case study on nuclear family

Nuclear Family (Definition + History)

In various societies and throughout history, the concept of family has served as a foundational unit, providing support, structure, and a sense of belonging. The ways in which people define and live within families have evolved, leading to diverse structures and dynamics.

A nuclear family is a family unit consisting of two parents (mother and father) and their biological or adopted children living together in a single household. This structure is distinct from extended family systems, which include additional relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Delving into the historical context, theories, cultural variations, benefits, and challenges, we will explore the intricate tapestry of the nuclear family. Through this exploration, we aim to provide insights into its impact on individuals and society, and how it compares to other family structures.

History of the Nuclear Family

Ancient Societies

The concept of the nuclear family can be traced back to several ancient societies, each of which has contributed uniquely to the understanding and evolution of this family structure.

Ancient Rome, Greece, and China, while geographically and culturally distinct, showcased early instances of nuclear family units within their respective societies, laying the foundation for future generations.

In ancient Rome, the family structure was predominantly patriarchal . The paterfamilias , or the male head of the family, held considerable authority and power, dictating the family's decisions and actions.

Within this patriarchal setup, the nuclear family was a visible unit, distinguished by its immediate family members sharing a household, apart from the extended family.

The nuclear family in ancient Rome functioned as a fundamental economic, social, and educational unit . Parents, particularly fathers, bore the responsibility of nurturing the children, imparting cultural norms, values, and traditions , ensuring the continuity of Roman heritage.

The Roman household was a microcosm of Roman society, reflecting societal hierarchies, roles, and responsibilities. Furthermore, marriages were often arranged for political or economic advantages, thereby influencing the dynamics within the nuclear family.

Ancient Greece, much like Rome, valued the concept of the oikos or household, which typically consisted of the father, mother, and children.

The Greek polis (city-state) had a profound impact on family life, as it underscored the nuclear family’s role in contributing to civic responsibilities and duties. Families were seen as the building blocks of a city-state, and the familial roles were often aligned with serving the interests of the community.

Education was a pivotal aspect of Greek family life, especially within the nuclear family. Parents, with a particular emphasis on fathers, were tasked with educating their children in philosophy, arts, sports, and civic duties, molding them into well-rounded citizens.

The societal expectations and norms were deeply ingrained within the family structure, shaping individual identities and responsibilities.

In ancient China, Confucianism played a pivotal role in shaping family structures and dynamics. The philosophy promoted filial piety, respect for elders, and the value of family harmony.

While extended families were highly valued and respected, the nuclear family maintained its position as a vital unit within the larger family framework.

Parents in a Chinese nuclear family were revered and held authority, with children expected to obey and honor them. The emphasis on education, moral values, and social harmony were integral to family life.

Families were seen as the foundation of a stable and harmonious society, reflecting the broader societal values and norms.

Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Transitioning from ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the nuclear family experienced shifts and adaptations, reflecting the changing socio-economic and cultural landscapes of the times.

The influence of the feudal system and the emergence of individualism during the Renaissance played crucial roles in molding family structures and dynamics.

Feudal System Influence

The Middle Ages in Europe were characterized by the feudal system , where land ownership and social status were linked. Noble families, owing to their wealth and status, often lived in large households with extended family members and servants.

However, peasants, constrained by economic limitations and living conditions, were more likely to reside in smaller, nuclear family units.

Within these nuclear family units, roles were clearly defined, with fathers working in fields or trades, mothers managing household duties, and children assisting based on their age and gender.

The church played a significant role in dictating family values, norms, and practices, influencing marriage, parenthood, and children's upbringing.

Changing Social Dynamics

The Renaissance period marked a departure from the rigid societal structures of the Middle Ages, ushering in an era of enlightenment, art, science, and individualism.

The emphasis on personal fulfillment, intellectual growth, and artistic expression brought about shifts in family dynamics and individual roles within the nuclear family.

Marriages became less about economic or political alliances and more about personal choice and mutual affection.

The concept of childhood was recognized, leading to changes in parenting styles and educational practices. The nuclear family became a space for individual growth, learning, and expression, reflecting the broader societal transformations.

Industrial Revolution Impact

The advent of the Industrial Revolution brought forth unprecedented changes in family life, especially concerning the nuclear family structure. The migration from rural areas to urban centers, coupled with the separation of work from home life, led to more pronounced roles within the family and a heightened focus on the immediate family unit.

Urbanization and Work Dynamics

The shift from agrarian (farming) societies to industrial urban centers called for changes in family structures and roles. Men increasingly worked away from home, becoming the primary breadwinners, while women assumed the role of homemakers, managing household duties and child-rearing.

The nuclear family became a distinct economic and social unit, adapting to the demands of industrialized urban life.

Children's roles within the nuclear family also evolved, with formalized education becoming a focal point. Schooling prepared boys for future employment and girls for homemaking, reinforcing gender roles and expectations .

The nuclear family became a microcosm of the industrial society, reflecting the values, norms, and aspirations of the time.

Evolution of Family Roles

The distinct roles of fathers as breadwinners and mothers as homemakers became more entrenched during the Industrial Revolution. However, this period also sowed the seeds for future changes and challenges to traditional gender roles within the nuclear family.

The economic pressures and opportunities in urban centers brought about discussions on women's rights, education, and employment, laying the groundwork for future social movements.

Children’s education and socialization became paramount, with schools and communities playing a pivotal role in shaping their values, skills, and aspirations.

The nuclear family, while maintaining its core structure, was evolving, adapting to the socio-economic realities and cultural shifts of the industrial age.

The 20th Century to Present

The 20th century and the dawn of the new millennium witnessed significant transformations in the nuclear family structure, influenced by world wars, social movements, technological advancements , and globalization .

The challenges and adaptations of the nuclear family during these times underscored its resilience and ability to reflect broader societal changes.

World Wars Influence

The tumultuous times during the two World Wars had a profound impact on family life. With men going off to war, many women stepped into the workforce , challenging and reshaping traditional gender roles within the nuclear family.

The post-war periods saw attempts to revert to traditional family roles, but the experiences of women during the wars had laid the foundation for future changes.

The wars also brought about economic, political, and social shifts, affecting family life and individual aspirations. The nuclear family was not isolated from these broader transformations; instead, it adapted, reflecting the changing values, norms, and expectations of society.

Social and Cultural Movements

The latter half of the 20th century was marked by a wave of social and cultural movements , advocating for civil rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights .

These movements challenged the traditional notions of the nuclear family, advocating for more inclusive and diverse family structures and roles.

The rise of feminism questioned gender roles within the family, advocating for women's rights, equality, and opportunities.

The LGBTQ+ rights movement brought forth discussions on same-sex families, challenging the heteronormative definition of the nuclear family.

These movements, along with technological advancements and globalization, continue to shape the modern nuclear family, reflecting the diversity and inclusivity of contemporary society.

The technological revolution and globalization in the 21st century further influenced family dynamics.

Virtual connectivity, changing work patterns, and exposure to varying cultural influences have shaped the modern nuclear family, making it a dynamic and adaptable social unit.

Tracing the origins and evolution of the nuclear family from ancient civilizations through significant historical epochs reveals its adaptability and resilience. The nuclear family has mirrored societal changes, evolving roles, and shifting values, maintaining its significance as a foundational unit of society.

Characteristics of the Nuclear Family

The nuclear family, a term familiar to many, consists of two parents and their children, living together in a single household.

This family model is distinguished from the extended family system, which encompasses additional relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Across cultures and through the tides of change, the nuclear family has showcased various characteristics and roles, often reflective of the societal norms and values of the time.

1. Stability and Support

One of the defining characteristics of the nuclear family is its provision of stability and support. The close-knit structure fosters an environment where individual members can rely on one another for emotional, financial, and social support.

This sense of security and belonging is fundamental to individual well-being and development, forming the bedrock of the family unit.

2. Defined Roles and Responsibilities

Within a nuclear family, roles and responsibilities are often clearly defined. Traditionally, parents are seen as providers and protectors, while children are nurtured and guided towards adulthood.

These roles, while evolving, continue to shape the dynamics within the family, influencing relationships, expectations, and individual identities.

3. Socialization and Value Transmission

The nuclear family plays a pivotal role in socializing children, imparting values, morals, and cultural norms.

Through interaction with parents and siblings, children learn about relationships, empathy, cooperation, and conflict resolution. This early socialization lays the foundation for individual development and societal integration .

Roles within the Nuclear Family

As society has evolved, so too have the roles within the nuclear family. Traditional roles have been redefined, expanded, and diversified, reflecting changes in societal expectations, gender norms, and individual aspirations.

Parental Roles

Traditionally, fathers were often the breadwinners, providing financial support, while mothers were primarily responsible for homemaking and child-rearing.

However, the latter half of the 20th century saw significant shifts in parental roles, with more women entering the workforce and men taking an active part in child-rearing and household duties. This shift towards more egalitarian roles has influenced family dynamics, relationships, and individual fulfillment.

Children’s Roles

Children within a nuclear family are not mere recipients of care and socialization but also contribute to the family dynamics.

The interactions between siblings, as well as with their parents, shape their social understanding, emotional intelligence, and individual identities.

The roles of children have also evolved, with changing expectations regarding autonomy, education, and contribution to household tasks.

Evolving Gender Roles

The movement towards gender equality has had a profound impact on roles within the nuclear family.

The increasing participation of women in the workforce, the advocacy for shared parenting and household responsibilities, and the recognition of diverse family structures have all contributed to the redefinition of gender roles within the family.

Impact on Individual Development

The characteristics and roles within the nuclear family have far-reaching implications for individual development. The family environment influences cognitive, emotional, social, and moral development, shaping the individuals children become.

Cognitive Development

The nuclear family is the first environment where children encounter learning. Through interaction, play, and exploration, children develop cognitive skills such as problem-solving, language acquisition, and critical thinking .

Parental involvement, support, and stimulation are crucial in fostering cognitive development, laying the groundwork for academic achievement and intellectual growth.

Emotional and Social Development

The emotional bonds formed within the nuclear family are foundational to children’s emotional and social development. The experience of love, trust, and security shapes their emotional well-being, self-esteem, and capacity for empathy and cooperation.

Social interactions within the family teach children about relationships , conflict resolution, and social norms, preparing them for integration into broader society.

Moral Development

The nuclear family is instrumental in instilling moral values and ethical principles. Through guidance, discipline, and role modeling, parents influence children’s understanding of right and wrong, responsibility, and respect for others .

This moral foundation guides individuals throughout their lives, influencing their character, decisions, and relationships.

The nuclear family, with its distinct characteristics and roles, serves as a cornerstone for individual development and societal cohesion. The stability, support, and socialization provided within this family structure shape the cognitive, emotional, social, and moral development of its members.

The evolution of roles within the nuclear family reflects broader societal changes and continues to influence family dynamics and individual aspirations. Understanding these characteristics and roles is essential in exploring the significance, benefits, and challenges of the nuclear family in contemporary society.

Pros and Cons of the Nuclear Family

Pros of the nuclear family.

Many people around the world grow up in a nuclear family, which is like a cozy little team made up of two parents and their kids. This type of family structure has lots of wonderful aspects that make it pretty popular!

1. Stability and Independence

Firstly, a big win for nuclear families is the sense of stability and independence they bring. Imagine your family as a tight-knit circle of support, like a cozy nest where everyone looks out for each other.

Being independent from a bigger, extended family means you get to make your own rules and traditions. It's like building your own little world where your family gets to decide what’s important.

2. Lots of Attention and Support

In a nuclear family, with fewer people in the house, parents can really zoom in on what each child needs.

This means every child gets a special spotlight, helping them feel valued and understood. It’s like having a cheerleading squad just for you, helping you grow strong and confident.

3. Managing Money and Moving Around

When it comes to money, nuclear families often find it easier to manage. It’s like having a smaller pie – when there are fewer people, everyone gets a bigger slice!

This can lead to better saving opportunities and smarter choices with money. Also, smaller families can pack up and move more easily, whether chasing better job opportunities, schools, or just a nicer place to live.

4. Adapting to Changes

Nuclear families are often like chameleons, able to adapt to new situations and ideas. They might be more open-minded, accepting people’s differences, and adjusting to new ways of thinking and living.

Cons of the Nuclear Family

However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. There are some challenges that nuclear families face, affecting both individuals and the family as a whole.

1. Limited Support System

One of the hurdles is that a smaller family might not have as many hands on deck for support. Imagine facing a big storm with a smaller umbrella – it can be tough without extra help, especially during hard times like sickness or loss.

2. Feeling Isolated

Sometimes, a nuclear family might feel a bit like an island, especially if they live far from other relatives or if the parents are super busy. Kids in these families might miss out on the bustling, lively feeling of having a larger family around.

3. More Pressure on Parents

In a nuclear family, the parents are like superheroes – they have to do it all! From caring for the kids to running the household, it’s a big job. And just like superheroes can get tired, so can parents, which can be stressful.

4. Losing Traditions

Living away from the extended family can sometimes mean missing out on learning about family traditions and stories. It’s like having fewer threads to weave the tapestry of your family’s history, leading to a weaker connection to your roots and heritage.

The nuclear family, this special team of parents and kids, has played a starring role in societies for ages. It’s like a tree that’s grown and changed with time, still standing strong and offering a safe and loving place for kids to grow. But, just like trees face storms, nuclear families have their challenges too.

Understanding the nuclear family is like piecing together a puzzle – looking at all the different pieces, the good and the tricky. It’s a really important way that people live together, and it helps mold who we become and how we view the world.

By diving into its history, how it functions, its ups, and downs, we get a clearer picture of its special role in our lives and the world.

Theories about the Nuclear Family

Diving into the world of theories and perspectives gives us a kaleidoscope of views on the nuclear family.

Over the years, many thinkers have explored this family structure, shedding light on its roles, functions, and impact on society and individuals. Let’s explore some of these intriguing theories and see what they tell us about the nuclear family!

Functionalism

The Functionalism theory, developed by Emile Durkheim in the early 20th century, looks at the nuclear family like a crucial puzzle piece in society.

According to this theory, each family has specific roles and functions that keep society running smoothly, just like how our body parts work together to keep us healthy.

Durkheim, and later Talcott Parsons , another influential sociologist, believed that the nuclear family performs essential functions like raising and educating children, providing emotional support, and contributing to economic stability.

In this view, the nuclear family is like a mini-society, a school where kids learn values, norms, and culture. It's where children first understand what’s right and wrong, shaping their characters and preparing them to be good members of society.

Additionally, the nuclear family is seen as an economic unit, with parents working to provide and kids eventually growing up to join the workforce.

Conflict Theory

Conflict Theory , introduced by thinkers like Karl Marx and later developed by Max Weber, offers a different lens. It views society as a stage where groups struggle for power and resources.

In this theory, the nuclear family is seen as a reflection of inequalities in society, with family members playing different roles and sometimes experiencing imbalance and conflict.

This theory sheds light on how power dynamics within the family can mirror broader societal inequalities. It questions the balance of power between men and women, parents and children, and how family structures can either challenge or uphold societal norms.

For example, it explores how traditional gender roles within the nuclear family might impact women’s opportunities and how families can either support or resist societal changes.

Symbolic Interactionism

Delving into Symbolic Interactionism , introduced by George Herbert Mead and later expanded by Herbert Blumer, we explore how individuals in a family interact and assign meanings to their relationships.

This theory is like looking at family life through a microscope, focusing on small, everyday interactions and how they shape our understanding of family roles and relationships.

In the context of the nuclear family, Symbolic Interactionism explores how family members communicate, how they define their roles, and how they create a shared family identity.

It looks at the symbols and meanings attached to ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘sibling’, and how these roles are interpreted and lived out. For instance, it might examine how a father’s role is seen as the provider and how this perception influences family interactions and expectations.

Social Exchange Theory

Social Exchange Theory , developed by George Homans in the 1950s and expanded by Peter Blau and Richard Emerson, views relationships as a sort of barter system.

It suggests that individuals seek to maximize rewards and minimize costs in their relationships, including family ties. The nuclear family, in this light, is seen as a network of relationships where members exchange resources, support, and care, aiming for a balance of give-and-take.

This theory helps us understand how family members negotiate responsibilities, support each other, and seek rewards in their relationships. It looks at how parents and children, husbands and wives, navigate the balance of giving and receiving, and how this dynamic influences family cohesion and satisfaction.

Feminist Theory

Feminist Theory , with roots in the works of thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and later contributions by Betty Friedan and bell hooks, critically examines gender roles and inequalities within the family.

It shines a spotlight on how traditional family structures can uphold patriarchal norms and explores how families can be spaces for both empowerment and subordination.

In the realm of the nuclear family, Feminist Theory scrutinizes the division of labor, power dynamics, and opportunities for men and women.

It advocates for equality within family relationships and challenges traditional norms that might limit individuals based on gender. It’s like questioning who does the dishes and why, and exploring how families can break free from limiting roles and expectations.

Economic Models

Lastly, economic models of the family take a practical approach, viewing the family as a unit of production and consumption.

Developed by economists like Gary Becker in the 1970s and 1980s, these models analyze how families make decisions about work, spending, and resource allocation. They explore how families adapt to economic pressures, how they invest in their children’s education, and how they plan for the future.

In the context of the nuclear family, economic models examine how parents balance work and family life, how they prioritize spending, and how they plan for their children’s futures.

It’s like looking at the family as a mini-economy, exploring how they manage resources, make investments, and navigate the financial landscape.

Modern Theories on Nuclear Families and Diverse Structures

In recent years, our understanding of what a nuclear family can be has transformed, opening up new ways of thinking and welcoming a spectrum of family structures.

Modern theories of nuclear families emphasize inclusivity, diversity, and the evolving nature of family life.

Queer Theory and Same-Sex Marriages

Queer Theory , stemming from the work of thinkers like Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the late 20th century, challenges traditional ideas about gender and sexuality.

It invites us to think outside the box when it comes to family structures, celebrating diversity and questioning norms.

In the landscape of nuclear families, Queer Theory illuminates the experiences of same-sex couples and their families. It explores how these families navigate societal norms, build strong relationships, and create loving environments for children.

Same-sex marriages, legally recognized in many countries around the world, have reshaped the definition of nuclear families, showcasing that love, commitment, and care are at the heart of family life, regardless of gender.

Blended Family Dynamics

Modern theories also explore the dynamics of blended families, where parents bring children from previous relationships into a new family unit. These theories delve into how family members build connections, navigate challenges, and create a harmonious family life.

Blended families add a layer of complexity to the nuclear family model, as they combine different family histories, traditions, and relationships. Understanding blended family dynamics helps us appreciate the adaptability and resilience of families, as they blend traditions, navigate relationships, and build strong bonds.

Childfree Families

Another modern perspective focuses on childfree families, where couples consciously choose not to have children. This viewpoint explores the motivations, experiences, and societal perceptions of childfree couples, acknowledging the diversity of family choices.

Childfree families challenge traditional expectations of parenthood and open up discussions about individual choice, fulfillment, and the different ways of building a meaningful life.

Recognizing childfree families as a valid family structure broadens our understanding of the many ways individuals create love, support, and commitment.

Dual-Career Families

The rise of dual-career families, where both partners pursue professional careers, has also shaped modern theories on nuclear families. These theories explore how families balance work and family life, share responsibilities, and support each other’s goals.

Dual-career families reflect the changing roles of men and women, the aspirations of individuals, and the adaptability of family structures. Understanding the dynamics of dual-career families provides insights into the evolving nature of family roles, relationships, and aspirations.

The Nuclear Family in Different Cultures

Examining the concept of the nuclear family across different cultures is like embarking on a fascinating journey around the world. E

ach culture, with its unique traditions, values, and social norms, adds a distinctive flavor to the nuclear family model, highlighting both commonalities and differences.

Western Cultures

In Western cultures, like in the United States and Europe, the nuclear family is often seen as the cornerstone of society. It’s like a building block, shaping individual identities and contributing to the larger community.

Here, the emphasis is often on individualism, independence, and the pursuit of personal goals.

In these cultures, nuclear families often live separately from extended families, valuing privacy and autonomy.

Children are encouraged to become independent and self-reliant, with education playing a pivotal role in preparing them for adulthood.

The concept of marriage has also evolved to include same-sex couples, reflecting changing societal norms and values.

Asian Cultures

Venturing into Asian cultures, we find a different perspective. Countries like China, Japan, and India often place a strong emphasis on collectivism, interdependence, and respect for tradition.

While nuclear families are common, there is often a close-knit connection with the extended family.

In these cultures, family values such as filial piety, respect for elders, and maintaining family harmony play a significant role.

Family members are expected to support each other, and children often live with their parents until marriage.

Additionally, arranged marriages are still prevalent in some Asian cultures, with families playing a central role in match-making.

African Cultures

Exploring African cultures, we discover a rich tapestry of family structures and values. In many African societies, the concept of family extends beyond the nuclear unit to include a broader network of relatives and community members.

In this communal setting, raising children is often a collective responsibility, with the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” encapsulating this ethos.

Extended families and communities play a crucial role in providing support, instilling values, and fostering a sense of belonging. The emphasis is often on cooperation, mutual support, and maintaining strong family ties.

Middle Eastern Cultures

In the Middle East, family is central to social structure and cultural identity. The nuclear family is valued, but there is a strong connection with extended family members, reflecting the importance of kinship and family solidarity.

In these cultures, traditions, and religious values significantly influence family roles and relationships. Respect for elders, adherence to family norms, and the importance of marriage and procreation are common themes.

Families tend to be patriarchal, with men often holding decision-making roles, while women are primarily responsible for childcare and household duties.

Latin American Cultures

In Latin American cultures, family is a vibrant and essential aspect of life. Like a colorful tapestry, the family is interwoven with traditions, celebrations, and a strong sense of unity.

The nuclear family is important, but so is the extended family, forming a close and supportive network.

In these cultures, family members often live close to each other, and there is a strong sense of loyalty and mutual support.

Traditional gender roles are prevalent, but there is also a growing trend towards equality and shared responsibilities within the family.

Celebrations and gatherings are integral to family life, reinforcing bonds and creating cherished memories.

Journeying through different cultures provides a panoramic view of the nuclear family, revealing its diverse manifestations and adaptations.

Whether shaped by individualism or collectivism, tradition or modernity, each culture adds its unique brushstrokes to the portrait of the nuclear family.

Understanding these cultural variations enriches our appreciation of the universality and adaptability of the nuclear family concept, a testament to its enduring significance in human societies.

