.

    ~B

    ReplyDelete
  4. I also meant to say, re the extended family: nuclear families were the usual practice in early modern England and forward. And certainly most European immigrants came in nuclear family groups (though often with extended family connections). And certainly Africans transported as slaves usually came as individuals torn from their communities.

    I think the extended family thing is, for western Europeans, more the exception than the rule, and a sort of fantasy...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. There's an interesting book about this topic called "The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition" by Alan Macfarlane. I mentioned the book in this post: http://hipcrimevocab.com/2019/11/28/the-demise-of-kinship-in-europe/

      Delete
  5. I was born in 1973. Indeed, things have changed. People are friendly enough, but there's a difference between that and being able to be included in social circles. I think it partly derives from the Northern European heritage; I've heard similar things about Germany/Scandinavia (which ironically is my ethnic background).

    ReplyDelete

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