Comparing Nuclear Family to Other Family Structures

In the diverse world of family structures, each type is like a unique plant in a garden, with its way of growing, blooming, and contributing to the ecosystem.

Comparing the nuclear family to other family structures helps us appreciate the variety in the garden of family life and understand how each type meets the needs of its members in its way.

Extended Family

Firstly, let’s look at the extended family, which is like a big, spreading tree with many branches. Unlike the nuclear family, which consists of parents and their children, extended families include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and sometimes even more relatives!

Living in such a family can feel like being part of a big, bustling community, with lots of people around to share experiences, offer help, and provide companionship.

Extended families offer a strong support system, with family members often living close by or under the same roof. This close-knit network can be especially helpful in times of need, with relatives stepping in to help with childcare, financial support, or just a listening ear.

However, living in a larger family can also mean less privacy and more opinions to consider when making decisions.

Single-Parent Family

Next, we have the single-parent family, which is like a resilient plant that finds a way to thrive even in challenging conditions.

In this family structure, one parent takes on the role of both caregiver and provider, juggling responsibilities and ensuring the well-being of the children. Life in a single-parent family can be full of love and closeness, but it can also be challenging, with one parent balancing many tasks.

Single-parent families might face financial challenges and time constraints, but they also foster strong bonds and a sense of independence.

Children in these families often learn responsibility early on and develop a close relationship with their parent. The smaller family size allows for individual attention and adaptability to meet each member’s needs.

Childless Families

In the garden of family life, childless families are like flowers that don’t produce seeds but still add beauty and diversity to the landscape.

Couples in childless families have chosen not to have children, focusing on their relationship, careers, hobbies, and other life goals. This family structure offers flexibility, freedom, and the opportunity to pursue individual and joint aspirations.

Childless families can invest time and resources in their interests, careers, and each other, fostering a close and fulfilling relationship.

However, they might also face societal expectations and misconceptions about their choice to remain childless.

Nevertheless, childless families are a testament to the diversity of family life and the validity of different life choices.

Blended Families

Blended families, formed when parents bring together children from previous relationships, are like gardens where different types of plants are grown together.

This family structure offers a chance for new beginnings, fostering relationships between stepparents, stepsiblings, and half-siblings. Navigating relationships in blended families can be complex, but it can also lead to a rich and rewarding family life.

Blended families require time, patience, and communication to build strong bonds and navigate differences.

The diversity within the family can lead to a richer and more inclusive family experience, with members learning from each other’s backgrounds and perspectives.

Like a garden with a mix of plants, a blended family can be a harmonious and vibrant place, where each member contributes to the family’s well-being.

Exploring different family structures sheds light on the myriad ways individuals create loving, supportive environments.

Whether in the close-knit setting of the nuclear family, the bustling community of the extended family, the resilient single-parent family, the flexible childless family, or the diverse blended family, each structure offers unique experiences and lessons.

Appreciating this diversity helps us understand the many forms of family life and the common threads of love, support, and belonging that connect them all.

Nuclear Families and Mental Health

Exploring the intricate world of psychology through the lens of various case studies and research reveals compelling insights into the impact of the nuclear family on individuals.

From understanding mental health dynamics to exploring correlations with criminal behavior, these studies offer a multifaceted perspective on the influence of family structure.

Attachment Theory and Child Development

One of the foundational studies in psychology, conducted by John Bowlby and further developed by Mary Ainsworth in the mid-20th century, delved into attachment theory .

This theory examines the bond between children and their primary caregivers (usually parents), focusing on the nuclear family.

The researchers found that a child’s attachment style could profoundly impact their mental health and interpersonal relationships as they grow.

Bowlby and Ainsworth came up with four attachment styles:

• Secure Attachment: This style is characterized by a sense of safety and security. Securely attached children feel confident to explore the world, knowing they can return to a safe base. They tend to develop higher self-esteem, better relationships, and more robust mental health.
• Insecure-Avoidant Attachment: Children with this style may avoid closeness and emotional connection with their caregivers. They tend to be more independent and may struggle with forming intimate relationships later in life.
• Insecure-Anxious Attachment: These children often exhibit anxiety and uncertainty. They may be clingy and overly dependent on their caregivers, fearing abandonment.
• Disorganized Attachment: This style is characterized by a lack of a clear attachment behavior, and these children might act disoriented or exhibit contradictory behaviors. It often arises from situations of neglect or abuse.

They also identified a few factors that can influence the development of these attachment styles:

• Sensitivity and Responsiveness: The caregiver’s sensitivity and responsiveness to a child’s needs are crucial in forming a secure attachment. Consistent, loving, and attentive care fosters a sense of security in children.
• Reliability: A caregiver’s reliability and availability contribute to the development of attachment styles. Children who can depend on their caregivers to meet their needs are more likely to develop secure attachments.
• Stress and Trauma: Exposure to stress, trauma, or inconsistency in early childhood can influence attachment styles. Children who experience such conditions are more likely to develop insecure or disorganized attachments.
• Temperament: The child’s innate temperament also plays a role. Some children might be more adaptable and resilient, while others may be more sensitive and reactive, influencing their attachment formation.

Attachment styles can have a lasting impact on an individual’s life, influencing their approach to relationships, self-esteem, and coping mechanisms.

Securely attached individuals are more likely to form healthy, balanced relationships and exhibit emotional resilience. In contrast, those with insecure attachment styles might face challenges in building trust, managing emotions, and maintaining relationships.

Therapeutic Interventions: Attachment-based therapy focuses on addressing and altering attachment patterns. It can be particularly beneficial for individuals with insecure or disorganized attachment styles, helping them develop healthier relationships, improve self-esteem, and enhance emotional regulation.

Attachment theory offers profound insights into the formative bonds formed within the nuclear family and their lasting impact on an individual’s development and well-being.

Understanding the different attachment styles, their influencing factors, and long-term effects provides a comprehensive view of the intricate relationship between early childhood experiences and subsequent life outcomes.

Recognizing the significance of secure attachments and the potential for therapeutic interventions contributes to a deeper appreciation of the pivotal role of the nuclear family in shaping individuals.

The Impact of Parental Involvement on Academic Achievement

Diana Baumrind ’s seminal research in the 1960s identified different parenting styles within nuclear families and their impact on children’s academic achievement and behavior.

She categorized parenting into authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful, examining how each style influenced children’s development.

• Authoritative Parenting: This style combines warmth and firmness, fostering a supportive environment while setting clear boundaries. Authoritative parents encourage open communication, provide rationale for rules, and offer consistent discipline. Children raised in this environment often exhibit higher academic achievement, better emotional regulation, social competence, and a balanced sense of autonomy.
• Authoritarian Parenting: Authoritarian parents are strict, demanding, and expect obedience without explanation. This style may lead to children who are obedient and proficient but may struggle with self-esteem, social competence, and may experience higher levels of unhappiness and stress.
• Permissive Parenting: Permissive parents are nurturing and accepting but make few demands and set limited boundaries. Children raised in this environment might struggle with self-control and self-regulation, performing less well academically and exhibiting behavioral problems.
• Neglectful Parenting: Neglectful parents are uninvolved, indifferent, and emotionally unresponsive. Children with neglectful parents are likely to face a myriad of developmental issues, including academic underachievement, behavioral problems, and poor mental health.

The impact of parenting styles and parental involvement on children’s academic achievement has ripple effects throughout their life. Success in academia often translates to better career opportunities, higher self-esteem, and improved overall well-being.

Moreover, individuals who have experienced supportive parenting are likely to replicate positive parenting practices with their children.

Educational and parental interventions can mitigate the effects of less effective parenting styles. Parenting programs aim to enhance parenting skills, improve parent-child relationships, and foster environments conducive to child development and academic achievement.

Family Structure and Juvenile Delinquency

Various studies have explored the correlation between family structure and juvenile delinquency. A common focus has been comparing children from single-parent families with those from nuclear families.

Research generally indicates that children from stable, well-functioning nuclear families generally exhibit lower rates of delinquency compared to those from single-parent families.

While it’s crucial to consider socio-economic factors and the quality of parent-child relationships, research suggests that the structure and stability of a nuclear family can play a protective role against juvenile delinquency.

Studies on Same-Sex Parenting

In recent years, research has shifted towards understanding the dynamics and outcomes of children raised in LGBTQ+ nuclear families.

Several studies have compared the mental health, social adjustment, and academic achievement of children raised by same-sex couples with those raised by opposite-sex couples.

The consensus from multiple studies indicates that children raised in LGBTQ+ families fare just as well in these aspects as their counterparts from heterosexual families.

The quality of parenting and family relationships are more significant predictors of children’s well-being than the parents’ sexual orientation.

Economic Stress and Family Dynamics

Economic stress can put a strain on the nuclear family, impacting relationships and individuals’ mental health.

Studies have investigated how financial difficulties, unemployment, and socio-economic status influence family dynamics, parental behavior, and children’s outcomes.

Families facing economic stress may experience increased tension, conflict, and disruption. However, strong family bonds, effective communication, and coping mechanisms can mitigate the adverse effects of financial strain on family members.

In weaving together the varied threads of information, theories, research studies, and real-life examples, we have embarked on a comprehensive exploration of the nuclear family, unveiling its multifaceted nature, evolution, and impact on individual members and society at large.

The nuclear family, characterized by its core unit of parents and children, serves as a cornerstone for many societies, influencing values, norms, and the development of its members.

We delved into the history and evolution of the nuclear family, tracing its roots and transformations across eras and cultural landscapes. The examination of diverse family structures across different cultures illuminated the adaptability and universality of familial bonds, while also highlighting the unique manifestations of the nuclear family in various societies.

A thorough exploration of theoretical perspectives, from the foundational works of Talcott Parsons to the modern discourses on same-sex families, enriched our understanding of the nuclear family's role and significance.

These theories, each with its unique lens, offered insights into the economic, sociological, and psychological dimensions of family life.

The comparison between nuclear and other family structures, complemented by detailed research findings, shed light on the distinct advantages and challenges associated with different family forms.

Through this, we gained a nuanced perspective on the importance of adaptability, support networks, and targeted interventions in fostering balanced development for children, regardless of their family structure.

The examination of psychological research and case studies provided a deeper understanding of the impact of family dynamics on individual well-being and development.

The exploration of attachment theory and the influence of parental involvement on academic achievement underscored the pivotal role of the family unit in shaping the academic, social, and emotional facets of a child’s life.

Finally, in reflecting on the diverse narratives, theories, and research studies, we recognize the inherent complexity and diversity of family life. The nuclear family, while a prevalent and influential structure, is but one piece of the intricate mosaic of family forms.

It is essential to appreciate the variety of familial experiences and continue exploring the ever-evolving dynamics of family life in our changing world.

The nuclear family remains a significant and influential structure, shaping the lives of its members and the fabric of societies.

Through continuous exploration, understanding, and adaptability, we can celebrate the diversity of family forms and work towards fostering supportive, inclusive environments for all families, nuclear and beyond.

Related posts:

• Social Institutions (Definition + 7 Examples)
• Golden Child Syndrome (Definition + Examples)
• Attachment Styles Theory (Free Test)
• John Bowlby Biography - Contributions To Psychology
• Mary Ainsworth (Biography)

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December 23, 2013

The real roots of the nuclear family.

• The nuclear family wasn't born after the Industrial Revolution--it predominated in England even in the 13th century. Tweet This
• The nuclear family is more adaptable and more child-centered than the traditional extended family clan. Tweet This

Though much of the public seems unaware of it, family scholars believe that—generally speaking—children are best off growing up with their two married parents. These are the children most likely to get the education crucial for maintaining a middle-class life in an advanced economy, to remain stably employed, and to marry and raise their own children to go on and do the same.

But it is not well understood  why  the married couple—or nuclear family—works so well for kids. The most intriguing explanation I’ve seen can be found in a little-known 2002 book by the sociologist Brigitte Berger:  The Family in the Modern Age . It recalls an old-fashioned era of sociology. There are no charts, regressions, or metrics; it is, rather, an exposition of economic, social, and demographic history. Yet it manages to anticipate and explain what today’s empirically grounded sociologists have repeatedly discovered about families and child wellbeing.

And so to Berger’s history: Not so long ago, family scholars labored under the assumption, half-Marxist, half-“functionalist,” that before the Industrial Revolution, the extended family was the norm in the Western world. There was more than a little romanticism associated with this view: extended families were imagined to have lived in warm, cohesive rural communities where men and women worked together on farms or in small cottage industries. That way of life, went the thinking, ended when industrialization wrenched rural folk away from their cottages and villages into the teeming, anonymous city, sent men into the factories, and consigned women to domestic drudgery. Worse, by upending the household economy, the Industrial Revolution seriously weakened the family. The nuclear family, it was believed, was evidence of family decline.

The nuclear family was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.

But by the second half of the twentieth century, one by one these assumptions were overturned. First to go was the alleged prevalence of the extended family. Combing through English parish records and other demographic sources, historians like Peter Laslett and Alan MacFarlane discovered that the nuclear family—a mother, father and child(ren) in a “simple house,” as Laslett put it—was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.

Rather than remaining in or marrying into the family home, as was the case in Southern Europe and many parts of Asia and the Middle East, young couples in England were expected to establish their own household. That meant that men and women married later than in other parts of the world, only after they had saved enough money to set up an independent home. By the time they were ready to tie the knot, their own parents were often deceased, making multi-generational households a relative rarity.

Far from being weaker than an extended family clan, Berger shows, the ordinary nuclear family was able to adapt superbly to changing economic and political realities. In fact, the family arrangement so common to England helps explain why it and other nations of northwest Europe were the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the launching ground for modern affluence. The young nuclear family had to be flexible and mobile as it searched for opportunity and property. Forced to rely on their own ingenuity, its members also needed to plan for the future and develop bourgeois habits of work and saving.

These habits were of little use to the idle, landed rich who were wedded to, and defined by, the ancestral property: think  Downton Abbey . Similarly, in extended families, a newly married couple was required to move in with the larger maternal or paternal clan, and to work the family land or maintain the family trade. Under those circumstances, people, particularly women, married young, generally before 20. Between their youth and dependence, the couple was not capable of becoming effective strivers in a changing economy.

Another less appreciated advantage to the nuclear family: it was uniquely child-centered.

These observations are not unique to  The Family in the Modern Age . But Berger finds another less appreciated advantage to the nuclear family: it was uniquely child-centered. In societies that rely on extended families, young women had plenty of time to have five or more children. The older brides of northwest Europe, on the other hand, had fewer fertile years ahead of them and smaller families, which enabled them to provide more focused attention on each child. Their children became part of a household already steeped in an ethos of hard work, future-mindedness, and ingenuity. This prepared them to take advantage of the new modes of labor introduced by the Industrial Revolution, which would eventually create an urbanized middle class.

Over time, with the increasing complexity of the labor market and the arrival of mass schooling, forward-thinking, child-centered parents were best equipped to organize themselves around what Berger calls “the family’s great educational mission.” Extended and clan families under the control of an older generation would be less adaptive since grandparents were more likely to bring up baby the old-fashioned way; larger families, meanwhile, tended to encourage older children to take charge of their younger siblings.

So how does all of this help us understand today’s debates about married couple vs. single-parent families? Researchers find that children growing up with two married parents are more likely to develop “soft skills” like self-control and perseverance that are more crucial than ever to school and labor-market success. Some of this could be chalked up to the logistical problems faced by a single parent.

But if we follow the logic of Berger’s history, another explanation presents itself: the children of married couples are internalizing their parents’ bourgeois aspirations and child-centeredness, both of which lie deep in the bones of the institution they have chosen to enter. Contemporary parents continue to marry late—at least those who do marry—and only after they are equipped to teach their kids the skills that they themselves have already learned. Their parenting style can be described as “concerted cultivation”: they devote great time and attention to developing their children’s skills. Single parents tend to be younger, less-educated, and more inclined to believe in the child’s “natural growth,” to use another of  Annette Lareau’s  terms.

Helicopter parents with their obsessive interest in their children’s physical, emotional, and cognitive development are the latest, if occasionally absurd, personification of values with strong historical roots. But, as it has for centuries now, their child-centeredness and future-oriented planning appears to be paying off.

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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 .

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The Increasing Diversity and Complexity of Family Structures for Adolescents

Lisa d. pearce.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

George M. Hayward

Laurie chassin.

Arizona State University

Patrick J. Curran

The structure of adolescents’ families, and thus parental forms, in the United States, have become more heterogeneous and fluid over the past several decades. These changes are due to increases in never-married, single parents, divorce, cohabitation, same-sex parenting, multi-partnered fertility, and co-residence with grandparents. We document current diversity and complexity in adolescents’ families as important context for rethinking future parenting theory and research. We also discuss how understandings of adolescents’ families are somewhat limited by current methods used to measure characteristics of families. We recommend social network and profile-based methods as alternatives to capturing key dimensions of family structure and processes. Understanding the diversity of households and families in which adolescents are raised can improve theory and research on parenting.

Even though a universal feature of adolescence is the growing autonomy that youth gain from parental oversight, parents, and the family context in general, continue to play a vital role in adolescents’ lives. The ways that adolescents are “parented,” including the provision of material and psychosocial resources, the quality of parent-child interactions and relationships, and levels of parental monitoring and scaffolding of youth have been consistently shown to matter for adolescents’ academic outcomes, subjective well-being, sexual behavior, substance use, delinquency, and other outcomes ( DiClemente et al. 2001 ; Simons and Conger 2007 ; Steinberg 2001 ). Thus, social scientists, policy-makers, and practitioners continue to investigate and attempt to promote successful models for parenting adolescents.

For better or worse, many current investigations of the features and types of parenting that seem most beneficial for adolescents are based on theories of parenting and adolescence developed decades ago when family structures and their distribution in the population looked very different than they do today. Two cornerstones of contemporary theory, warmth and control, are concepts developed primarily between the 1930s and 1960s ( Baldwin 1955 ; Baumrind 1967 ; Becker 1964 ; Sears, Maccoby, and Levin 1957 ; Symonds 1939 ) —a period in which about 90 percent of children under the age of 18 lived with two parents ( Ruggles and Brower 2003 ). Studies of parenting have been increasingly recognizing how styles of parenting and their impact vary across cultures, socioeconomic strata, and family structures (e.g., Lareau 2003 ; Newman 2012 ; Sorkhabi and Mandara 2013 ; see also from this issue Jones, Loiselle, and Highlander; Lansford et al.; Murry; Stein et al.). Thus, to more accurately theorize, measure, and interpret findings regarding the parenting of adolescents, we must be clear about how families and households have changed over time, especially their increasingly dynamic and complex natures.

In this article, we review and summarize a wide body of literature showing how family forms and their prevalence have changed over the last several decades. After defining what we mean by “family” and “adolescence,” we describe the family households of adolescents, or the family members with whom they tend to live. We then discuss how family members might also be spread across other households, near and far. We then examine current practices in measuring the family contexts of adolescents and recommend innovations such as family network and profile methods. It is our goal to provide as detailed a picture as we can as to the range and distribution of adolescents’ family contexts in addition to suggesting methods for further enhancing our understanding of parenting contexts during adolescence.

Definitions

Family has always been a relatively elusive concept – definitions of family have changed over time, families themselves change over time, and members of families change (i.e., development and aging) ( Harris 2008 ; Powell et al. 2010 ). For our purposes, we focus on all parents, siblings, and extended family members who play a role in adolescents’ lives. Family members may be related by blood, marriage, or other lasting bonds (e.g., cohabitation, guardianships, or adoption). Some family members reside in the same household as a given adolescent and some do not. Sometimes adolescents move between households following custody arrangements or other special circumstances. Thus, we start by describing change in the family households of adolescents and then broaden our focus to consider non-residential family members and their connections to adolescents over time.

Adolescence is a phase of life whose exact age bounds vary by expert or study, but are generally considered to encompass the second decade of life. This is roughly the time period from the onset of puberty to the beginning of adult roles ( Steinberg 2016 ). We cite studies using a variety of age or grade ranges, including 12–17, 18–24, or grades 7–12, primarily due to the ages of participants. Further, many studies of family structure or stability aggregate data for all minors (ages 0–17). Thus, some of the data that we present apply to all youth, not just adolescents. Where we are able, we comment on the extent to which adolescents’ family forms are different than those of younger children.

The Households in Which Adolescents Live

As of 2016, 15 percent of all American households, and 23 percent of family households, contained at least one 12–17 year old ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017a ). Below we describe the changing prevalence of other family members in the households of adolescents. We discuss the parents, siblings, and grandparents with whom adolescents often live as well as homeless adolescents and adolescents who head their own households.

Parental Structure

The nuclear family (a mother and father—usually married—and their biological child/ren) has long been assumed to be the Standard North American Family (SNAF) ( Smith 1993 ) and continues to generally be the standard form to which all others are compared ( Powell et al. 2010 ). As seen in Figure 1 , as recently as 1960, about 88 percent of children (ages 0–17) lived with two parents (biological/adoptive, step, or cohabiting parents), eight percent lived with their mothers only, one percent lived with their fathers only, and three percent lived with other relatives or non-relatives. As of 2016, the percentage of children living with two parents is 69 percent -- a 22 percent decrease in 56 years. The shift was mostly due to single mother and single father families: now, 23 percent of children live with their mother only and four percent live with their fathers only. These numbers represent a 192 percent increase in mother-only families and 259 percent increase in father-only families ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017e ). Although father-only families have increased in number faster than mother-only families, mother-only families are still nearly six times more common.

Living Arrangments of Children Under 18 Years Old, 1960–2016

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2017e)

Notes. The Census report does not have statistics for 1961–1967; for graphical purposes, a linear trend in each category is used between the data points for 1960 and 1968.

The increase in single parent households over time is primarily the result of two trends. First, divorce has been on the rise in the United States since the end of the Civil War, with a brief plateauing during the early 1980s ( Kennedy and Ruggles 2014 ). Second, there has been a rise in the percentage of all births occurring to unmarried women, from four percent in 1940 to 41 percent in 2013 ( Curtin, Ventura, and Martinez 2014 ). However, just over half (55 percent) of the births to single mothers, as of 2016, are to cohabiting parents ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017d ), and this has been increasing over time ( Kennedy and Bumpass 2008 ). Thus, increasingly, one biological parent is not residing in the household, and if there are two parents, they may be cohabiting partners rather than marital ones. Because of racial and ethnic variation in rates of nonmarital births, cohabitation, and divorce ( Barber, Yarger, and Gatny 2015 ; Curtin et al. 2014 ; Ruggles 1997 ; Smith, Morgan, and Koropeckyj-Cox 1996 ; Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan 1995 ), the increase in mother-only households and children living with other relatives has been particularly dramatic for Black and Hispanic youth, as illustrated in Figure 2 .

Living Arrangments of Children Under 18 Years Old, by Race/Ethnicity, 1960–2016

Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2017g

Notes. The Census report does not have statistics for 1961–1967; for graphical purposes, a linear trend in each category is used between the data points for 1960 and 1968. Data for Hispanics begin in 1980 since they were not available before then for the subcategories shown here.

The way data were collected for many years, one can identify whether there are two adults living in a household and whether at least one of the adults is biologically or adoptively related to children in the household. However, further specification of the marital or even romantic status of the two adults or how both adults are related to each child is often impossible in data collected from before the mid-1990s. More contemporary data has the specificity that allows us to further distinguish households by the complexity of family relationships. For example, we create Table 1 below by adapting U.S. Census Bureau data based on the Current Population Survey in 2016 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017b ). This table builds upon Figure 1 and allows us to hone in on three groups of adolescents: 9–11 year-olds, 12–14 year-olds, and 15–17 year-olds.

Living Arrangements of Children and Adolescents in the United States in 2016 (Numbers in Thousands)

Source. U.S. Census Bureau (2017b) .

Note: Calculations of significant differences were made following the source documentation instructions.

Overall, 9–17 year-olds have very similar living arrangements to 0–17 year-olds. About 68 percent of 9–14 year-olds and 64 percent of 15–17 year-olds live with two parents as compared to 69 percent of all 0–17 year-olds. Twenty-eight percent of 9–14 year-olds and 30 percent of 15–17 year-olds live with one parent, compared to 27 percent of 0–18 year-olds. And, four and five percent, respectively, do not reside with a parent compared to four percent of those aged 0–17. Not surprisingly, the older adolescents (whose parents have had more time to change living situations or family structure) are slightly more likely than the younger children to live in single parent, other relative, or nonrelative homes.

For the 64–68 percent of adolescents living with two parents, the vast majority of them (about 96–98 percent) live with married biological or adoptive parents. For the 28–30 percent of adolescents who live with one parent, the vast majority of them live with their mothers; specifically, 85 percent of 9–11 year-olds, 84 percent of 12–14 year-olds, and 82 percent of 15–17 year-olds who live with a single parent live with their mother. Conversely, between 15 and 18 percent of adolescents in a single-parent home live with their single father. For all single parent categories, the largest groups, by far, are never married mothers and divorced mothers. Living with a separated mother is the third most common single parent living arrangement, which describes 11–13 percent of adolescents. Lastly, for the 4 to 5 percent of adolescents who do not live with either parent, the most common arrangement is to live with a grandparent, though this likelihood decreases with age: 65 percent of 9–11 year-olds, 58 percent of 12–14 year-olds, and 46 percent of 15–17 year-olds living without parents are living with a grandparent. The next most common arrangements for those living without either parent are living with another relative (25 to 33 percent), living with a nonrelative (7 to 18 percent), and living in foster care (4 to 6 percent).

Given the family change and diversity we have documented, theory and research about the parenting of adolescents must take into account that both parents and children are increasingly experiencing transitions in who lives with them that may induce emotional and financial stress or raise real or perceived stigma ( Cherlin 2010 ; McLanahan and Sandefur 1994 ; Pryor 2004 ). This changes resources for parenting as well as the kinds of issues for which adolescents need support. Further, parents are increasingly spread across different households, which raises issues of how parenting is shared (or not) inside and outside an adolescent’s primary residence.

Same-Sex Parents

There have also been changes over time in the percentage of children living with two parents of the same sex. Vespa, Lewis, and Kreider (2013) find that about 16 percent of same-sex cohabiting or married couples in the United States have biological, adoptive, or stepchildren under age 18 living with them as of 2012 (11 percent of male couples and 22 percent of female couples). This is higher than the 1990 rate of 13 percent, but is lower than estimates between 2000 and 2008, which fluctuated between 17 and 19 percent ( Gates 2012 ). With current estimates of same-sex couples from the American Community Survey at about 860,000 for 2015 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017c ), if 15–20 percent of them have one child, then between 129,000–172,000 youth are currently living with co-resident same-sex parents.

One noteworthy trend among same-sex couples is the proportional increases in adoptive children compared to biological children, which may be due to LGBT individuals coming out earlier in life and thus becoming less likely to have children while in relationships with opposite sex partners ( Gates 2012 ). The global increase in assisted reproductive techniques (ART)( Dyer et al. 2016 ), in tandem with medical advances and fertility clinics welcoming same-sex couples, is also increasing the ability for same-sex individuals (whether coupled or not) to become parents ( Greenfeld and Seli 2016 ; Grover et al. 2013 ). With the number of same-sex couples growing each year between 2008–2015 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017c ), the proportion of adolescents living with same-sex parents has grown.

Theory and research on parenting often consider mothers’ and fathers’ roles in providing warmth and control, and sometimes claim unique and essential roles of both, but evidence suggests the gender composition of parents has minimal influence on children’s psychological and social outcomes ( Biblarz and Stacey 2010 ). However, parents’ gender is correlated with how parents and children get along, parents’ emphasis on gender conformity, and parenting skills, so theory and research on parenting should continue to examine the gender composition of parents as a factor shaping parenting and its outcomes ( Bos, van Balen, and van den Boom 2007 ; Golombok, Tasker, and Murray 1997 ).

Although social acceptance of same-sex couples marrying and having children is growing, there is still potential for parents and children in these families to experience stigma and discrimination ( Gates 2015 ). As Jones et al. (this volume), Mills-Koonce, Rehder, and McCurdy (this volume), Murry (this volume), and Stein et al. (this volume) all point out, in families facing real and perceived stigma, parents face the challenge of building a positive sense of oneself and one’s family in addition to helping children understand and persevere in these social dynamics.

Foster and Adoptive Parents

In September of 2015, about 172,000 adolescents ages 10–20 were living in foster care; during the same year, 92,000 adolescents entered foster care and 99,000 exited foster care ( Children’s Bureau 2016 ). Among youth ages 0–20 who exited, 51 percent were reunified with their parents or primary caretakers and 22 percent were adopted ( Children’s Bureau 2016 ). In published statistics, adopted children are typically included with those who are biologically related to parents. However, Child Trends (2012) uses more detailed survey data on adoption from 2007 to show that two percent of all children (ages 0–17) live with at least one adoptive parent and no biological parents. Of those, 37 percent were in foster care at some point, 38 percent were adopted through private domestic adoption, and 25 percent were adopted internationally. One more recent estimate suggests that approximately seven percent of children ages 0–17 in the United States live with at least one adoptive parent, but this includes those adopted by a step-parent, unlike the prior estimate ( Kreider and Lofquist 2014 ).

Fostering and adopting children raises all kinds of unique parenting issues. Adolescent foster or adoptive children have often experienced prior neglect, abuse, or abandonment, making them less trusting of parent figures in general ( Pryor 2004 ). Adoptive parents and children sometimes differ notably in culture or appearance, posing potential issues for how they or others view their relationships ( Pryor 2004 ). Foster parents may be managing uncertainty about how long a child/ren will be in their home and what kinds of bonds to forge ( Pryor 2004 ). Birth parents may still be in contact and involved with their children, raising issues of how to manage co-parenting with foster parents. In other words, there are additional factors at play in foster or adoptive parenting, highlighting key roles of parents and how those are modified across family structure.

Another important feature of family or household context, when it comes to parenting, is how many and what types of siblings live with adolescents on average. Using data from 2009, Kreider and Ellis (2011) find that about 58 million children live with siblings (78 percent). Of these children, the majority (82 percent) live with only full siblings, 14 percent live with a halfsibling, 2 percent live with a stepsibling, and 2 percent live with an adopted sibling. About 22 percent of all youth have no siblings, 38 percent have one sibling, 24 percent have two siblings, 11 percent have three siblings, and 5 percent have four or more siblings.

Siblings function as both sources of intimacy and conflict for adolescents ( Lempers and Clark-Lempers 1992 ), which is largely a continuation of their sibling relationships from childhood ( Dunn, Slomkowski, and Beardsall 1994 ). Intimacy remains stable among same-sex sibling dyads throughout adolescence, but increases for mixed-sex dyads, while conflict appears to taper off during middle to late adolescence ( Kim et al. 2006 ). Theory and research on parenting often focuses on one dyad despite there often being other children in the family. The number of siblings has implications for how resources (material and emotional) are shared which is directly related to parenting ( Blake 1981 ). This takes on even more complexity in blended families with a combination of sibling types.

Grandparents

Table 1 , discussed earlier, shows that about two percent of all children live without parents but with a grandparent. Figure 3 , below, adds to this statistic by showing trends over time in children living with grandparents, in any combination with or without parents ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017f ). The figure shows a doubling in the percent of children who live with a grandparent between 1980 and 2014, from 3.2 percent to 6.6 percent. Notably, about two-thirds of children living with a grandparent are also living with one of their parents (typically the mother). These are called multigenerational households, or households containing three or more generations, and have been shown elsewhere to also vary by race – with Hispanics and blacks having the highest rates (8 percent of households), followed by Asians (6 percent) and whites (4 percent)( Vespa et al. 2013 ). Theories and research on grandparents as parents should factor in how the middle generation (biological parents) fit into the family and parenting, as well as how life course stages and developmental compatibility between family members affect grandparents’ parenting styles ( Burton, Dilworth-Anderson, and Merriwether-deVries 1995 ; Kemp 2007 ).

Children Under 18 Living with Grandparents as Percentage of All Children Under 18

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2017f)

Homeless adolescents

Although rare, another important family form to address for adolescents is homelessness. About seven percent of the homeless population are unaccompanied children (under 18 years old) and youth (18–24), and about 37,000 children and youth were experiencing homelessness during a point-in-time estimate in 2015 ( National Alliance to End Homelessness 2016 ). However, this is likely an underestimate, since enumeration techniques are not as effective for youth, and youth often do not congregate in the same areas as those in older age groups. Indeed, survey estimates of youth who experience at least one night of homelessness in a given year range from about 1 million to 1.7 million ( Fernandes-Alcantara 2013 ). Homelessness is surely a taxing and stigmatizing experience for adolescents and their parents, further what parents can or cannot provide adolescents.

Adolescents as parents

Births to adolescents are declining and reached an all-time low in 2015 ( Martin et al. 2017 ), predominately due to improved contraceptive usage ( Lindberg, Santelli, and Desai 2016 ), though many adolescents do become parents – usually unintentionally. Finer and Zolna (2014) show that, as of 2008, 91 percent of pregnancies among 15–17 year-olds and 77 percent of pregnancies among 18–19 year-olds are unintended. Nevertheless, in 2015, adolescent females ages 15–19 had about 230,000 births, with about one percent of 15–17 year-old girls giving birth and four percent of 18–19 year-old girls ( Martin et al. 2017 ). Adolescent parents and their children face a number of obstacles and are at an increased risk for a host of negative outcomes, yet intervention programs have the potential to mitigate these (see Pinzon et al. (2012 ) for a comprehensive review on both outcomes of adolescent parenting and interventions). The renegotiation of parenting when one’s own adolescent becomes a parent, and may need new kinds of support and/or more independence, likely presents unique challenges.

Household Transitions Experience by Adolescents

What we have presented to this point are snapshots of what the households of children or adolescents look like across the population in certain years. Another way of understanding variance in the family contexts of youth is to consider how stable these contexts are over time. Several studies have conceptualized family instability as the number of transitions households experience ( Cavanagh 2008 ; Fomby, Mollborn, and Sennott 2010 ), and increasingly studies are comparing particular types of transitions or the timing of those transitions and their associations with child well-being ( Lee and McLanahan 2015 ). When households lose or gain parents or siblings, it is likely to affect parenting resources and styles ( Pryor 2004 ).

Parental Transitions

Brown (2006) uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of youth in grades 7–11 during the 1994–95 school year to report the frequency of family transitions within one year of adolescence. Ninety-three percent of these youth experienced no household transitions in that year; specifically, 62 percent of adolescents in this sample lived with two-biological parents throughout the year (married or cohabiting), 12 percent remained in a previously formed stepfamily, and 19 percent remained with a single mother. Seven percent of adolescents experienced a household or family transition during that year: four percent moved from a two-parent family to a single-mother family, three percent went from a single-mother household to a two-parent household (either cohabiting or married), and one percent experienced a transition from one two-parent household type to another (usually from a cohabiting stepfamily to a married stepfamily). Laughlin (2014) shows that 12 percent of children ages 12 to 17 years old in 2011 had experienced a change in the number of residential parents or parent’s partners in the home in the past four years.

Considering the trajectories of household structure throughout all of childhood and adolescence, Mitchell (2013) uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Mother’s and Children sample to estimate latent classes of children’s long-term living arrangements for youth who were 14–19 years old in 2006. She finds five general pathways: 1) consistently living with two biological parents from birth (55 percent), long-term living with a single mother (18 percent), living with married biological parents who divorce (12 percent), gaining a stepfather through marriage (11 percent), and being born to cohabiting parents who later married or broke up (4 percent). Although these five pathways do not encompass the experiences of all adolescents, they give a good sense of the most common experiences over time.

Custody and Living Arrangements

Using data from the 2009 American Community Survey, Elliot and Simmons (2011) show that about 18 percent of men and 44 percent of women with a divorce in the past year were living with children under 18. This equates to over a million children experiencing a divorce in the past year, with the median age of these children around 9.8 – about the onset of adolescence. Following many of these divorces will be custody arrangements that inevitably change the living situation of the adolescents involved. Custody arrangements have changed tremendously over the past few centuries (see DiFonzo (2014) for a review), but the most recent trend (from the mid-1980s to present) has been a substantial decline in sole custody awards to mothers coupled with a dramatic increase in shared custody awards ( Cancian et al. 2014 ). Estimates of custody awards from 2008, based on a very large sample of court records in Wisconsin, suggest that about 42 percent of awards are now for sole mother custody, 45 percent are for shared custody, nine percent are sole father custody, and the rest are split custody ( Cancian et al. 2014 ).

Other Residential Transitions

The period between late adolescence and early adulthood, often called “emerging adulthood” ( Arnett 2004) , is marked by numerous transitions and identity exploration. For example, about 69 percent of high school graduates begin college immediately following their high school completion ( McFarland et al. 2017 ). This is often accompanied by a residential move, as about half of college students live apart from their parents, which is split about evenly between those with and without roommates ( Sallie Mae 2017 ). Thus, late adolescence is a period of home-leaving for many but not necessarily independent living for most. For adolescents who do not go on to college, many of them begin some sort of paid work, establish their own household, or start families ( DeLuca, Clampet-Lundquist, and Edin 2016 ; Mitchell and Syed 2015 ), often with difficulties in the labor market due to having no more than a high school degree ( Rosenbaum 2001 ). Especially among disadvantaged youth, the typical explorations of emerging adulthood may not be possible ( Côté 2014 ); these youth often face an expedited path to adulthood that involves forgoing postsecondary education and becoming independent as quickly as possible ( DeLuca et al. 2016 ).

Interestingly, the percentage of older adolescents and young adults who return to their parents’ home after leaving, who are sometimes referred to as “boomerang kids,” has been increasing over time in the United States ( Goldscheider and Goldscheider 1999 ). In fact, recent estimates show that living with parents is the most common living situation for 18 to 34 year-olds, at 32 percent ( Fry 2016 ). The reaction of parents to this phenomenon varies, but there is an expectation among parents in the United States that their live-in adult children are working toward independence ( Newman 2012 ).

In general, the increasing fluidity and change in the households and family structures of adolescents signals a growing need for theories and research on the parenting of adolescents to not just expand to consider different family forms, but to also recognize family instability as its own context for parenting ( Pryor 2004 ). As the life course perspective recognizes ( Elder 1998 ), young people (and their parents) carry forward their early life experiences, and so a divorced and single mother might not just be parenting with reduced time and resources in the present, but she and her child/ren are also living with the experiences of the past, such as how well was the divorce handled by all. Due to distress and disruption, parenting is often temporarily compromised during and immediately following a transition in family structure ( Capaldi and Patterson 1991 ; DeGarmo and Forgatch 1999 ).

Nonresidential Family Members of Adolescents

Nonresident fathers.

Due to rising rates of births to single mothers and divorce, as well as the fragility of cohabiting unions, many children have nonresident fathers for some or all of adolescence. In Figure 1 , we show that about 27 percent of youth live away from their father, with the majority of them (23 percent of youth) living with a single mother. Rates of single motherhood also vary substantially by race, with 18 percent of white children, 52 percent of black children, and 25 percent of Hispanic children living with a single mother as of 2016 ( U.S. Census Bureau 2017g ). Nonresident fathers, as a group, substantially increased involvement in their children’s lives between 1976 and 2002, with more fathers seeing their children weekly and fewer fathers reporting no contact at all ( Amato, Meyers, and Emery 2009 ). Cheadle, Amato, and King (2010) add nuance to this finding and identify four latent classes of nonresident father involvement: 38 percent of fathers have high and stable involvement over time, 32 percent have low and stable involvement, 23 percent have high involvement initially but decrease it over time, and 8 percent have low involvement initially but increase it over time.

Nonresident Mothers

Although uncommon, some children spend years not living with their biological or adoptive mothers. In Figure 1 we show that about 8 percent of youth live away from their mother, with about half of these youth (4 percent) residing with single fathers. Table 1 further shows that this percentage is about the same for 9–11 year-olds, 12–14 year-olds, and 15–17 year-olds. The economic situation of nonresident mothers tends to be worse, on average, than that of nonresident fathers, as they earn less money and are less likely to be working ( Sousa and Sorensen 2006 ). However, nonresident mothers tend to spend more time with their children than nonresident fathers ( Gunnoe 1993 ). Because of the historical norm that mothers are more likely to get custody, women who lose or have less custody than fathers probably face stigma that will affect their parenting and create a need for children to also be parented in ways that helps them prepare for potential discrimination. Being a nonresident parent, father or mother, introduces challenges to spending time with one’s children to parent, and may remove one from involvement in important decisions or parenting tasks ( Pryor 2004 ).

Multi-Partner Fertility

Adults have become increasingly like to have children with more than one partner, often called multi-partner fertility (MPF). Recent estimates suggest about 10 percent of adults have MPF ( Monte 2017 ). This means many adolescents have siblings (with full, partial, or no biological ties) with whom they may be maintaining relationships, potentially across residences. Once again, because surveys usually only collect information on household members, we know little about how many adolescents have siblings of any kind residing in other households, nor the quality, benefits, or consequences of those relationships. It is likely that the presence of siblings across other households stretches resources such that adolescents in these situations may get, on average, less time and support from their parents ( Meyer and Cancian 2012 ; Tach, Mincy, and Edin 2010 ). There may also be tension between different parent figures or parents and children that interferes with or complicates the parenting of adolescents ( Pryor 2004 ).

Extended Family

Adolescents are often close to and exchange support with extended family members, including grandparents, aunts and uncles, or cousins ( Sterrett et al. 2011 ). Increasing gains in longevity translate to a higher likelihood that adolescents know their grandparents longer than in previous generations ( Kemp 2007 ). The closer grandparents live to their grandchildren, the more emotionally close they are, but grandparents who live far away often use electronic forms of communication, and studies show that frequent phone or email conversations build closeness ( Harwood 2000 ). Kinds of support that grandparents provide include emotional support, peace-keeping, “straight talking,” and sharing family history ( Soliz 2008 ).

Although research is increasingly incorporating the roles of nonresidential family members, and especially parental figures, in the lives of adolescents ( Jones et al. 2007 ), more could be done to examine forms of support (or conflict) provided to adolescents and residential parent figures. Past theories and methods have relied heavily on the household context and often assumed two biological parents are involved, but now the socialization and raising of adolescents falls to a larger network of adults. The better we understand the forms family configurations and exchanges take, the better we can tailor theory, research, and practice or interventions to fit families as they are.

Measuring Family Contexts for the Parenting of Adolescents

In addition to data on families collected through the U.S. Census, there are a number of high quality, nationally representative sample surveys, many of which are used in the research reported above, that make the description of adolescent family contexts possible. What we know about the family contexts in which adolescents live depends on how we collect data and “measure” family life. Although we learn a great deal from existing data, in some ways, the designs of these studies limit our ability to fully understand certain aspects of adolescents’ families.

Most existing surveys mainly collect information about family members who reside together in households. For some surveys, like the Current Population Survey or the American Community Survey, households are a sampling unit, and one member of the household reports on all others. The quality of those data for understanding family structures within households depends heavily on a well-designed household roster or matrix that lists all members of a household and carefully notes the relationships between all members. When data do not include complete information about the relations between each household member and all other household members, we are restricted from knowing important family characteristics, like whether a married or cohabiting couple in a household are biological, adoptive, or step-parents to the child/ren in the household ( Manning, Brown, and Stykes 2014 ; O’Hara, Shattuck, and Goerge 2017 ). Further, data often lack the detail necessary to determine whether co-resident children are full, half, or unrelated siblings ( McHale, Updegraff, and Whiteman 2012 ).

For many years, household surveys such as U.S. Census forms (up until 1980) required the “household head” to be the household respondent. This was typically a man. In 1980, the Census changed procedure, allowing any “householder” to be the respondent, and this would include men or women who jointly own or rent the home. The proportion of reporting householders who are women has increased over time ( Ruggles and Brower 2003 ). On the other hand, in many more recently established survey studies, such as the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children and Young Adults, or the National Study of Youth and Religion, mothers are the primary reporting parent and source of information on other members of the household. Household- or child-focused studies are often designed to have mothers (whenever possible) as reporters because of long-standing assumptions about their chief importance in and knowledge of children’s development and family processes ( Schaeffer, Seltzer, and Dykema 1998 ). It has also proved easier and less costly, historically, to locate and recruit women or mothers for survey research ( Braver and Bay 1992 ; Schaeffer et al. 1998 ). Despite the benefits of relying on mothers for family information, only having reports from one parent limits the information we have about adolescents and their families.

Regardless of how residential family members and their relationships to each other are documented, household-based surveys are also limited by the extent to which they can shed light on family members who reside outside the focal household ( Manning et al. 2014 ). This includes nonresidential parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, or even adults who are not blood relatives but play a central role in parenting adolescents. Some studies, like the National Study of Families and Households, involve interviews with multiple parents, including follow ups with parents who leave the household. Very few nationally representative studies of youth or families collect data from nonresidential parents from the start. One exception is the Fragile Families Study ( Reichman et al. 2001 ), in which fathers are interviewed at all the same time points as mothers, even if they live apart. It is undoubtedly expensive to fully delineate and measure adolescents’ families, especially from the perspective of multiple family members, but the value in doing so justifies consideration of how we might more creatively approach the collection of data on adolescents’ family contexts.

A handful of other previously identified factors may also bias our understandings of adolescents or young adults’ living arrangements when young people themselves are the sampling units. For example, when youth are sampled from schools, youth who are not in school either because of dropping out or being homeschooled may be missing from the sampling frame ( Johnston and O’Malley 1985 ). Thus, the types of families or households those youth tend to have could be underrepresented in the data. Further, some studies restrict residents of institutions from being in the sampling frame, meaning that when focusing on youth, those who live on a college campus or are incarcerated (and their family situations) are underrepresented. And, some studies restrict their samples to college students, making findings less generalizable to the whole population of late adolescents or young adults. ( Côté 2014 ; Mitchell and Syed 2015 ).

Future Directions

Family networks.

One alternative that could address limitations inherent in the household-centric design of surveys is the application of social network approaches and methods to the collection of data on family members ( Bernardi 2011 ; Widmer 2010 ). These methods have been primarily used for adults’ social networks to date, and to collect information on the most influential people in their lives. Widmer (2010) argues families are best defined as configurations created out of the interdependencies between family members. Using a social network approach to conceptualize families allows researchers to put adolescents at the center of a network of family members, considering the social, psychological, biological, and geographic distances of those in the web of family. It also makes it possible to assess the type and quality of ties between members of an adolescent’s family network, including the social capital available ( Widmer 2010 ). Further, one could consider the support networks (family or wider) of multiple family members and the extent to which they overlap or leave certain family members isolated ( Bernardi 2011 ).

The conceptualization of adolescents’ families as social networks suggests new forms of data collection as well ( Bernardi 2011 ; Widmer 2010 ). In survey studies designed to understand the role of family and family members in the lives of adolescents, rather than a standard household roster,, adolescents might be asked to complete a sociogram or network diagram that systematically elicits reports of the important family members in an adolescent’s life ( Widmer, Aeby, and Sapin 2013 ). “Important” could be defined according to key theories or research questions. For example, studies might focus on listing and describing family ties based on levels of closeness, social support, financial support, or time spent together. Further, adolescents could report perceptions of how close each of these family members is to every other family member, so that standard network measures, such as density or centrality, could be applied to understanding family characteristics. Other family members could also become participants in the study and provide their own assessment of adolescents’ family networks and the ties involved.

In longitudinal studies, the repeated mapping of adolescents’ family networks could provide rich data for shifts over time in influential family members, family relationships, and family living arrangements. This dynamic approach allows for assessing levels of stability or instability in family networks as well as various trajectories in network change. Widmer (2010) demonstrates how change in family configurations in the short and long term are related to psychological well-being.

Using a social network approach in measuring the family structures, ties, and interactions of adolescents could address several issues raised earlier in the paper. For one, this measurement strategy could do a better job of documenting family relations across households, not limiting researchers to the context of one household. Second, depending on how data about family networks are collected, this approach could do a better job of characterizing types and features of family relationships ( Widmer 2010 ). With a variety of studies indicating that levels of warmth and control provided by parents are more predictive of youth well-being than the family structure/s in which they have lived ( Arnold et al. 2017 ; Demo and Acock 1996 ; Lansford et al. 2001 ; Phillips 2012 ), it is important that we understand how family configurations improve or challenge the ability of parents to provide high quality parenting ( Pryor 2004 ; Murry this issue).

Family Profiles

Another alternative for measuring the family contexts in which adolescents live is to use cluster analysis or latent class methods to suggest “types” or “profiles” of families. Common types of families would be identified by a set of indicators of family structure such as number and type of parent figures, sibling types and living arrangements, different residential custody arrangements, multigenerational living, and more. Family configurations could represent families at one moment in time or a set of experiences across time.

Research on the implications of family structure for children and adolescents often focuses on one part of family structure at a time, like whether there are one or two parents in the home, or the impact of a remarriage on adolescents. However, the relationship status or transitions experienced by parents might be different based on whether an adolescent has siblings or not and how many. Manning et al. (2014) and others describe the multifaceted nature of families as “complexity,” and they recommend an approach that documents types of parent figures as well as siblings. Methods such as latent class analysis could achieve this.

Indicators of dynamic living arrangements such as shared residential custody could be included in analyses. One could represent family transitions over time such as having ever lived with a single parent, a step-parent (married or cohabiting), having had a biological-, half-, or step-sibling, having ever lived with a grandparent, having experienced a parental dissolution, having moved from home, or ever having returned to home.

The use of social network or configurational methods has the potential to transform the study of adolescents’ family contexts and parenting by providing better coverage of family members and processes. Rather than having to rely on certain segments of what adolescents might define as their family, or only consider one aspect of family structure at a time, these methods allow the complexity of families to be more fully captured. Moreover, with network or family profile methods, measures of the quality or content of family interactions could be included. This might include family experiences, such as death, severe or chronic health issues, incarceration, or deportation of a family member as factors that define a family and present new issues for parenting adolescents.

Conclusions

Understanding forms of family in which adolescents come of age and their impact is challenging on a number of fronts. There are many dynamics at play. The definition of family has been changing over time, families experience changes of members across time, and parents and adolescents themselves are developing through time. Further, there are key measurement challenges, including the extent to which we focus on household members as family, who we ask to report on family structure and dynamics, and how to best capture changes in these very complex processes over time.

Despite these challenges, we do have a sense of the range and prevalence of family forms and how these have changed over time. Adolescents increasingly live in single-parent, step-parent, and no-biological-parent homes. Having step-siblings or half-siblings in the home or in other homes is more common. Grandparents are increasingly present in adolescents’ homes and lives. Older adolescents or young adults are more likely to return to their parents’ homes for a period of time. Further, the number of changes in living arrangements families experience has increased. Because so much about adolescents’ families has changed since the middle of the 20 th century when foundational theories of parenting were developed, it is important we consider how newer contexts for parenting might alter or expand theory or research on parenting adolescents.

The many aspects of family change experienced in the United States over the past few decades share a common set of implications for parenting adolescents. Different forms and increasing change within families involves relationship transitions for both parents and children, can be stigmatizing for parents and children, might increase the number of parent figures needing to coordinate support and guidance for an adolescent, and can be a source of difference or distance between parents and children.

Relationship transitions, such as separation or divorce, are associated with more parental stress and harsher parenting in mothers ( Beck et al. 2010 ; Cooper et al. 2009 ). Amato (2004 :32) contends that while there are many risk factors associated with divorce, “disruptions in parent-child relationships have the greatest potential to affect children negatively.” Families with “boomerang” adolescents, who have moved out and then return, may have challenges negotiating appropriate autonomy-granting and independence-building ( Newman 2012 ). Thus, the transitions involved in creating increasingly new and different family forms raise challenges to parenting adolescents. Classic theories highlighting the importance of warmth and control (e.g., Baldwin 1955 ; Baumrind 1967 ; Becker 1964 ; Sears et al. 1957 ; Symonds 1939 ) can be enhanced in thinking about ways parents can adequately provide support to adolescents during times of transition and in new family forms.

These considerations all point to an increased need for cooperation, negotiation, and understanding among parents, partners, and children ( Amato 2004 ). Theory and research should continue to address the extent to which relationship transitions limit parents’ abilities to provide optimal support and monitoring, and whether, at the same time, adolescents in these situations might need more support and monitoring. Parents themselves should and often do acknowledge the need to process these transitions in as healthy a manner as possible to protect their and their adolescents’ well-being. For example, authoritative parenting, in which parents are warm, involved, and supportive of their adolescent’s autonomy and decision-making, yet are clear and firm about their boundaries and expectations, can be successful across multiple family types and cultures ( Baumrind 1971 ; Sorkhabi and Mandara 2013 ; Steinberg 2001 ). Other parents and family members who are not be dealing with family transitions might consider how they can best support those parents who are, in the interest of helping families emerge from transitions.

When family forms are changing so fast, and society holds strong to nostalgia for the idealize family of the past ( Coontz 1992 ), there is great potential for suspicion and condemnation of non-nuclear families, same-sex parent families, or foster/adoptive families that stem from a failure or inadequacy on the part of biological parents. Thus, parents and adolescents in these family forms, with these experiences and identities, face personal challenges that arise from marginalization, and they worry about and attend to each other’s harm from such discrimination. These processes are also discussed by Murry (this issue) and are a potential context in which to consider what optimal parenting of adolescents involves.

Parents in these often-judged families can benefit from being aware and educated about the risk of experiencing real and perceived stigma. If parents are presented with data to show the relative normality of their experiences today and the questionable reasoning in assuming a golden age of families in the past ( Coontz 1992 ), they may gain confidence as parents, allowing them to provide the support and monitoring that seems more essential to adolescents than family structure in and of itself. Likewise, adolescents who face potential stigma because of their family experiences can be taught how to understand and cope with it. Finally, parents and adolescents who have consistently been a part of a nuclear, biological, heterosexual parent family should also recognize that different family forms are not necessarily inferior family forms. They should connect with different kinds of families to learn how their lives are more similar than they know. As everyone recognizes the dangers in assuming that family structure equates to family quality, the risk of stigma for parents and children in new family forms will decline.

Complex families with multiple parent figures, including grandparents, other relatives, non-residential parents, and foster parents, have increased potential for conflicts about parenting and greater challenges negotiating a unified and beneficial parenting approach ( Pryor 2004 ). As a greater number of parent figures become involved in adolescents’ lives, parenting behaviors become responsive to the desires and circumstances of a range of parent types, new children, and others. These complex family networks will affect access to, and relationships with, all of a parent’s children ( Meyer and Cancian 2012 ; Tach et al. 2010 ).

Finally, with greater heterogeneity and change over time in the number of parent figures involved in an adolescents lives comes the potential for greater distance between parents and adolescent along a number of lines. Step-parents, foster or adoptive parents, or even parents who had children via ART, and their adolescent children, often have issues surrounding the lack of biological connection between them and/or negotiating how to establish strong bonds and encourage their connection with their biological parents (if they are still involved) ( Pryor 2004 ). Grandparents who parent may share biological ties with adolescents, but their age difference may pose challenges to parenting. Non-resident mothers or fathers may be or feel less involved in key decisions or socialization processes due to their limits on time together ( Pryor 2004 ).

We have covered a variety of aspects of family structure and their implications for the contemporary study of parenting adolescents. Yet, there remain other ways that families differ that might impact parenting and should also be studied further. We focused on permanent relationship and living arrangement change in our survey of the literature, but families can become separated in temporary (but often long-term) ways that hold many of the same implications for how parenting might unfold. For example, military families deal with frequent moves as well as deployment of at least one parent ( Arnold et al. 2017 ). There has been a massive increase in the likelihood an adolescent will be separated from a parent who is incarcerated, presenting its own unique challenges ( Johnson and Easterling 2012 ; Murphey and Cooper 2015 ). Deportation is increasingly an issue for immigrant families in the United States, and refuges may have family members left in their country of origin. There are also family experiences that do not change the structure of family, but shift the balance of resources or parenting. This could include parent or child physical or mental health issues, unemployment, or death of a family member. In general, the better we are at considering the range of family forms and experiences in our measures and models, the more advice can be tailored to specific parenting contexts for adolescents.

In addition to incorporating new family forms and their implications into our theorizing and research on parenting adolescents, we must also advance our methods of measuring families. Because of the challenges in grasping all complexities of adolescents’ families, research should continue to pursue and implement new ways to conceptualize and measure family forms and processes. Social network methods bring a flexibility and comprehensiveness to the measurement of significant family ties, as well as allowing the study of multiple family members’ perspectives. Profile or clustering methods permit studying unique configurations of certain aspects of family structure and the quality of interactions.

In the absence of these alternate forms of data on families, we recommend that studies focused on or controlling for the role of family structure in parenting theorize the appropriate dimensions of family context to a given topic, and include as many of those as possible. This would include measures of number and type of parents, siblings, and extended family members and involvement of non-residential parent figures in an adolescent’s life. We also recommend modeling interactions between parenting styles and family structure, so we can better evaluate the extent to which the importance of key constructs like emotional support or behavioral monitoring varies by family context.

More fully recognizing the contemporary range of family structures and the unique issues involved with each greatly improves the odds that we are more accurately theorizing, measuring, and analyzing best practices for parenting adolescents. In turn, the public can also be better informed about the growing normality of non-nuclear, impermanent family structures, possibly lowering stigma of certain families and raising parents’ and adolescents’ confidence in maintaining strong bonds and successfully preparing for the transition to adulthood.

Acknowledgments

This research received support from the Population Research Training grant (T32 HD007168) and the Population Research Infrastructure Program (P2C HD050924) awarded to the Carolina Population Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Contributor Information

Lisa D. Pearce, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

George M. Hayward, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Laurie Chassin, Arizona State University.

Patrick J. Curran, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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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.

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The Nuclear Family

Table of Contents

Historical context of the nuclear family, theoretical perspectives on the nuclear family, functional roles of the nuclear family, criticisms of the nuclear family.

• Contemporary Relevance of the Nuclear Family

The concept of the nuclear family has been a cornerstone in sociological discussions, primarily within the contexts of family structures, socialization, and societal norms . The term “nuclear family” traditionally refers to a family unit consisting of two parents and their biological children living together. This essay will delve into the historical context, theoretical frameworks, functional roles, criticisms, and contemporary relevance of the nuclear family, providing a comprehensive understanding suitable for an undergraduate audience.

Early Origins

The origins of the nuclear family can be traced back to pre-industrial societies, where extended family structures were more common. However, the nuclear family as a distinct social unit became more pronounced during the industrial revolution. This period marked a significant shift in family structures, influenced by the changing economic landscape.

Industrialization and Urbanization

The industrial revolution brought about urbanization and the need for a mobile workforce. As a result, the extended family units, which were predominant in agrarian societies, began to fragment. The nuclear family emerged as a more functional unit in urban settings, where smaller households were easier to maintain and more adaptable to the demands of industrial work schedules.

From a functionalist perspective, the nuclear family is seen as a fundamental building block of society. Talcott Parsons , a prominent functionalist sociologist, argued that the nuclear family performs essential functions that contribute to societal stability. These functions include socialization of children, emotional support, and the stabilization of adult personalities. The nuclear family is viewed as a unit that adapts to the needs of an industrial society, providing a stable environment for its members.

Conflict Theory

Conflict theorists, such as Friedrich Engels , critique the nuclear family from a different angle. Engels argued that the nuclear family emerged alongside private property and capitalism, serving to perpetuate class inequalities . The family unit is seen as a site of power dynamics and economic disparity, where the roles within the family reflect broader societal hierarchies. This perspective highlights how the nuclear family can reinforce social stratification and limit individual freedoms.

Symbolic interactionists focus on the micro-level interactions within the nuclear family. This perspective emphasizes the meanings and definitions that family members attach to their roles and relationships. According to symbolic interactionism , the nuclear family is not a static institution but is constantly shaped and reshaped through daily interactions. This approach highlights the importance of understanding the subjective experiences of family members and how these experiences influence family dynamics.

Socialization

One of the primary functions of the nuclear family is the socialization of children. Socialization is the process through which individuals learn the norms, values , and behaviors necessary for functioning in society. Within the nuclear family, parents play a crucial role in transmitting cultural norms and values to their children, preparing them for participation in the broader social world.

Emotional Support

The nuclear family provides a source of emotional support and stability for its members. This support is essential for the psychological well-being of individuals. The intimate relationships within a nuclear family offer a sense of belonging and security, which can be vital in navigating the complexities of modern life.

Economic Cooperation

Economically, the nuclear family functions as a cooperative unit. Traditionally, the division of labor within the nuclear family has been based on gender roles, with men typically taking on the role of breadwinner and women managing the household. However, these roles have evolved over time, with increasing numbers of dual-income households and more fluid gender roles .

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nuclear family

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• The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family - Nuclear Family Emotional Process
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nuclear family , in sociology and anthropology , a group of people who are united by ties of partnership and parenthood and consisting of a pair of adults and their socially recognized children. Typically, but not always, the adults in a nuclear family are married. Although such couples are most often a man and a woman, the definition of the nuclear family has expanded with the advent of same-sex marriage . Children in a nuclear family may be the couple’s biological or adopted offspring.

Thus defined, the nuclear family was once widely held to be the most basic and universal form of social organization. Anthropological research, however, has illuminated so much variability of this form that it is safer to assume that what is universal is a “nuclear family complex” in which the roles of husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister are embodied by people whose biological relationships do not necessarily conform to the Western definitions of these terms. In matrilineal societies, for example, a child may be the responsibility not of his biological genitor but of his mother’s brother, who fulfills the roles typical of Western fatherhood.

Closely related in form to the predominant nuclear-family unit are the conjugal family and the consanguineal family. As its name implies, the conjugal family is knit together primarily by the marriage tie and consists of mother, father, their children, and some close relatives. The consanguineal family, on the other hand, typically groups itself around a unilineal descent group known as a lineage , a form that reckons kinship through either the father’s or the mother’s line but not both. Whether a culture is patrilineal or matrilineal, a consanguineal family comprises lineage relatives and consists of parents, their children, and their children’s children. Rules regarding lineage exogamy , or out-marriage, are common in these groups; within a given community , marriages thus create cross-cutting social and political ties between lineages.

The stability of the conjugal family depends on the quality of the marriage of the husband and wife, a relationship that is more emphasized in the kinds of industrialized, highly mobile societies that frequently demand that people reside away from their kin groups. The consanguineal family derives its stability from its corporate nature and its permanence, as its relationships emphasize the perpetuation of the line.

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Why the nuclear family might not be enough

Writing in the atlantic, david brooks calls for greater reliance on extended families. family experts say that’s a beginning..

By Jennifer Graham

SALT LAKE CITY — New York Times columnist David Brooks eulogized the nuclear family recently, saying the model of a married couple and their children living alone doesn’t work well for everyone and calling for greater reliance on extended family.

In the article , published on The Atlantic’s website, Brooks said the nuclear family has been good for the economically privileged, but “ravages the working-class and poor” who need the support that a sprawling family network provides. Such support acts as a shock absorber when things go wrong, and children benefit from the guidance of their relatives. “Multiple adults teach children right from wrong, how to behave toward others, how to be kind,” Brooks wrote.

If the bad news is that the nuclear family has become brittle, as Brooks said, the good news is that Americans are inching toward a system that worked well in generations past.

Twenty percent of Americans live in multigenerational homes today, compared to 12 percent in 1980, a change driven by young adults moving back in with their parents and seniors sharing homes with their kids, Brooks wrote.

And young adults are building family-like networks with people who aren’t relatives as “a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values,” he wrote. He cited a website where single mothers can connect with other single mothers to share housing, and also mentioned Salt Lake City’s The Other Side Academy, which helps connect felons with a community that acts as an extended family.

While Brooks’ overarching theme was the need for denser networks of familial support, his indictment of the nuclear family as a “catastrophe” that has led to broken families and loneliness was provocative, and on social media and elsewhere, reaction was swift and strong. On Twitter, Dr. Melody McCloud wrote, “It‘s not that the nuclear family is a mistake; it’s the crumbling of the nuclear family that’s a mistake. ... We need intact nuclear families.”

And the Institute for Family Studies, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, responded immediately with a weeklong online symposium to give family scholars a chance to respond to Brooks’ arguments.

Among them was Kay S. Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who wrote, “The disaster confronting less prosperous Americans is not the nuclear family, but the erosion of socioeconomic conditions that help them sustain lasting pair bonds.”

Here’s a summary of Brooks’ arguments, and how some leading family scholars have responded.

Honey, we shrunk the family

In the 19th century, almost all Americans worked on farms or in family businesses, and these lifestyles supported — even demanded — large, intertwined families, Brooks explained. “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.”

Industrialization eventually drove young Americans to work at factories in cities, where the nuclear family was born, along with its attendant mythology. By 1960, more than three-quarters of children were living with married parents, away from extended family. The economy was strong; divorce rates were down and fertility rates were up. The nuclear family seemed, for a brief, shining decade and a half, the Camelot of family units, a reputation that stuck even when circumstances changed. Only one-third of Americans currently live in a nuclear family.

In fact, Brooks wrote, “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.”

In their relative isolation, nuclear families afford individuals mobility and freedom, but deprive children of stability and a rich, important social tapestry. “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,” Brooks wrote.

“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.”

As such, children are the ones who suffer most when the nuclear family disintegrates. Only about half of American children spend their childhood with both biological parents; 1 in 5 young adults have no contact with their fathers. And, Brooks writes, “American children are more likely to live in a single-parent household than children from any other country.”

Affluent families can more easily withstand negative events, he says, by essentially buying extended family with goods and services. The poor can’t. And the negative effects persist even after the children have grown. Brooks says that this broken ideal contributes to the problem of loneliness in the U.S. “Today’s crisis of connection flows from the impoverishment of family life,” he writes.

‘Bring back the big tables’

In interviews with the Deseret News and in responses published by the Institute for Family Studies, scholars said that Brooks’ article started an important conversation, but said there are other issues that deserve consideration.

Regarding The Atlantic’s provocative headline, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, said, “It’s a mistake to think you can go it alone as a nuclear family.”

“In the last century, too many Americans have tried to go it alone. It’s certainly the case that many hands of kin and kith make the work of family life lighter.”

But Wilcox said Brooks’ prescription of “chosen” or “forged” families ignores the importance of marriage to a family and to the nation.

“His prescription seems to me fundamentally inadequate because it doesn’t recognize that children and communities are much more likely to thrive when marriage anchors them because marriage gives meaning, direction and purpose to families, and to kids in particular.

“We know, for instance, that kids who are being raised in multigenerational families with a single parent in the middle do about as poorly as kids being raised without a third generation. We know that kids being raised by uncles and aunts do worse than kids being raised by their own parents. His conclusion doesn’t really acknowledge that there’s something fundamental about being loved by, and loving, your parents in your own home, and when you don’t have that, there’s a fundamental sense of loss that a lot of kids experience.”

Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families and a history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, wrote about idealized families in her 1992 book “The Way We Never Were.” She said Brooks does a little idealizing of his own in talking about the glories of large families in the 18th and 19th centuries, although he does acknowledge that the structure was no ideal for women for spent most of their days cooking and cleaning for a dozen people, or two dozen, or for the slaves and servants that supported these large households. But, she says, Brooks doesn’t go far enough.

 “His solution stresses the need to promote new forms of chosen kin, and I agree those are good. But in our huge country, with its regional disparities and growing segregation by race and class, local initiatives are not enough. We don’t just need a new family paradigm. We need a new social paradigm.”

Coontz said that economic factors weigh heavily on American families, both nuclear and extended, and that business models that bow to shareholder profits do so at the expense of families and communities. “While we’re thinking, let’s think about how we can begin to recognize that we’re all part of an interdependent society,” she said. “We need to rebuild not just the social safety net, but also the psychological sense that we’re all in this together.”

Without economic stability, Coontz said, marriage is not an option for many Americans. “In the midst of this growing inequality, the only people who can take the risk of marrying each other are those who are almost already there in terms of their emotional and economic security. Marriage can be tremendously helpful to those who have the emotional and economic security to make sure it will work, but in today’s society, where we have freedom, for better or for worse, to leave a marriage that does not satisfy us, it’s a risky endeavor for those who are under economic stress.”

Likewise, writing for the Institute for Family Studies symposium, Scott M. Stanley, a research professor at the University of Denver, noted the correlation between income and education and family stability. “As a group, those with higher education and incomes —those with the most options — are now overrepresented among those with stable marriages and nuclear families.”

And Stanley noted that a major obstacle blocking societal change is the vaunted American love of individualism, privacy and space, which Brooks acknowledges when he writes, “Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life.”

Moreover, nuclear families tend to perpetuate themselves. “People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mindset than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan,” Brooks wrote. “People with an individualistic mindset tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption.”

But that’s all the more reason for a movement to enlarge our most important and nurturing network, either biological or forged, according to Brooks. “For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin,” he says. “It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.”

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Stealing behaviour that is not kleptomania could be influenced by emotional instability: NIMHANS study

Those with specific psychological conditions may be more prone to resort to stealing as a coping mechanism for their emotions, corresponding author of the study, prof manoj sharma said.

Updated - August 06, 2024 02:40 pm IST

Published - August 06, 2024 10:15 am IST - Bengaluru

A view of the National Institute Of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences (Nimhans), Bengaluru. The study was carried out by a team of researchers from NIMHANS.  | Photo Credit: File photo

A case report by a team of researchers from NIMHANS has revealed that stealing behaviour is influenced by emotional instability, underlying personality vulnerabilities, a negative self-concept and coping mechanisms. The study titled ‘Psychopathology Underlying Stealing Behaviour’ was published in the Malaysian Journal of Psychiatry in July.

Stealing behaviour that is repeated, has been observed in individuals who do not meet the description of kleptomania, an impulse control disorder that results in an irresistible urge to steal, the paper said. “Those with specific psychological conditions may be more prone to resort to stealing as a coping mechanism for their emotions,” said Manoj Kumar Sharma, professor, Department of Clinical Psychology, who also heads the SHUT Clinic at NIMHANS, and is the corresponding author of the study.

Psychopathology of stealing

Aimed at exploring the psychopathology that underlies the activity of stealing, the study has presented the case of a young adult female patient from a nuclear family. “She had a history of parental neglect, poor coping mechanisms, emotional dysregulation and impulsive behaviour, in addition to frequent stealing,” said Dr. Sharma.

“The first time the girl stole something was during her early adolescence. The patient reported feeling extremely guilty after the act and felt she was a bad person. There have been a few other incidents where she stole trivial things, such as clothes, Maggi, chips, and chocolates. She reported having no awareness of what was going through her mind and felt that her body was moving on its own,” the doctor said.

“The case report has demonstrated the role of stealing in coping with chronic parental criticism and neglect. The patient had a negative self-concept and emotional instability, which was further exacerbated by her poor coping. Furthermore, the acts are followed by feelings of guilt and shame, and are not motivated by thrill-seeking tendencies,” he said, explaining the case.

“The case report has provided evidence to help recognise that individuals who steal, may also have co-occurring psychological issues. Working with individuals who steal would necessitate screening and offering psychological support to this population,” he said.

Factors that could lead to stealing

Pointing out that a wide range of factors can lead to stealing, including lack of resources, peer pressure, a desire for the product, impulse control, and behavioural modelling, Dr. Sharma said stealing activities have also been linked to other psychopathologies, including drug abuse, mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and obsessive–compulsive disorders.

Stating that not all acts of repeated stealing fall under the category of kleptomania, Dr. Sharma said some people who steal or shoplift repeatedly feel guilty or regretful rather than satisfied with their actions. 

“Stealing is not so much a want to be gratified as it is a coping strategy. The present case report examined the possible factors underlying stealing behaviour to understand the case motives. It offers evidence for understanding and helping people who engage in stealing behaviour, and who have co-occurring psychological problems,” he added.

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case study on nuclear family

Nuclear family (definition + history).

In various societies and throughout history, the concept of family has served as a foundational unit, providing support, structure, and a sense of belonging. The ways in which people define and live within families have evolved, leading to diverse structures and dynamics.

A nuclear family is a family unit consisting of two parents (mother and father) and their biological or adopted children living together in a single household. This structure is distinct from extended family systems, which include additional relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Delving into the historical context, theories, cultural variations, benefits, and challenges, we will explore the intricate tapestry of the nuclear family. Through this exploration, we aim to provide insights into its impact on individuals and society, and how it compares to other family structures.

History of the Nuclear Family

Ancient Societies

The concept of the nuclear family can be traced back to several ancient societies, each of which has contributed uniquely to the understanding and evolution of this family structure.

Ancient Rome, Greece, and China, while geographically and culturally distinct, showcased early instances of nuclear family units within their respective societies, laying the foundation for future generations.

In ancient Rome, the family structure was predominantly patriarchal . The paterfamilias , or the male head of the family, held considerable authority and power, dictating the family's decisions and actions.

Within this patriarchal setup, the nuclear family was a visible unit, distinguished by its immediate family members sharing a household, apart from the extended family.

The nuclear family in ancient Rome functioned as a fundamental economic, social, and educational unit . Parents, particularly fathers, bore the responsibility of nurturing the children, imparting cultural norms, values, and traditions , ensuring the continuity of Roman heritage.

The Roman household was a microcosm of Roman society, reflecting societal hierarchies, roles, and responsibilities. Furthermore, marriages were often arranged for political or economic advantages, thereby influencing the dynamics within the nuclear family.

Ancient Greece, much like Rome, valued the concept of the oikos or household, which typically consisted of the father, mother, and children.

The Greek polis (city-state) had a profound impact on family life, as it underscored the nuclear family’s role in contributing to civic responsibilities and duties. Families were seen as the building blocks of a city-state, and the familial roles were often aligned with serving the interests of the community.

Education was a pivotal aspect of Greek family life, especially within the nuclear family. Parents, with a particular emphasis on fathers, were tasked with educating their children in philosophy, arts, sports, and civic duties, molding them into well-rounded citizens.

The societal expectations and norms were deeply ingrained within the family structure, shaping individual identities and responsibilities.

In ancient China, Confucianism played a pivotal role in shaping family structures and dynamics. The philosophy promoted filial piety, respect for elders, and the value of family harmony.

While extended families were highly valued and respected, the nuclear family maintained its position as a vital unit within the larger family framework.

Parents in a Chinese nuclear family were revered and held authority, with children expected to obey and honor them. The emphasis on education, moral values, and social harmony were integral to family life.

Families were seen as the foundation of a stable and harmonious society, reflecting the broader societal values and norms.

Middle Ages to the Renaissance

Transitioning from ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the nuclear family experienced shifts and adaptations, reflecting the changing socio-economic and cultural landscapes of the times.

The influence of the feudal system and the emergence of individualism during the Renaissance played crucial roles in molding family structures and dynamics.

Feudal System Influence

The Middle Ages in Europe were characterized by the feudal system , where land ownership and social status were linked. Noble families, owing to their wealth and status, often lived in large households with extended family members and servants.

However, peasants, constrained by economic limitations and living conditions, were more likely to reside in smaller, nuclear family units.

Within these nuclear family units, roles were clearly defined, with fathers working in fields or trades, mothers managing household duties, and children assisting based on their age and gender.

The church played a significant role in dictating family values, norms, and practices, influencing marriage, parenthood, and children's upbringing.

Changing Social Dynamics

The Renaissance period marked a departure from the rigid societal structures of the Middle Ages, ushering in an era of enlightenment, art, science, and individualism.

The emphasis on personal fulfillment, intellectual growth, and artistic expression brought about shifts in family dynamics and individual roles within the nuclear family.

Marriages became less about economic or political alliances and more about personal choice and mutual affection.

The concept of childhood was recognized, leading to changes in parenting styles and educational practices. The nuclear family became a space for individual growth, learning, and expression, reflecting the broader societal transformations.

Industrial Revolution Impact

The advent of the Industrial Revolution brought forth unprecedented changes in family life, especially concerning the nuclear family structure. The migration from rural areas to urban centers, coupled with the separation of work from home life, led to more pronounced roles within the family and a heightened focus on the immediate family unit.

Urbanization and Work Dynamics

The shift from agrarian (farming) societies to industrial urban centers called for changes in family structures and roles. Men increasingly worked away from home, becoming the primary breadwinners, while women assumed the role of homemakers, managing household duties and child-rearing.

The nuclear family became a distinct economic and social unit, adapting to the demands of industrialized urban life.

Children's roles within the nuclear family also evolved, with formalized education becoming a focal point. Schooling prepared boys for future employment and girls for homemaking, reinforcing gender roles and expectations .

The nuclear family became a microcosm of the industrial society, reflecting the values, norms, and aspirations of the time.

Evolution of Family Roles

The distinct roles of fathers as breadwinners and mothers as homemakers became more entrenched during the Industrial Revolution. However, this period also sowed the seeds for future changes and challenges to traditional gender roles within the nuclear family.

The economic pressures and opportunities in urban centers brought about discussions on women's rights, education, and employment, laying the groundwork for future social movements.

Children’s education and socialization became paramount, with schools and communities playing a pivotal role in shaping their values, skills, and aspirations.

The nuclear family, while maintaining its core structure, was evolving, adapting to the socio-economic realities and cultural shifts of the industrial age.

The 20th Century to Present

The 20th century and the dawn of the new millennium witnessed significant transformations in the nuclear family structure, influenced by world wars, social movements, technological advancements , and globalization .

The challenges and adaptations of the nuclear family during these times underscored its resilience and ability to reflect broader societal changes.

World Wars Influence

The tumultuous times during the two World Wars had a profound impact on family life. With men going off to war, many women stepped into the workforce , challenging and reshaping traditional gender roles within the nuclear family.

The post-war periods saw attempts to revert to traditional family roles, but the experiences of women during the wars had laid the foundation for future changes.

The wars also brought about economic, political, and social shifts, affecting family life and individual aspirations. The nuclear family was not isolated from these broader transformations; instead, it adapted, reflecting the changing values, norms, and expectations of society.

Social and Cultural Movements

The latter half of the 20th century was marked by a wave of social and cultural movements , advocating for civil rights, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights .

These movements challenged the traditional notions of the nuclear family, advocating for more inclusive and diverse family structures and roles.

The rise of feminism questioned gender roles within the family, advocating for women's rights, equality, and opportunities.

The LGBTQ+ rights movement brought forth discussions on same-sex families, challenging the heteronormative definition of the nuclear family.

These movements, along with technological advancements and globalization, continue to shape the modern nuclear family, reflecting the diversity and inclusivity of contemporary society.

The technological revolution and globalization in the 21st century further influenced family dynamics.

Virtual connectivity, changing work patterns, and exposure to varying cultural influences have shaped the modern nuclear family, making it a dynamic and adaptable social unit.

Tracing the origins and evolution of the nuclear family from ancient civilizations through significant historical epochs reveals its adaptability and resilience. The nuclear family has mirrored societal changes, evolving roles, and shifting values, maintaining its significance as a foundational unit of society.

Characteristics of the Nuclear Family

The nuclear family, a term familiar to many, consists of two parents and their children, living together in a single household.

This family model is distinguished from the extended family system, which encompasses additional relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Across cultures and through the tides of change, the nuclear family has showcased various characteristics and roles, often reflective of the societal norms and values of the time.

1. Stability and Support

One of the defining characteristics of the nuclear family is its provision of stability and support. The close-knit structure fosters an environment where individual members can rely on one another for emotional, financial, and social support.

This sense of security and belonging is fundamental to individual well-being and development, forming the bedrock of the family unit.

2. Defined Roles and Responsibilities

Within a nuclear family, roles and responsibilities are often clearly defined. Traditionally, parents are seen as providers and protectors, while children are nurtured and guided towards adulthood.

These roles, while evolving, continue to shape the dynamics within the family, influencing relationships, expectations, and individual identities.

3. Socialization and Value Transmission

The nuclear family plays a pivotal role in socializing children, imparting values, morals, and cultural norms.

Through interaction with parents and siblings, children learn about relationships, empathy, cooperation, and conflict resolution. This early socialization lays the foundation for individual development and societal integration .

Roles within the Nuclear Family

As society has evolved, so too have the roles within the nuclear family. Traditional roles have been redefined, expanded, and diversified, reflecting changes in societal expectations, gender norms, and individual aspirations.

Parental Roles

Traditionally, fathers were often the breadwinners, providing financial support, while mothers were primarily responsible for homemaking and child-rearing.

However, the latter half of the 20th century saw significant shifts in parental roles, with more women entering the workforce and men taking an active part in child-rearing and household duties. This shift towards more egalitarian roles has influenced family dynamics, relationships, and individual fulfillment.

Children’s Roles

Children within a nuclear family are not mere recipients of care and socialization but also contribute to the family dynamics.

The interactions between siblings, as well as with their parents, shape their social understanding, emotional intelligence, and individual identities.

The roles of children have also evolved, with changing expectations regarding autonomy, education, and contribution to household tasks.

Evolving Gender Roles

The movement towards gender equality has had a profound impact on roles within the nuclear family.

The increasing participation of women in the workforce, the advocacy for shared parenting and household responsibilities, and the recognition of diverse family structures have all contributed to the redefinition of gender roles within the family.

Impact on Individual Development

The characteristics and roles within the nuclear family have far-reaching implications for individual development. The family environment influences cognitive, emotional, social, and moral development, shaping the individuals children become.

Cognitive Development

The nuclear family is the first environment where children encounter learning. Through interaction, play, and exploration, children develop cognitive skills such as problem-solving, language acquisition, and critical thinking .

Parental involvement, support, and stimulation are crucial in fostering cognitive development, laying the groundwork for academic achievement and intellectual growth.

Emotional and Social Development

The emotional bonds formed within the nuclear family are foundational to children’s emotional and social development. The experience of love, trust, and security shapes their emotional well-being, self-esteem, and capacity for empathy and cooperation.

Social interactions within the family teach children about relationships , conflict resolution, and social norms, preparing them for integration into broader society.

Moral Development

The nuclear family is instrumental in instilling moral values and ethical principles. Through guidance, discipline, and role modeling, parents influence children’s understanding of right and wrong, responsibility, and respect for others .

This moral foundation guides individuals throughout their lives, influencing their character, decisions, and relationships.

The nuclear family, with its distinct characteristics and roles, serves as a cornerstone for individual development and societal cohesion. The stability, support, and socialization provided within this family structure shape the cognitive, emotional, social, and moral development of its members.

The evolution of roles within the nuclear family reflects broader societal changes and continues to influence family dynamics and individual aspirations. Understanding these characteristics and roles is essential in exploring the significance, benefits, and challenges of the nuclear family in contemporary society.

Pros and Cons of the Nuclear Family

Pros of the nuclear family.

Many people around the world grow up in a nuclear family, which is like a cozy little team made up of two parents and their kids. This type of family structure has lots of wonderful aspects that make it pretty popular!

1. Stability and Independence

Firstly, a big win for nuclear families is the sense of stability and independence they bring. Imagine your family as a tight-knit circle of support, like a cozy nest where everyone looks out for each other.

Being independent from a bigger, extended family means you get to make your own rules and traditions. It's like building your own little world where your family gets to decide what’s important.

2. Lots of Attention and Support

In a nuclear family, with fewer people in the house, parents can really zoom in on what each child needs.

This means every child gets a special spotlight, helping them feel valued and understood. It’s like having a cheerleading squad just for you, helping you grow strong and confident.

3. Managing Money and Moving Around

When it comes to money, nuclear families often find it easier to manage. It’s like having a smaller pie – when there are fewer people, everyone gets a bigger slice!

This can lead to better saving opportunities and smarter choices with money. Also, smaller families can pack up and move more easily, whether chasing better job opportunities, schools, or just a nicer place to live.

4. Adapting to Changes

Nuclear families are often like chameleons, able to adapt to new situations and ideas. They might be more open-minded, accepting people’s differences, and adjusting to new ways of thinking and living.

Cons of the Nuclear Family

However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. There are some challenges that nuclear families face, affecting both individuals and the family as a whole.

1. Limited Support System

One of the hurdles is that a smaller family might not have as many hands on deck for support. Imagine facing a big storm with a smaller umbrella – it can be tough without extra help, especially during hard times like sickness or loss.

2. Feeling Isolated

Sometimes, a nuclear family might feel a bit like an island, especially if they live far from other relatives or if the parents are super busy. Kids in these families might miss out on the bustling, lively feeling of having a larger family around.

3. More Pressure on Parents

In a nuclear family, the parents are like superheroes – they have to do it all! From caring for the kids to running the household, it’s a big job. And just like superheroes can get tired, so can parents, which can be stressful.

4. Losing Traditions

Living away from the extended family can sometimes mean missing out on learning about family traditions and stories. It’s like having fewer threads to weave the tapestry of your family’s history, leading to a weaker connection to your roots and heritage.

The nuclear family, this special team of parents and kids, has played a starring role in societies for ages. It’s like a tree that’s grown and changed with time, still standing strong and offering a safe and loving place for kids to grow. But, just like trees face storms, nuclear families have their challenges too.

Understanding the nuclear family is like piecing together a puzzle – looking at all the different pieces, the good and the tricky. It’s a really important way that people live together, and it helps mold who we become and how we view the world.

By diving into its history, how it functions, its ups, and downs, we get a clearer picture of its special role in our lives and the world.

Theories about the Nuclear Family

Diving into the world of theories and perspectives gives us a kaleidoscope of views on the nuclear family.

Over the years, many thinkers have explored this family structure, shedding light on its roles, functions, and impact on society and individuals. Let’s explore some of these intriguing theories and see what they tell us about the nuclear family!

• Functionalism

The Functionalism theory, developed by Emile Durkheim in the early 20th century, looks at the nuclear family like a crucial puzzle piece in society.

According to this theory, each family has specific roles and functions that keep society running smoothly, just like how our body parts work together to keep us healthy.

Durkheim, and later Talcott Parsons , another influential sociologist, believed that the nuclear family performs essential functions like raising and educating children, providing emotional support, and contributing to economic stability.

In this view, the nuclear family is like a mini-society, a school where kids learn values, norms, and culture. It's where children first understand what’s right and wrong, shaping their characters and preparing them to be good members of society.

Additionally, the nuclear family is seen as an economic unit, with parents working to provide and kids eventually growing up to join the workforce.

Conflict Theory

Conflict Theory , introduced by thinkers like Karl Marx and later developed by Max Weber, offers a different lens. It views society as a stage where groups struggle for power and resources.

In this theory, the nuclear family is seen as a reflection of inequalities in society, with family members playing different roles and sometimes experiencing imbalance and conflict.

This theory sheds light on how power dynamics within the family can mirror broader societal inequalities. It questions the balance of power between men and women, parents and children, and how family structures can either challenge or uphold societal norms.

For example, it explores how traditional gender roles within the nuclear family might impact women’s opportunities and how families can either support or resist societal changes.

• Symbolic Interactionism

Delving into Symbolic Interactionism , introduced by George Herbert Mead and later expanded by Herbert Blumer, we explore how individuals in a family interact and assign meanings to their relationships.

This theory is like looking at family life through a microscope, focusing on small, everyday interactions and how they shape our understanding of family roles and relationships.

In the context of the nuclear family, Symbolic Interactionism explores how family members communicate, how they define their roles, and how they create a shared family identity.

It looks at the symbols and meanings attached to ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘sibling’, and how these roles are interpreted and lived out. For instance, it might examine how a father’s role is seen as the provider and how this perception influences family interactions and expectations.

Social Exchange Theory

Social Exchange Theory , developed by George Homans in the 1950s and expanded by Peter Blau and Richard Emerson, views relationships as a sort of barter system.

It suggests that individuals seek to maximize rewards and minimize costs in their relationships, including family ties. The nuclear family, in this light, is seen as a network of relationships where members exchange resources, support, and care, aiming for a balance of give-and-take.

This theory helps us understand how family members negotiate responsibilities, support each other, and seek rewards in their relationships. It looks at how parents and children, husbands and wives, navigate the balance of giving and receiving, and how this dynamic influences family cohesion and satisfaction.

Feminist Theory

Feminist Theory , with roots in the works of thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir and later contributions by Betty Friedan and bell hooks, critically examines gender roles and inequalities within the family.

It shines a spotlight on how traditional family structures can uphold patriarchal norms and explores how families can be spaces for both empowerment and subordination.

In the realm of the nuclear family, Feminist Theory scrutinizes the division of labor, power dynamics, and opportunities for men and women.

It advocates for equality within family relationships and challenges traditional norms that might limit individuals based on gender. It’s like questioning who does the dishes and why, and exploring how families can break free from limiting roles and expectations.

Economic Models

Lastly, economic models of the family take a practical approach, viewing the family as a unit of production and consumption.

Developed by economists like Gary Becker in the 1970s and 1980s, these models analyze how families make decisions about work, spending, and resource allocation. They explore how families adapt to economic pressures, how they invest in their children’s education, and how they plan for the future.

In the context of the nuclear family, economic models examine how parents balance work and family life, how they prioritize spending, and how they plan for their children’s futures.

It’s like looking at the family as a mini-economy, exploring how they manage resources, make investments, and navigate the financial landscape.

Modern Theories on Nuclear Families and Diverse Structures

In recent years, our understanding of what a nuclear family can be has transformed, opening up new ways of thinking and welcoming a spectrum of family structures.

Modern theories of nuclear families emphasize inclusivity, diversity, and the evolving nature of family life.

Queer Theory and Same-Sex Marriages

Queer Theory , stemming from the work of thinkers like Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in the late 20th century, challenges traditional ideas about gender and sexuality.

It invites us to think outside the box when it comes to family structures, celebrating diversity and questioning norms.

In the landscape of nuclear families, Queer Theory illuminates the experiences of same-sex couples and their families. It explores how these families navigate societal norms, build strong relationships, and create loving environments for children.

Same-sex marriages, legally recognized in many countries around the world, have reshaped the definition of nuclear families, showcasing that love, commitment, and care are at the heart of family life, regardless of gender.

Blended Family Dynamics

Modern theories also explore the dynamics of blended families, where parents bring children from previous relationships into a new family unit. These theories delve into how family members build connections, navigate challenges, and create a harmonious family life.

Blended families add a layer of complexity to the nuclear family model, as they combine different family histories, traditions, and relationships. Understanding blended family dynamics helps us appreciate the adaptability and resilience of families, as they blend traditions, navigate relationships, and build strong bonds.

Childfree Families

Another modern perspective focuses on childfree families, where couples consciously choose not to have children. This viewpoint explores the motivations, experiences, and societal perceptions of childfree couples, acknowledging the diversity of family choices.

Childfree families challenge traditional expectations of parenthood and open up discussions about individual choice, fulfillment, and the different ways of building a meaningful life.

Recognizing childfree families as a valid family structure broadens our understanding of the many ways individuals create love, support, and commitment.

Dual-Career Families

The rise of dual-career families, where both partners pursue professional careers, has also shaped modern theories on nuclear families. These theories explore how families balance work and family life, share responsibilities, and support each other’s goals.

Dual-career families reflect the changing roles of men and women, the aspirations of individuals, and the adaptability of family structures. Understanding the dynamics of dual-career families provides insights into the evolving nature of family roles, relationships, and aspirations.

The Nuclear Family in Different Cultures

Examining the concept of the nuclear family across different cultures is like embarking on a fascinating journey around the world. E

ach culture, with its unique traditions, values, and social norms, adds a distinctive flavor to the nuclear family model, highlighting both commonalities and differences.

Western Cultures

In Western cultures, like in the United States and Europe, the nuclear family is often seen as the cornerstone of society. It’s like a building block, shaping individual identities and contributing to the larger community.

Here, the emphasis is often on individualism, independence, and the pursuit of personal goals.

In these cultures, nuclear families often live separately from extended families, valuing privacy and autonomy.

Children are encouraged to become independent and self-reliant, with education playing a pivotal role in preparing them for adulthood.

The concept of marriage has also evolved to include same-sex couples, reflecting changing societal norms and values.

Asian Cultures

Venturing into Asian cultures, we find a different perspective. Countries like China, Japan, and India often place a strong emphasis on collectivism, interdependence, and respect for tradition.

While nuclear families are common, there is often a close-knit connection with the extended family.

In these cultures, family values such as filial piety, respect for elders, and maintaining family harmony play a significant role.

Family members are expected to support each other, and children often live with their parents until marriage.

Additionally, arranged marriages are still prevalent in some Asian cultures, with families playing a central role in match-making.

African Cultures

Exploring African cultures, we discover a rich tapestry of family structures and values. In many African societies, the concept of family extends beyond the nuclear unit to include a broader network of relatives and community members.

In this communal setting, raising children is often a collective responsibility, with the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” encapsulating this ethos.

Extended families and communities play a crucial role in providing support, instilling values, and fostering a sense of belonging. The emphasis is often on cooperation, mutual support, and maintaining strong family ties.

Middle Eastern Cultures

In the Middle East, family is central to social structure and cultural identity. The nuclear family is valued, but there is a strong connection with extended family members, reflecting the importance of kinship and family solidarity.

In these cultures, traditions, and religious values significantly influence family roles and relationships. Respect for elders, adherence to family norms, and the importance of marriage and procreation are common themes.

Families tend to be patriarchal, with men often holding decision-making roles, while women are primarily responsible for childcare and household duties.

Latin American Cultures

In Latin American cultures, family is a vibrant and essential aspect of life. Like a colorful tapestry, the family is interwoven with traditions, celebrations, and a strong sense of unity.

The nuclear family is important, but so is the extended family, forming a close and supportive network.

In these cultures, family members often live close to each other, and there is a strong sense of loyalty and mutual support.

Traditional gender roles are prevalent, but there is also a growing trend towards equality and shared responsibilities within the family.

Celebrations and gatherings are integral to family life, reinforcing bonds and creating cherished memories.

Journeying through different cultures provides a panoramic view of the nuclear family, revealing its diverse manifestations and adaptations.

Whether shaped by individualism or collectivism, tradition or modernity, each culture adds its unique brushstrokes to the portrait of the nuclear family.

Understanding these cultural variations enriches our appreciation of the universality and adaptability of the nuclear family concept, a testament to its enduring significance in human societies.

Comparing Nuclear Family to Other Family Structures

In the diverse world of family structures, each type is like a unique plant in a garden, with its way of growing, blooming, and contributing to the ecosystem.

Comparing the nuclear family to other family structures helps us appreciate the variety in the garden of family life and understand how each type meets the needs of its members in its way.

Extended Family

Firstly, let’s look at the extended family, which is like a big, spreading tree with many branches. Unlike the nuclear family, which consists of parents and their children, extended families include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and sometimes even more relatives!

Living in such a family can feel like being part of a big, bustling community, with lots of people around to share experiences, offer help, and provide companionship.

Extended families offer a strong support system, with family members often living close by or under the same roof. This close-knit network can be especially helpful in times of need, with relatives stepping in to help with childcare, financial support, or just a listening ear.

However, living in a larger family can also mean less privacy and more opinions to consider when making decisions.

Single-Parent Family

Next, we have the single-parent family, which is like a resilient plant that finds a way to thrive even in challenging conditions.

In this family structure, one parent takes on the role of both caregiver and provider, juggling responsibilities and ensuring the well-being of the children. Life in a single-parent family can be full of love and closeness, but it can also be challenging, with one parent balancing many tasks.

Single-parent families might face financial challenges and time constraints, but they also foster strong bonds and a sense of independence.

Children in these families often learn responsibility early on and develop a close relationship with their parent. The smaller family size allows for individual attention and adaptability to meet each member’s needs.

Childless Families

In the garden of family life, childless families are like flowers that don’t produce seeds but still add beauty and diversity to the landscape.

Couples in childless families have chosen not to have children, focusing on their relationship, careers, hobbies, and other life goals. This family structure offers flexibility, freedom, and the opportunity to pursue individual and joint aspirations.

Childless families can invest time and resources in their interests, careers, and each other, fostering a close and fulfilling relationship.

However, they might also face societal expectations and misconceptions about their choice to remain childless.

Nevertheless, childless families are a testament to the diversity of family life and the validity of different life choices.

Blended Families

Blended families, formed when parents bring together children from previous relationships, are like gardens where different types of plants are grown together.

This family structure offers a chance for new beginnings, fostering relationships between stepparents, stepsiblings, and half-siblings. Navigating relationships in blended families can be complex, but it can also lead to a rich and rewarding family life.

Blended families require time, patience, and communication to build strong bonds and navigate differences.

The diversity within the family can lead to a richer and more inclusive family experience, with members learning from each other’s backgrounds and perspectives.

Like a garden with a mix of plants, a blended family can be a harmonious and vibrant place, where each member contributes to the family’s well-being.

Exploring different family structures sheds light on the myriad ways individuals create loving, supportive environments.

Whether in the close-knit setting of the nuclear family, the bustling community of the extended family, the resilient single-parent family, the flexible childless family, or the diverse blended family, each structure offers unique experiences and lessons.

Appreciating this diversity helps us understand the many forms of family life and the common threads of love, support, and belonging that connect them all.

Nuclear Families and Mental Health

Exploring the intricate world of psychology through the lens of various case studies and research reveals compelling insights into the impact of the nuclear family on individuals.

From understanding mental health dynamics to exploring correlations with criminal behavior, these studies offer a multifaceted perspective on the influence of family structure.

Attachment Theory and Child Development

One of the foundational studies in psychology, conducted by John Bowlby and further developed by Mary Ainsworth in the mid-20th century, delved into attachment theory .

This theory examines the bond between children and their primary caregivers (usually parents), focusing on the nuclear family.

The researchers found that a child’s attachment style could profoundly impact their mental health and interpersonal relationships as they grow.

Bowlby and Ainsworth came up with four attachment styles:

• Secure Attachment: This style is characterized by a sense of safety and security. Securely attached children feel confident to explore the world, knowing they can return to a safe base. They tend to develop higher self-esteem, better relationships, and more robust mental health.
• Insecure-Avoidant Attachment: Children with this style may avoid closeness and emotional connection with their caregivers. They tend to be more independent and may struggle with forming intimate relationships later in life.
• Insecure-Anxious Attachment: These children often exhibit anxiety and uncertainty. They may be clingy and overly dependent on their caregivers, fearing abandonment.
• Disorganized Attachment: This style is characterized by a lack of a clear attachment behavior, and these children might act disoriented or exhibit contradictory behaviors. It often arises from situations of neglect or abuse.

They also identified a few factors that can influence the development of these attachment styles:

• Sensitivity and Responsiveness: The caregiver’s sensitivity and responsiveness to a child’s needs are crucial in forming a secure attachment. Consistent, loving, and attentive care fosters a sense of security in children.
• Reliability: A caregiver’s reliability and availability contribute to the development of attachment styles. Children who can depend on their caregivers to meet their needs are more likely to develop secure attachments.
• Stress and Trauma: Exposure to stress, trauma, or inconsistency in early childhood can influence attachment styles. Children who experience such conditions are more likely to develop insecure or disorganized attachments.
• Temperament: The child’s innate temperament also plays a role. Some children might be more adaptable and resilient, while others may be more sensitive and reactive, influencing their attachment formation.

Attachment styles can have a lasting impact on an individual’s life, influencing their approach to relationships, self-esteem, and coping mechanisms.

Securely attached individuals are more likely to form healthy, balanced relationships and exhibit emotional resilience. In contrast, those with insecure attachment styles might face challenges in building trust, managing emotions, and maintaining relationships.

Therapeutic Interventions: Attachment-based therapy focuses on addressing and altering attachment patterns. It can be particularly beneficial for individuals with insecure or disorganized attachment styles, helping them develop healthier relationships, improve self-esteem, and enhance emotional regulation.

Attachment theory offers profound insights into the formative bonds formed within the nuclear family and their lasting impact on an individual’s development and well-being.

Understanding the different attachment styles, their influencing factors, and long-term effects provides a comprehensive view of the intricate relationship between early childhood experiences and subsequent life outcomes.

Recognizing the significance of secure attachments and the potential for therapeutic interventions contributes to a deeper appreciation of the pivotal role of the nuclear family in shaping individuals.

The Impact of Parental Involvement on Academic Achievement

Diana Baumrind ’s seminal research in the 1960s identified different parenting styles within nuclear families and their impact on children’s academic achievement and behavior.

She categorized parenting into authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and neglectful, examining how each style influenced children’s development.

• Authoritative Parenting: This style combines warmth and firmness, fostering a supportive environment while setting clear boundaries. Authoritative parents encourage open communication, provide rationale for rules, and offer consistent discipline. Children raised in this environment often exhibit higher academic achievement, better emotional regulation, social competence, and a balanced sense of autonomy.
• Authoritarian Parenting: Authoritarian parents are strict, demanding, and expect obedience without explanation. This style may lead to children who are obedient and proficient but may struggle with self-esteem, social competence, and may experience higher levels of unhappiness and stress.
• Permissive Parenting: Permissive parents are nurturing and accepting but make few demands and set limited boundaries. Children raised in this environment might struggle with self-control and self-regulation, performing less well academically and exhibiting behavioral problems.
• Neglectful Parenting: Neglectful parents are uninvolved, indifferent, and emotionally unresponsive. Children with neglectful parents are likely to face a myriad of developmental issues, including academic underachievement, behavioral problems, and poor mental health.

The impact of parenting styles and parental involvement on children’s academic achievement has ripple effects throughout their life. Success in academia often translates to better career opportunities, higher self-esteem, and improved overall well-being.

Moreover, individuals who have experienced supportive parenting are likely to replicate positive parenting practices with their children.

Educational and parental interventions can mitigate the effects of less effective parenting styles. Parenting programs aim to enhance parenting skills, improve parent-child relationships, and foster environments conducive to child development and academic achievement.

Family Structure and Juvenile Delinquency

Various studies have explored the correlation between family structure and juvenile delinquency. A common focus has been comparing children from single-parent families with those from nuclear families.

Research generally indicates that children from stable, well-functioning nuclear families generally exhibit lower rates of delinquency compared to those from single-parent families.

While it’s crucial to consider socio-economic factors and the quality of parent-child relationships, research suggests that the structure and stability of a nuclear family can play a protective role against juvenile delinquency.

Studies on Same-Sex Parenting

In recent years, research has shifted towards understanding the dynamics and outcomes of children raised in LGBTQ+ nuclear families.

Several studies have compared the mental health, social adjustment, and academic achievement of children raised by same-sex couples with those raised by opposite-sex couples.

The consensus from multiple studies indicates that children raised in LGBTQ+ families fare just as well in these aspects as their counterparts from heterosexual families.

The quality of parenting and family relationships are more significant predictors of children’s well-being than the parents’ sexual orientation.

Economic Stress and Family Dynamics

Economic stress can put a strain on the nuclear family, impacting relationships and individuals’ mental health.

Studies have investigated how financial difficulties, unemployment, and socio-economic status influence family dynamics, parental behavior, and children’s outcomes.

Families facing economic stress may experience increased tension, conflict, and disruption. However, strong family bonds, effective communication, and coping mechanisms can mitigate the adverse effects of financial strain on family members.

In weaving together the varied threads of information, theories, research studies, and real-life examples, we have embarked on a comprehensive exploration of the nuclear family, unveiling its multifaceted nature, evolution, and impact on individual members and society at large.

The nuclear family, characterized by its core unit of parents and children, serves as a cornerstone for many societies, influencing values, norms, and the development of its members.

We delved into the history and evolution of the nuclear family, tracing its roots and transformations across eras and cultural landscapes. The examination of diverse family structures across different cultures illuminated the adaptability and universality of familial bonds, while also highlighting the unique manifestations of the nuclear family in various societies.

A thorough exploration of theoretical perspectives, from the foundational works of Talcott Parsons to the modern discourses on same-sex families, enriched our understanding of the nuclear family's role and significance.

These theories, each with its unique lens, offered insights into the economic, sociological, and psychological dimensions of family life.

The comparison between nuclear and other family structures, complemented by detailed research findings, shed light on the distinct advantages and challenges associated with different family forms.

Through this, we gained a nuanced perspective on the importance of adaptability, support networks, and targeted interventions in fostering balanced development for children, regardless of their family structure.

The examination of psychological research and case studies provided a deeper understanding of the impact of family dynamics on individual well-being and development.

The exploration of attachment theory and the influence of parental involvement on academic achievement underscored the pivotal role of the family unit in shaping the academic, social, and emotional facets of a child’s life.

Finally, in reflecting on the diverse narratives, theories, and research studies, we recognize the inherent complexity and diversity of family life. The nuclear family, while a prevalent and influential structure, is but one piece of the intricate mosaic of family forms.

It is essential to appreciate the variety of familial experiences and continue exploring the ever-evolving dynamics of family life in our changing world.

The nuclear family remains a significant and influential structure, shaping the lives of its members and the fabric of societies.

Through continuous exploration, understanding, and adaptability, we can celebrate the diversity of family forms and work towards fostering supportive, inclusive environments for all families, nuclear and beyond.

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• Golden Child Syndrome (Definition + Examples)
• Attachment Styles Theory (Free Test)
• John Bowlby Biography - Contributions To Psychology
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December 23, 2013

The real roots of the nuclear family.

• The nuclear family wasn't born after the Industrial Revolution--it predominated in England even in the 13th century. Tweet This
• The nuclear family is more adaptable and more child-centered than the traditional extended family clan. Tweet This

Though much of the public seems unaware of it, family scholars believe that—generally speaking—children are best off growing up with their two married parents. These are the children most likely to get the education crucial for maintaining a middle-class life in an advanced economy, to remain stably employed, and to marry and raise their own children to go on and do the same.

But it is not well understood  why  the married couple—or nuclear family—works so well for kids. The most intriguing explanation I’ve seen can be found in a little-known 2002 book by the sociologist Brigitte Berger:  The Family in the Modern Age . It recalls an old-fashioned era of sociology. There are no charts, regressions, or metrics; it is, rather, an exposition of economic, social, and demographic history. Yet it manages to anticipate and explain what today’s empirically grounded sociologists have repeatedly discovered about families and child wellbeing.

And so to Berger’s history: Not so long ago, family scholars labored under the assumption, half-Marxist, half-“functionalist,” that before the Industrial Revolution, the extended family was the norm in the Western world. There was more than a little romanticism associated with this view: extended families were imagined to have lived in warm, cohesive rural communities where men and women worked together on farms or in small cottage industries. That way of life, went the thinking, ended when industrialization wrenched rural folk away from their cottages and villages into the teeming, anonymous city, sent men into the factories, and consigned women to domestic drudgery. Worse, by upending the household economy, the Industrial Revolution seriously weakened the family. The nuclear family, it was believed, was evidence of family decline.

The nuclear family was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.

But by the second half of the twentieth century, one by one these assumptions were overturned. First to go was the alleged prevalence of the extended family. Combing through English parish records and other demographic sources, historians like Peter Laslett and Alan MacFarlane discovered that the nuclear family—a mother, father and child(ren) in a “simple house,” as Laslett put it—was the dominant arrangement in England stretching back to the thirteenth century.

Rather than remaining in or marrying into the family home, as was the case in Southern Europe and many parts of Asia and the Middle East, young couples in England were expected to establish their own household. That meant that men and women married later than in other parts of the world, only after they had saved enough money to set up an independent home. By the time they were ready to tie the knot, their own parents were often deceased, making multi-generational households a relative rarity.

Far from being weaker than an extended family clan, Berger shows, the ordinary nuclear family was able to adapt superbly to changing economic and political realities. In fact, the family arrangement so common to England helps explain why it and other nations of northwest Europe were the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, the launching ground for modern affluence. The young nuclear family had to be flexible and mobile as it searched for opportunity and property. Forced to rely on their own ingenuity, its members also needed to plan for the future and develop bourgeois habits of work and saving.

These habits were of little use to the idle, landed rich who were wedded to, and defined by, the ancestral property: think  Downton Abbey . Similarly, in extended families, a newly married couple was required to move in with the larger maternal or paternal clan, and to work the family land or maintain the family trade. Under those circumstances, people, particularly women, married young, generally before 20. Between their youth and dependence, the couple was not capable of becoming effective strivers in a changing economy.

Another less appreciated advantage to the nuclear family: it was uniquely child-centered.

These observations are not unique to  The Family in the Modern Age . But Berger finds another less appreciated advantage to the nuclear family: it was uniquely child-centered. In societies that rely on extended families, young women had plenty of time to have five or more children. The older brides of northwest Europe, on the other hand, had fewer fertile years ahead of them and smaller families, which enabled them to provide more focused attention on each child. Their children became part of a household already steeped in an ethos of hard work, future-mindedness, and ingenuity. This prepared them to take advantage of the new modes of labor introduced by the Industrial Revolution, which would eventually create an urbanized middle class.

Over time, with the increasing complexity of the labor market and the arrival of mass schooling, forward-thinking, child-centered parents were best equipped to organize themselves around what Berger calls “the family’s great educational mission.” Extended and clan families under the control of an older generation would be less adaptive since grandparents were more likely to bring up baby the old-fashioned way; larger families, meanwhile, tended to encourage older children to take charge of their younger siblings.

So how does all of this help us understand today’s debates about married couple vs. single-parent families? Researchers find that children growing up with two married parents are more likely to develop “soft skills” like self-control and perseverance that are more crucial than ever to school and labor-market success. Some of this could be chalked up to the logistical problems faced by a single parent.

But if we follow the logic of Berger’s history, another explanation presents itself: the children of married couples are internalizing their parents’ bourgeois aspirations and child-centeredness, both of which lie deep in the bones of the institution they have chosen to enter. Contemporary parents continue to marry late—at least those who do marry—and only after they are equipped to teach their kids the skills that they themselves have already learned. Their parenting style can be described as “concerted cultivation”: they devote great time and attention to developing their children’s skills. Single parents tend to be younger, less-educated, and more inclined to believe in the child’s “natural growth,” to use another of  Annette Lareau’s  terms.

Helicopter parents with their obsessive interest in their children’s physical, emotional, and cognitive development are the latest, if occasionally absurd, personification of values with strong historical roots. But, as it has for centuries now, their child-centeredness and future-oriented planning appears to be paying off.

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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.

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nuclear family

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• The Bowen Center for the Study of the Family - Nuclear Family Emotional Process
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nuclear family , in sociology and anthropology , a group of people who are united by ties of partnership and parenthood and consisting of a pair of adults and their socially recognized children. Typically, but not always, the adults in a nuclear family are married. Although such couples are most often a man and a woman, the definition of the nuclear family has expanded with the advent of same-sex marriage . Children in a nuclear family may be the couple’s biological or adopted offspring.

Thus defined, the nuclear family was once widely held to be the most basic and universal form of social organization. Anthropological research, however, has illuminated so much variability of this form that it is safer to assume that what is universal is a “nuclear family complex” in which the roles of husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, brother, and sister are embodied by people whose biological relationships do not necessarily conform to the Western definitions of these terms. In matrilineal societies, for example, a child may be the responsibility not of his biological genitor but of his mother’s brother, who fulfills the roles typical of Western fatherhood.

Closely related in form to the predominant nuclear-family unit are the conjugal family and the consanguineal family. As its name implies, the conjugal family is knit together primarily by the marriage tie and consists of mother, father, their children, and some close relatives. The consanguineal family, on the other hand, typically groups itself around a unilineal descent group known as a lineage , a form that reckons kinship through either the father’s or the mother’s line but not both. Whether a culture is patrilineal or matrilineal, a consanguineal family comprises lineage relatives and consists of parents, their children, and their children’s children. Rules regarding lineage exogamy , or out-marriage, are common in these groups; within a given community , marriages thus create cross-cutting social and political ties between lineages.

The stability of the conjugal family depends on the quality of the marriage of the husband and wife, a relationship that is more emphasized in the kinds of industrialized, highly mobile societies that frequently demand that people reside away from their kin groups. The consanguineal family derives its stability from its corporate nature and its permanence, as its relationships emphasize the perpetuation of the line.

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• v.376(1827); June 21, 2021

The male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ human family, and promotion of this myth may have adverse health consequences

Rebecca sear.

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK

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This article has no additional data.

The importance of social support for parental and child health and wellbeing is not yet sufficiently widely recognized. The widespread myth in Western contexts that the male breadwinner–female homemaker nuclear family is the ‘traditional’ family structure leads to a focus on mothers alone as the individuals with responsibility for child wellbeing. Inaccurate perceptions about the family have the potential to distort academic research and public perceptions, and hamper attempts to improve parental and child health. These perceptions may have arisen partly from academic research in disciplines that focus on the Western middle classes, where this particular family form was idealized in the mid-twentieth century, when many of these disciplines were developing their foundational research. By contrast, evidence from disciplines that take a cross-cultural or historical perspective shows that in most human societies, multiple individuals beyond the mother are typically involved in raising children: in evolutionary anthropology, it is now widely accepted that we have evolved a strategy of cooperative reproduction. Expecting mothers to care for children with little support, while expecting fathers to provide for their families with little support, is, therefore, likely to lead to adverse health consequences for mothers, fathers and children. Incorporating evidence-based evolutionary, and anthropological, perspectives into research on health is vital if we are to ensure the wellbeing of individuals across a wide range of contexts.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘Multidisciplinary perspectives on social support and maternal–child health’.

1.  Introduction

To misquote John Donne ‘no woman is an island’, able to raise children alone. In evolutionary anthropology, it is now widely accepted that we are a species that practises cooperative reproduction: throughout human history, children have been raised by cooperative networks of individuals [ 1 , 2 ]. In Western contexts, this idea does not yet appear to be particularly widespread much beyond anthropology, either in academia, in popular culture or among policy-makers. Instead, the ‘traditional’ family is widely regarded to be a nuclear family, where the husband–wife unit is assumed to be economically autonomous and responsible for raising children with little help, with an extreme sexual division of labour in which men are solely responsible for ‘breadwinning’ and women ‘homemaking’. In reality, across most societies, the husband–wife unit is rarely autonomous, but is instead engaged in extensive cooperative relationships with other individuals, particularly other family members. These include extensive help with raising children. The male breadwinner–female homemaker division of labour is also unusual. While there is often a sexual division of labour, such that women and men do not have exactly the same roles (for example, women do typically spend more time in childcare), childcare is not the exclusive preserve of women in most societies and, even more so, productive labour is not the exclusive preserve of men.

Inaccurate assumptions about the ‘traditional’ human family matter because they are reflected in academic research, policy and health interventions, and popular discussions, meaning they have the potential to distort research, hamper attempts to improve health and wellbeing, and feed into problematic political narratives. These assumptions also spread into research and public health interventions in the Global South, given the loudness of the Global North's voice in these arenas. Such assumptions are particularly problematic because of the ease with which ‘traditional’ becomes ‘natural’ and ‘good’, despite endless repetition of the dangers of the naturalistic and is/ought fallacies. Behaviour that is ‘natural’ or that is typically performed is not necessarily always the ‘right’ behaviour, but moral judgements are frequently made about family form, likely because of the importance of family in human lives. To avoid hampering research, public health and policy, and misinforming popular culture, it is important, therefore, to promote an accurate picture of what the human family actually looks like worldwide, emphasizing the diversity of family forms in which children can be successfully raised.

2.  Where does the idea that the ‘traditional’ human family is a male breadwinner nuclear family come from?

If the male breadwinner nuclear family is a relatively unusual family form, then where does the idea that it is the ‘traditional’ family come from? Evolutionary researchers need to bear some responsibility for promoting this view. Social norms surrounding the family and gender roles undoubtedly have complex origins, but in popular discourse in the West, they are often given an evolutionary justification; for example, the male breadwinner–female homemaker family may be considered the ‘natural’ way of things because of the assumption that women are biologically designed to bear and raise children, while men provide for them. This view unfortunately does appear in some evolutionary research, particularly from the mid-to-late twentieth century. For example, ‘Man the Hunter’ was an influential conference and subsequent book in the 1960s which promoted a vision of an evolutionary past in which hunting by men and provisioning of women and children was of key importance in human evolution [ 3 ]. Lovejoy's aptly titled 1981 paper ‘The origin of man’ extrapolated this vision beyond male provisioning into the claim that female homemaking also had a long history: ‘the nuclear family …may have [its] ultimate origin long before the dawn of the Pleistocene’ [ 4 , p. 348]. There were always some voices in evolutionary social science emphasizing the importance of the extended family, and recent decades have seen an explosion of evolutionary anthropological literature providing evidence that male breadwinner nuclear families are far from ‘traditional’ (see the next section), but even in 2020, some evolutionary psychologists are still publishing papers that explicitly refer to this family form as ‘traditional’. Given that this idea is still being (inaccurately) promoted in some areas of the evolutionary behavioural sciences, it is not too surprising that there should still be a popular perception that the male breadwinner family is ‘traditional’.

Some social sciences also need to shoulder responsibility for promoting the view that the male breadwinner nuclear family is ‘traditional’. Research on the family by the economist Gary Becker, which has been highly influential far beyond economics, assumes the nuclear family is the organizational unit on which economic production is focused. In his widely read A treatise on the family , he explicitly attributed household specialization to biological differences between the sexes: ‘The most pervasive division [of labour] is between married women, who traditionally have devoted most of their time to childbearing and other domestic activities, and married men, who have hunted, soldiered, farmed, and engaged in other “market” activities’ [ 5 , p. 30]. He even referred to men in the household and women in the labour market as a ‘deviant division of labour’ [ 5 , p. 40], though he backtracked on biological differences as the cause of household specialization in domestic or market work in other writings [ 6 ]. Despite acknowledging the important economic contributions of children to the household in some societies, he also did not appear to be aware of the considerable support that mothers receive for childrearing: ‘over the years most households in Western and Eastern societies have been headed by married men and women who raise their own children’ [ 5 , p. 80].

In much of sociology and demography too, there seems to be a pervasive assumption that the male breadwinner nuclear family is the norm: changes in family structure that have happened in (some sections of) Western populations since the Second World War, such as increasing female labour force participation, childbearing outside of marriage and decreasing marriage rates, have been described as the ‘decline’ of the family [ 7 ] and ‘the earthquake that shuddered through the American family in the past 20 years’ [ 8 , p. 451]. While these ideas may have been partly influenced by Becker's views on the ‘traditional' nature of the male breadwinner nuclear family [ 5 ], they may also arise from work by sociologists such as Talcott Parsons. Parsons, while acknowledging that other family forms existed, concluded that the ‘isolated' male breadwinner nuclear family was best suited to (the most ‘natural’ in?) industrialized societies (e.g. [ 9 ]). These ideas about late twentieth century ‘declines' in the family led to concerns about mothers ‘abandoning’ their children by going out to work, though subsequently demographers were ‘perplexed’ that this did not seem to have the expected catastrophic consequences for child wellbeing [ 10 ]. McLanahan's widely cited ‘diverging destinies’ framework in demography, however, does argue that a shift away from ‘traditional’ marriages—of which the mainstay is ‘gender-role specialization’—is having adverse effects on children. Similar assumptions about the importance of mothers dedicating themselves exclusively to childrearing, influenced by Bowlby's mid-twentieth century evolutionary work on ‘attachment’, are made in psychology, where the responsibility for children's development and success is typically placed squarely in mothers' laps [ 11 ].

What all of these lines of research that emphasize the male breadwinner nuclear family have in common is that they arose shortly after the Second World War, as many academic disciplines burgeoned. It was during this time period that the idealization of the male breadwinner nuclear family reached its zenith in the West. This family form seems to have been deliberately promoted by some governments as a way to get women out of the labour force immediately after the Second World War in order to ensure jobs were available for returning servicemen [ 11 ]. This promotion was made easier by the rise of new forms of mass media such as television, and the rise of powerful media corporations, which allowed this family form to be stamped on the consciousness of academics and the general public alike [ 12 , 13 ]. Academic researchers responsible for some foundational work in various disciplines during this period may have drawn conclusions about what is the ‘traditional’ or ‘natural’ human family from the family arrangements in which they grew up and raised their own children, and that they saw represented in the media. These ideas have since been influential in the development of these academic disciplines. Further, the perverse incentives in academia that encourage academics to stay within their disciplinary lanes mean that there may be little interaction between disciplines that draw conclusions about the ‘traditional’ family from a particular context and time period and those that might have different perspectives on the family, such as anthropology or history. The next two sections review research from these latter disciplines to show that the male breadwinner nuclear family, to the extent that it exists at all, is likely relatively novel in human history.

3.  What does the ‘traditional’ human family actually look like?

A more accurate picture of the human family is one of flexibility. Anthropology, including evolutionary anthropology, has produced a large body of work on family structure and the division of labour within families from cultures worldwide. There are some features of the male breadwinner nuclear family that are common worldwide: the tendency to form pair-bonds between individuals who work together to raise children, and the tendency for women to devote more time to childrearing than men. But these pair-bonds are not always lifelong, exclusive or co-residential, and do not necessarily involve only the parents of the children [ 14 ]; nor are children always raised by their own parents [ 15 , 16 ]. Greater emphasis on childrearing among women also does not mean that exclusive female domesticity automatically follows. For mothers across species and in most human societies, ‘childrearing’ involves making sure children are fed, which, for our species, means women typically work in productive labour to produce food, alongside other family members. What is particularly missing from the ‘traditional’ view of the family is acknowledgement of cooperative relationships beyond the parents: the food that men and women produce is not necessarily used to feed their own children, but shared more widely with both extended family and other group members. The extended family and other group members also share other tasks needed to raise children successfully, such as direct childcare.

It is now widely accepted in evolutionary anthropology that humans have evolved a cooperative strategy of reproduction. In comparison with other apes, we humans bear a relatively large number of children in quick succession, and our children are dependent on adult provisioning for an unusually long time. This creates a heavy burden of care since mothers simultaneously have multiple dependent children—a burden mothers cannot manage alone, as other ape mothers tend to do. We are also a species that relies heavily on social learning, and other family and group members provide support for children to develop the skills necessary in adulthood, both for productive work and for raising children. These characteristics of our species mean that we adopt a reproductive strategy that involves an unusually high degree of investment from fathers, compared with other mammals. But paternal investment is not universal nor necessarily sufficient [ 17 ], so that typically multiple other individuals are also involved in raising children, though exactly who is involved in childraising varies between societies [ 1 , 18 – 21 ].

Evidence both for the significant contributions of women to the family diet and of a cooperative reproduction strategy come from data on production patterns across the life course, i.e. how much individuals of different sex and age contribute to the diet, in terms of number of calories produced. Across subsistence societies—those that are entirely or very largely self-sufficient in producing food—women typically contribute a substantial proportion of calories to the diet. On average, female contributions hover slightly below 50% [ 22 , 23 ], though these patterns do vary between populations: there are some societies in which women produce few calories, but there are also some in which women contribute the majority of food produced [ 24 – 27 ]. Analyses of how both production and consumption patterns vary across the life course also demonstrate that both sexes tend to remain net producers, producing more calories than they consume, until late in life [ 28 – 30 ]. The excess food they produce is then used to help support their existing children and grandchildren.

Such intergenerational support from the grandparental generation is common worldwide, and not just in terms of providing children with food. Grandparents provide a range of other types of support to their adult children and grandchildren, including direct childcare, and help with domestic work, as well as emotional support and advice. Aubel's reviews of the literature in lower- and middle-income countries illustrate the influential role that grandmothers and older women have as advisors and carers around the perinatal period and in child feeding [ 31 , 32 ]. Another recent literature review assessed the evidence for the impact of grandparental investment (measured by coresidence, caregiving, financial and other support) on grandchild outcomes (including physical health, socio-emotional wellbeing and cognitive development) [ 33 ]. These associations were quite heterogeneous, with the exception that studies on cognitive development tended to show beneficial associations between grandparental investment and child outcomes. An earlier literature review suggested that the presence of grandmothers, particularly maternal grandmothers, was associated with higher child survival in some settings [ 34 , 35 ].

These reviews on grandparents and child outcomes do need to be interpreted cautiously, as few studies on the topic have used methods that provide evidence for a causal association between grandparental presence or investment and grandchild outcomes (but see [ 36 , 37 ]). Associations are also not always positive, at least when public health metrics are used. For example, some studies have found that grandparental involvement tends to be positively associated with child BMI in high- or middle-income contexts, meaning that higher rates of ‘over-nutrition’ may be seen in such children. These findings could be interpreted as grandparents trying to support their children and grandchildren, even if these attempts are not in accord with public health recommendations (see also [ 38 , 39 ]). A further difficulty is that the non-maternal childcare literature often takes a narrow perspective, with a heavy focus on the grandmother—possibly influenced by the abundance of grandparents in the West, because of higher longevity (though grandparents are not a novel phenomenon: [ 40 ]). But our cooperative reproduction strategy is a flexible one, with mothers seeking help where available. If grandmothers are not available, mothers may turn to other carers instead, meaning that children without grandmothers may not appear to be any worse off than those with grandmothers [ 41 – 43 ]. Nevertheless, these reviews do present clear evidence that grandparents provide many different types of support to their children and grandchildren across a wide range of contexts worldwide, supporting the hypothesis that childraising requires cooperation in our species.

Despite the idealization of the nuclear family and emphasis on mother-as-carer in the West, cooperative reproduction is also seen in these societies. Recent research has shown that high proportions of grandparents in Europe provide childcare for their grandchildren [ 44 ], as well as emotional support, advice and transfers of financial resources [ 45 ]—support that has been shown to be sufficient to increase women's labour force participation [ 46 ]. Even in 1959, around the height of the idealization of the male breadwinner family, research that explored intergenerational relations concluded: ‘The answer to the question “The isolated nuclear family, 1959: fact or fiction?” is mostly fiction. Kin ties, especially intergenerational ones, have far more significance than we have been led to believe in the life processes of the urban [US] family’ [ 47 , p. 338].

If the extended family has been so consistently important, then again this begs the question of why is there so much idealization of the nuclear family in the West? Part of the answer may lie in some differences in how cooperative reproduction is practised in higher income, market-integrated populations compared with the subsistence societies humans have lived in for most of our history. In high-income populations, an important component of cooperative childraising involves state-provided or private childcare and schooling (Hughes et al . [ 48 ] highlight how the paid childcare sector is also rapidly growing in lower and middle-income countries). Formal education may not typically be perceived as ‘childcare’, but it provides parents with a safe and socially acceptable place to leave children, where they develop skills needed for adulthood, while parents can engage in productive work. Failure to recognize paid childcare or formal schooling as one plank in our strategy of cooperative reproduction may feed into the perception that parents are solely responsible for raising children. The COVID pandemic may shift these perceptions, as it has clearly highlighted, in their absence, the reliance of parents on schools and childcare facilities.

Intergenerational transfers are also somewhat different between contemporary high income and subsistence societies. In the former, older individuals support their families in many ways and private financial transfers still flow down generations, but older individuals often become economically inactive relatively early in life. The provision of state-provided pensions and healthcare means that net financial transfers flow up generations, once these public transfers are taken into account. This contrasts with subsistence societies, where older individuals remain net producers until near the end of their lives, meaning net transfers of resources flow down generations [ 29 ]. Another notable difference between cooperative reproduction as practised throughout most of human history and in contemporary high-income societies is the role of children. In high-income populations, children are expected to attend school rather than work, but in subsistence societies children make substantial contributions to the family economy by engaging in a range of subsistence and domestic work, including caring for younger siblings or relatives [ 49 – 53 ]. The economic inactivity of both children and the older generation in high-income populations may reinforce ideals about the married couple as the foundational family unit, responsible for caring for both children and their parents even if—in reality—the grandparental generation, at least, is still providing substantial support of various kinds for raising children.

Before moving on to the next section, it is worth noting that there may be some unexpected side effects to our cooperative strategy of reproduction. Hrdy [ 54 ] has suggested that the reason that humans and callitrichids (marmosets and tamarins) share the relatively unusual characteristic among primates of maternal infanticide is because both are cooperative breeders. In the absence of helpers, it may be better for mothers to end investment in a particular offspring and wait for a time when help is available to attempt to raise a child. Our cooperative strategy of reproduction might therefore help explain the contingent nature of mother love, as described by Hrdy [ 55 ], by anthropologists such as Scheper-Hughes [ 56 ] and by historians such as Badinter [ 57 ], whereby mothers do not always lavish unconditional love on their children, but might withdraw or reduce investment under some circumstances. Our cooperative strategy of reproduction also opens up the possibility of conflict within the family. If family members cooperate to raise children then this means that family resources are shared between family members, who may then compete over access to these resources [ 58 – 60 ]. It is important to remember that our cooperative reproductive strategy, though it does suggest supportive relationships are often seen between mothers and other family, does not paint an entirely rosy picture of unconditional love and devotion between all family members.

4.  Male breadwinning appears to be relatively novel in human history

So research in anthropology has presented clear evidence that the male breadwinner nuclear family is not the ‘traditional’ family form, in that, across societies, women mostly work and parents typically receive considerable support for childrearing. Nevertheless, there is variation between societies in exactly what the human family looks like, with some conforming a little more closely to the male breadwinner nuclear family model than others—though, as described above, even those that look more like isolated nuclear families typically receive a lot of ‘hidden’ support for raising children. Historical disciplines have contributed to this discussion by demonstrating that male breadwinning appears to be relatively novel in our history; the rise of male breadwinning seems to be associated with industrialization in Western Europe [ 61 – 64 ]. In most subsistence economies, economic contributions of women and children are vital to family success; the exceptions, where women contribute relatively few calories to the diet, typically involve cooperation between men to produce food [ 65 ]. Male breadwinning is a strategy that is often inefficient—wasting the potential economic contributions of women and children—and risky—given that death, incapacity or desertion of the breadwinner endangers the mother and children left behind, if they have no means to support themselves. In Europe, in recent centuries, a combination of increasing agricultural productivity, wealth extracted from colonies and the industrial revolution meant that market economies grew and standards of living rose. This made a male breadwinning strategy more feasible, since it relies on the breadwinner being able to bring in a sufficiently high and reliable flow of resources to support an entire family.

This broad brush overview does hide considerable variation in family structure in the industrializing West, though: in more economically disadvantaged regions and groups, male breadwinning may never have gained a strong foothold, because it requires a certain level of resources and security [ 66 ]. The tendency of academics to come from the kind of affluent families in which male breadwinning is feasible, incidentally, is likely another reason why some academic research is particularly fixated on this family form. Once established in those economically advantaged regions and families, historians have suggested that the male breadwinner norm was then exported to other parts of the world from the West [ 63 ]. In parts of Africa, for example, there is evidence that the male breadwinner norm was introduced by colonial authorities and by the Christian missionaries who accompanied colonization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries [ 67 ]. Elsewhere, in South Asia, for example, industrialization may also have led to the emergence of a male breadwinner norm, but through a slightly different trajectory from that in Europe, with a progressive differentiation of men's and women's work and devaluation of women's work [ 68 ].

Changing economic conditions may well have been the catalyst for a shift towards male breadwinning in Western Europe, but there has been a long-standing debate as to whether some elements of the nuclear family form—notably residence patterns that involve nuclear families residing apart from extended family members—may have predated industrialization in this part of the world [ 69 – 71 ]. Henrich has recently contributed to this debate by arguing that the Christian church was responsible for unusual European marriage patterns which extend back several centuries, where couples tended to marry late and formed independent households after marriage. In particular, the Church banned polygyny and discouraged extended families and strong kinship networks ([ 72 ], but see [ 73 ]). This may have resulted in a shift towards nuclear families, and away from coresidence with extended family members, but these nuclear families were not ‘isolated’ in the sense that mothers and fathers provided, and cared, entirely for their own children. Domestic servants (hired helpers at the nest) were commonly employed in households in historical Europe, suggesting that support for childrearing from non-kin may have a relatively long history in Europe [ 74 ].

Returning to the catalyst of industrialization, this allowed not only sufficient income for a male breadwinner strategy to become more feasible, but also a clear public/private divide, as productive work increasingly took place outside the home. This meant a separation of ‘breadwinner’ and ‘homemaker’ roles, whereas in subsistence economies, work and home lives are typically more blurred [ 68 ]. This illustrates an important point about the ‘traditional male breadwinner nuclear family’ norm: it is associated not just with a particular division of labour within the household, but also with rigid gender roles [ 75 , 76 ]. This vision of the family is a patriarchal model, in which men's roles are firmly in the public sphere, and they have authority over wives and children; women's roles lie firmly in the private sphere. This model is also associated with idealization of a particular kind of childhood and of motherhood. Children in most societies contributed productively to the family economy [ 77 , 78 ], because their help was a necessary part of our cooperative reproduction strategy, but also because children's work both in raising younger children and in subsistence tasks allowed them to learn the skills needed for adulthood [ 79 , 80 ]. Perceptions of childhood changed during and after the industrial revolution, likely influenced by declining child mortality and the rise of formal education, associated with changing patterns of productive labour. The former meant that raising children successfully became a less stochastic process and so intensive investment in children may have had more of an impact in determining child success. The latter meant children were educated away from the home, so that they may have had less opportunity for contributing to the family economy.

As children's roles in the family changed with industrialization, so did women's. The emergence of the male breadwinner model pushed women into the home, where childhood was being re-interpreted as a period of consumption rather than production. Women's roles, therefore, became focused on being ‘good mothers’ who devoted their energies to caring for husbands and children [ 81 ] . Basu [ 81 ] considers that these new ideals of maternal self-sacrifice—which could be measured, for example, in reduced leisure time for women—also shifted power relations within the family, by ‘clamping down’ on women's autonomy. This is not to suggest that pre-industrial societies were paradises of female empowerment. Patriarchal families existed long before the industrial revolution. But some elements of women's status do seem to track their contributions to subsistence; various lines of evidence suggest that in those subsistence societies where women contribute more productive labour, they have higher status [ 82 ]: for example, higher nutritional status [ 83 ]. The male breadwinner nuclear family represents a family form in which women have little economic power and, potentially, reduced access to support from their families, suggesting the status of women may not be high in societies that idealize this family form.

5.  What are the implications of a male breadwinner isolated nuclear family norm for health and wellbeing?

So, there is considerable evidence that the idea that the ‘traditional’ human family is an isolated nuclear family, in which mothers are solely responsible for childcare and fathers solely responsible for providing for their families, is a myth. Isolated nuclear families, who raise children without help beyond the parental unit, barely seem to exist at all, even in twentieth or twenty-first century Western societies, and male breadwinning is both rare and novel in our history. Myths about the ‘traditional’ family, and what ‘traditional’ maternal and paternal roles should look like, are likely to have real-world implications. The assumption that mothers are primarily responsible for childrearing, that they should sacrifice themselves to invest intensively and over a long period in their children, may put considerable pressure on women to behave in ways compatible with this difficult-to-attain, and novel, ideal of motherhood [ 11 ]. Particularly damaging may be the idea that mothers should be able to cope with relatively little support. Research has shown that new mothers in the UK spend a significant proportion of their time alone with their infants (one study found 38% of mothers spent more than 8 h a day alone, and 34% between 4 and 8 h [ 84 ]). This is a situation that appears to be less than desirable in a social species that relies on cooperation to raise children, and on social learning for developing skills in a wide range of behaviours including parenting. Such isolation and the expectation that mothers should cope with little support is not likely to provide ideal childrearing conditions for either mother or child: for example, prompting maternal guilt where mothers feel they are not living up to this ideal [ 85 , 86 ], increased rates of postnatal depression [ 87 ] and decreased breastfeeding [ 88 ] in the absence of support, and other negative effects on mother's wellbeing [ 89 ].

Assumptions about the adverse effect of the ‘breakdown’ of marriages, which idealize the nuclear family as the best way to raise children, and blame adverse child outcomes on the absence of such a family structure, have also led to government interventions aimed at persuading couples to marry rather than cohabit in the USA [ 90 ]. These interventions tend to focus on socioeconomically disadvantaged groups because such groups have lower rates of marriage than more advantaged groups. A belief underlying these interventions appears to be that if disadvantaged groups can be made to form marital relationships that mirror the family structure of advantaged groups, then their disadvantage will melt away. Such interventions have attracted criticism, because a more effective way of reducing ‘bad family outcomes’ is likely to be to tackle economic disadvantage itself, rather than a marker of disadvantage such as cohabitation [ 91 ]. These marriage interventions also do not work.

Public health initiatives around maternal and child health in lower- and middle-income countries typically also assume a default nuclear family structure in which mothers are largely responsible for the health of their children—this excludes vital support structures such as grandmothers (see [ 92 ]). There are even some perceptions in global health that grandmothers are the ‘guardians of tradition’ [ 93 ] and that, if they have a role at all, it is a role that has the potential for negative maternal and health outcomes, given that the advice of older women may contradict that of public health professionals. This echoes some of the findings from the literature on grandparental investment, which suggests that input from grandparents may not always result in child outcomes that would be approved of by a public health professional. But even if older women's advice does contradict that of public health professionals, they are typically very influential in decisions around maternal and child health, which suggests it is even more important to incorporate older women into public health interventions [ 31 ]. The positive results in the handful of studies that have incorporated grandmothers and older women in public health initiatives suggest this would be a fruitful avenue for improving maternal and child health [ 93 – 96 ], and mental health (Dixon Chibanda's ‘Friendship Bench’ is perhaps the best known example of a successful intervention employing ‘grandmothers’ [ 97 , 98 ]).

Ideologies around the family and ‘traditional’ gender roles feed into political ideologies that promote hierarchies of male dominance over women. Online fora have facilitated the spread of misogynistic movements, including Mens' Rights Activist groups and Incels (involuntary celibates), which are collectively referred to as the ‘manosphere’. These movements use and misuse evolutionary psychology as their theoretical justification, and draw on supposedly biological arguments that women are ‘designed’ to bear and raise children while men are ‘designed’ to do pretty much everything else in society [ 99 , 100 ]. These movements have led to fatal terrorist attacks [ 101 , 102 ]. These ideologies not only present a terrorist threat, but also do not seem to benefit the men who adopt them, given such ideologies sometimes promote ‘men going their own way’ and removing themselves from (female) society [ 103 ]. The cooperative nature of our species suggests that such isolationism may not suit our evolved preferences [ 104 ]. At a less extreme level, the male breadwinner norm promotes ideals of male independence and isolation from others, since it assumes that men should have the ability to entirely provision a wife and children without support, which may feed into gender norms and socialization that have been popularly referred to as ‘toxic masculinity’. These include emphasis on male dominance and self-reliance, and are considered to be detrimental to men, women and children [ 105 ].

Finally, despite the belief in some circles that intensive mothering, and lengthy, dependent childhoods, is optimal for children, the little research on the impact of intensive mothering does not find clear and conclusive evidence that such parenting has substantial positive effects on children [ 106 ]. Such childhoods may even fail to allow children to develop some of the skills they need to succeed in adult life [ 107 ]. Children and adolescents typically lack opportunities to develop parenting skills in Western societies, for example, as they are no longer involved in caring for younger children. Hrdy also cautions us that, if we are a species adapted to a strategy of cooperative reproduction, then mothers raising children with little support from others, and keeping children dependent on mothers for lengthy periods, may hamper children's abilities to develop the social, cognitive and emotional skills they need to succeed in adult society:

If empathy and understanding develop only under particular rearing conditions, and if an ever-increasing proportion of the species fails to encounter those conditions but nevertheless survives to reproduce, it won't matter how valuable the underpinnings for collaboration were in the past. Compassion and the quest for emotional connection will fade away as surely as sight in cave-dwelling fish. [ 1 , p. 239]

6.  Conclusion

Humans are a social species, and our success, our ability to thrive in almost all environments across the globe, is likely related to our cooperative nature [ 108 ]. Hrdy [ 1 , 109 ] suggests that our strategy of cooperative reproduction may even have led to cooperation in other spheres and affected our cognitive evolution, thereby underpinning our success as a species. Contemporary Western society seems in danger of forgetting this, however, and perhaps of encouraging such memory loss in other contexts. Or at least, there is significant idealization of the isolated nuclear family as the ‘traditional’ family in the West, even when mothers do in fact receive support with childcare. It may be the rigid gender roles and stereotypes that are associated with this idealization of the nuclear family that are particularly problematic. Gender roles that expect mothers to be very largely responsible for childcare and men to be able to support families without help may lead to beliefs about what the household division of labour and parenting strategies ‘should’ be and discourage mothers and fathers from adopting strategies that are best suited to their own situations, and from fully accessing all the support they need. A vision of parenting, family life and childhood that both recognizes the cliché that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ and also recognizes that this ‘village’ can encompass considerable diversity may be necessary in order for women, men and children to thrive.

Data accessibility

Competing interests.

I declare I have no competing interests.

This work was funded by the John Templeton Foundation, grant ID 61426.

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The Nuclear Family

Table of Contents

Historical context of the nuclear family, theoretical perspectives on the nuclear family, functional roles of the nuclear family, criticisms of the nuclear family.

• Contemporary Relevance of the Nuclear Family

The concept of the nuclear family has been a cornerstone in sociological discussions, primarily within the contexts of family structures, socialization, and societal norms . The term “nuclear family” traditionally refers to a family unit consisting of two parents and their biological children living together. This essay will delve into the historical context, theoretical frameworks, functional roles, criticisms, and contemporary relevance of the nuclear family, providing a comprehensive understanding suitable for an undergraduate audience.

Early Origins

The origins of the nuclear family can be traced back to pre-industrial societies, where extended family structures were more common. However, the nuclear family as a distinct social unit became more pronounced during the industrial revolution. This period marked a significant shift in family structures, influenced by the changing economic landscape.

Industrialization and Urbanization

The industrial revolution brought about urbanization and the need for a mobile workforce. As a result, the extended family units, which were predominant in agrarian societies, began to fragment. The nuclear family emerged as a more functional unit in urban settings, where smaller households were easier to maintain and more adaptable to the demands of industrial work schedules.

From a functionalist perspective, the nuclear family is seen as a fundamental building block of society. Talcott Parsons , a prominent functionalist sociologist, argued that the nuclear family performs essential functions that contribute to societal stability. These functions include socialization of children, emotional support, and the stabilization of adult personalities. The nuclear family is viewed as a unit that adapts to the needs of an industrial society, providing a stable environment for its members.

Conflict theorists, such as Friedrich Engels , critique the nuclear family from a different angle. Engels argued that the nuclear family emerged alongside private property and capitalism, serving to perpetuate class inequalities . The family unit is seen as a site of power dynamics and economic disparity, where the roles within the family reflect broader societal hierarchies. This perspective highlights how the nuclear family can reinforce social stratification and limit individual freedoms.

Symbolic interactionists focus on the micro-level interactions within the nuclear family. This perspective emphasizes the meanings and definitions that family members attach to their roles and relationships. According to symbolic interactionism , the nuclear family is not a static institution but is constantly shaped and reshaped through daily interactions. This approach highlights the importance of understanding the subjective experiences of family members and how these experiences influence family dynamics.

Socialization

One of the primary functions of the nuclear family is the socialization of children. Socialization is the process through which individuals learn the norms, values , and behaviors necessary for functioning in society. Within the nuclear family, parents play a crucial role in transmitting cultural norms and values to their children, preparing them for participation in the broader social world.

Emotional Support

The nuclear family provides a source of emotional support and stability for its members. This support is essential for the psychological well-being of individuals. The intimate relationships within a nuclear family offer a sense of belonging and security, which can be vital in navigating the complexities of modern life.

Economic Cooperation

Economically, the nuclear family functions as a cooperative unit. Traditionally, the division of labor within the nuclear family has been based on gender roles, with men typically taking on the role of breadwinner and women managing the household. However, these roles have evolved over time, with increasing numbers of dual-income households and more fluid gender roles .

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Mr Edwards has a PhD in sociology and 10 years of experience in sociological knowledge

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The Nuclear Family Is Still Indispensable

Rumors of its demise have been greatly exaggerated—and it remains the stablest environment in which to raise children.

The nuclear family is disintegrating—or so Americans might conclude from what they watch and read. The quintessential nuclear family consists of a married couple raising their children. But from Oscar-winning Marriage Story ’s gut-wrenching portrayal of divorce or the Harvard sociologist Christina Cross’s New York Times op-ed in December, “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home,” discounting the importance of marriage for kids , one might draw the conclusion that marriage is more endangered than ever—and that this might not be such a bad thing.

Meanwhile, the writer David Brooks recently described the post–World War II American concept of family as a historical aberration—a departure from a much older tradition in which parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins all look out for the well-being of children. In an article in The Atlantic bearing the headline “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” Brooks argued that the “nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades.” He sees extended families and what he calls “forged families”—single parents, single adults, and others coming together to support one another and children—as filling the vacuum created by the breakdown of the nuclear family.

David Brooks: The nuclear family was a mistake

Yet the search for alternate forms of family has two major flaws. First, there’s evidence indicating that the nuclear family is, in fact, recovering. Second, a nuclear family headed by two loving married parents remains the most stable and safest environment for raising children.

There are, of course, still reasons for legitimate concern about the state of the American family. Marriage today is less likely to anchor family life in many poor and working-class communities. While a majority of college-educated men and women between 18 and 55 are married, that’s no longer true for the poor (only 26 percent are married) and the working class (39 percent). What’s more, children from these families are markedly less likely to live under the same roof as their biological parents than their peers from better-off backgrounds are.

But there is also ample good news—especially for kids.

Today, the divorce rate is down , having fallen by more than 30 percent since peaking around 1980, in the wake of the divorce revolution. And, since the Great Recession, out-of-wedlock births are now dipping as well . Less divorce and less nonmarital childbearing means that more children are being raised in stable, married families. Since 2014, the share of kids in intact families has begun to climb , reversing a decades-long trend in the opposite direction. And as Brooks noted—citing research that one of us conducted at the University of Virginia —the nuclear family headed by married parents remains a personal ideal even among men and women who harbor no moral objections to alternative family structures.

None of this suggests that scholars and social commentators are wrong to extol the role extended families can play in improving children’s lives. In her New York Times article raising questions about the importance of the two-parent home, Cross hypothesized that living closer to extended family may actually be helping protect black children “against some of the negative effects associated with parental absence from the home.” And, in Brooks’s evocative telling, the alternatives to the nuclear family hold enormous promise: “Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families,” arrangements that “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.”

Grandparents, for example, are sharing homes with children and grandchildren; single adults and single parents are forging novel alliances on websites like CoAbode, where, according to Brooks, “single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home.” These emerging arrangements not only afford people more freedom to choose their own ties that bind, but they also promise to fill the void left in the absence of a strong nuclear family.

Read: The age of grandparents is made of many tragedies

There’s no question that “a dozen pairs of arms” can make lighter work of family life. Society should applaud those who step up to try to rescue adults and children left adrift in a nation where, despite promising trends, many children still grow up outside an intact two-parent family.

But Americans should not presume that society can successfully replace families headed by married parents with models oriented more around kith and kin. Caution is especially warranted as extended families and communities struggle to foster upward mobility or to raise the next generation successfully in circumstances where the family once anchored by marriage has broken down in their midst.

It turns out that the relationship between nuclear families and larger communities is more symbiotic than substitutionary, more interdependent than interchangeable. Whatever the merits of extended or other nonnuclear forms of family life, research has yet to show that they are entirely equipped to shoulder the unique role of a child’s two parents.

Today, most multigenerational households—which include grandparents, parents, and children—contain only one parent. This often occurs because a mother has moved in with her own parent (or the reverse) following a divorce or breakup. According to the sociologist Wendy Wang, 65 percent of multigenerational families include a single parent. But research reveals mixed outcomes for such households.

Sara McLanahan of Princeton University and Gary Sandefur of the University of Wisconsin have found that the average child raised by a “mother and grandmother is doing about the same as the average child raised by a single mother” on outcomes such as dropping out of high school or having a teen birth. And in the absence of both parents, children raised by their extended kin, such as an aunt or uncle, are significantly more likely to have, in the words of one study , “higher levels of internalizing problems”—including loneliness and sadness—compared to their peers raised by married parents. As for other emerging forms of family, such as forged families, there are well-founded reasons for skepticism about the role unrelated adults might play in raising a child. Over the years, study after study has detailed the many possible downsides to introducing unrelated adults, especially men, into children’s lives without the presence of those children’s married parents.

This is because, sadly, adults who are unrelated to children are much more likely to abuse or neglect them than their own parents are. One federal report found that children living in a household with an unrelated adult were about nine times more likely to be physically, sexually, or emotionally abused than children raised in an intact nuclear family. All this is to say that, for kids, it matters if all the pairs of arms raising them include—first and foremost—those of their own parents.

The positive effects of stable marriage and stable nuclear families also spill over. Neighborhoods, towns, and cities are more likely to flourish when they are sustained by lots of married households. The work of the Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson tells us that neighborhoods with many two-parent families are much safer. In his own words : “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor[s] of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.”

Read: What you lose when you gain a spouse

His Harvard colleagues, the economists Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, have drawn similar conclusions about the relationship between the health of the American dream and the presence of two-parent families in a community. Working with a team of scholars, they found that black boys are more likely to achieve upward economic mobility if there are more black fathers in a neighborhood—and more married couples , as well. And for poor children of all races, Chetty and his team have found that the fraction of children with single parents in a given community is the strongest and most robust predictor of economic mobility—or its absence. Children raised in communities with high percentages of single mothers are less likely to move up. In other words, it takes a village—but of married people—to raise the odds that a poor child will have a shot at the American dream.

To be sure, the isolated nuclear family detached from all social support is simply not workable for most people. Married couples raising children—as well as other family forms—are more likely to thrive when they are embedded in strong networks of friends, family, community, and religious congregations .

Likewise, communities are stronger and safer when they include lots of committed married couples. It’s good news, then, that the share of children being raised by their own married parents is on the rise. Extended kin can (and sometimes must) play a greater role in meeting children’s needs. But as any parent knows, when it comes to an inconsolable child, even a “dozen pairs of arms” from the village don’t quite compare to the warm and safe embrace of Mom or Dad.

Nuclear Family Functions In Sociology

Charlotte Nickerson

Research Assistant at Harvard University

Undergraduate at Harvard University

Charlotte Nickerson is a student at Harvard University obsessed with the intersection of mental health, productivity, and design.

Learn about our Editorial Process

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

A nuclear family is a family unit consisting of an adult male and female and dependent children. It is regarded by some sociologists (in particular functionalists) as the basic universal form of family structure.

The (white) nuclear family is sometimes referred to as the cereal packet family, because of its frequent portrayal by advertisers as the norm.

The concept of the nuclear family is thought to have arisen in the Western world during the Industrial Revolution, when families left farms and moved to small towns and cities for work. During this time, young people began to delay marriage and childbearing, living instead with their parents until they had established a career.

Functionalists such as Parsons suggest that the nuclear family replaced the extended family as the dominant form in industrial societies because it provided a better “fit”, and more closely matched the needs of society.

Despite the fact that by 2000 only 21% of all house holds consisted of a married or cohabiting couple with dependent children, the notion of the nuclear family remains central to family ideology.

Sociologists and politicians of the New Right frequently suggest that many social problems in Britain stem from the fact that not enough children are being brought up in stable, two-parent families.

Key Takeaways

• A nuclear family is a family consisting of of 2 generations, husband and wife and immature children who constitute a unit from the rest of the community.
• The term “nuclear family” is commonly used in the United States, where it was first coined by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1955. It has been suggested that the nuclear family is a universal human social grouping.
• Nuclear family is not universal, the structure of the family changes as the needs of the society changes. Pre-industrial families were extended families with multiple generations living together, where as post industrial families needed to be
• However, some scholars argue that the nuclear family is not a natural or inevitable human institution but rather a product of specific historical and cultural circumstances.
• In sociology, the nuclear family has been historically treated as the basic unit of social organization, but this has come into question over the past several decades, as the structure of families has become more and more diverse.

Functions of the Nuclear Family

Marxists believe that the family is a tool of capitalism and its main function is to maintain capitalism and reinforce social inequalities.

According to Marxism, the monogamous nuclear family emerged with capitalism. Before capitalism, traditional and tribal societies were classless and did not have private property.

Instead, property was collectively owned, and this was reflected in family structures.

An isolated nuclear family means that men can confirm whether a child belongs to them and ensure that wealth remains in the family through private inheritance.

Ultimately, however, this arrangement served to reproduce inequality. As the children of the rich grew into wealth, the children of the poor remained. Thus, the nuclear family served to benefit the bourgeois more than the proletariat.

A nuclear family system, one in which nuclear families live by themselves independent from the families they grew up in, is thought to be particularly well adopted to the needs of the American, and many other western economies, for a fluid and mobile labor market (Sussman, 1958).

Patriarchal Ideology

Feminists are critical of the family as a social institutions. They believe that the family is a tool of female oppression and in particular the nuclear family serves the needs of men rather than women.

This is through issues such as unequal division of domestic labour and domestic violence.

Some feminists view the function of the nuclear family as a place where patriarchal values are learned by individuals, which in turn add to the patriarchal society .

Young girls may be socialized to believe that inequality and oppression is a normal part of being a woman and boys are socialized to believe that they are superior and have authority over women.

Feminists often believe that the nuclear family teaches children gender roles which translate to gender roles in wider society.

For instance, girls may learn to accept that being a housewife is the only possible or acceptable role for women. Some feminists also believe that the division of labor is unequal in nuclear families, with women and girls accepting subservient roles in the household.

Murdock: Four Universal Residual Functions

Murdock (1949) claimed that the nuclear family performs four functions that benefit society because they reduce the potential for chaos and conflict and consequently bring about relatively well ordered, structured and predictable societies

Socialization : The family is the primary socializing agent for children. Parents teach their children the norms and values of society.

Economic stability : The family provides economic stability for its members. In many families, both parents work to earn an income.

Reproductive/Procreative : The nuclear family provides new members of society, without which society would cease to exist.

Sexual relationships : The family as an institution also regulates sexual behavior. Many societies, for example, have historically forbidden sex outside the family-creating bond of marriage.

Primary Socialization

According to Parsons (1951), although the nuclear family performs functions that are reduced in comparison to what it did in the past, it is still the only institution that can perform the core functions of primary socialization and the stabilization of adult personalities.

Primary socialization refers to the early period in a person”s life where they learn and develop themselves through interactions and experiences around them. This results in a child learning the attitudes, values, and actions appropriate to individuals as members of a particular culture.

The Stabilization of Adult Personalities

The stabilization of adult personalities, otherwise known as “warm bath theory,” emphasizes the emotional security found within marital relationships.

This stabilization serves to balance out the stresses and strains of life faced by most adults.

In addition, the stabilization of adult personalities within marriage allows adults to act on the child-like dimension of their personality by playing with their children, using their toys, and so forth (Parsons, 1951).

Another factor that aids the stabilization of adult personalities is the sexual division of labor within nuclear families.

Within isolated nuclear families, people are allocated particular roles in order to allow the unit to function correctly. There are the aforementioned expressive and instrumental roles (Parsons, 1951).

Instrumental and Expressive Roles

Murdock argued that nuclear families consist of instrumental and expressive roles . Instrumental roles provide financial support and establish family status, while expressive roles involve providing emotional support and physical care.

In a 20th-century view of the nuclear family, the father is typically the head of the household and is responsible for providing for the family financially. The mother is typically responsible for taking care of the home and raising the children.

Parsons suggested that children needed to grow up in a family in which the instrumental and expressive roles are performed by the respective parents if the children were to develop “stable adult personalities”.

Parsons’ understanding of expressive and instrumental roles was derived from, and constituted a reflection of, middle-class American society in the 1950s.

Disadvantages of the Nuclear Family

Postmodernists have called the nuclear family an inherently fragile structure, prosporous only in a time marked by especially easy to come by home ownership and economic progress during the post-war boom.

Proponents of this view argue that the nuclear family is beset by a number of serious problems. They point to high rates of divorce and single parenthood, as well as to the difficulty many families have in maintaining close relationships (Bengtson, 2001).

Even dynamics as common as sibling rivalry and parent-child differences can place tension on a small family with little contact with other members of an extended family. The lack of a support network can make it difficult for nuclear families to deal with problems, leading to further isolation and feelings of loneliness or helplessness (Bengtson, 2001).

For children in particular, growing up in a nuclear family can be quite difficult. With both parents working full-time, many kids feel neglected or abandoned. In some cases, this can lead to serious behavioral problems.

However, not all families are functional. Some families may be considered dysfunctional due to a variety of factors such as alcoholism, drug addiction, mental illness, physical abuse, or simply a lack of love and communication.

When a family is dysfunctional, it can have a negative impact on the individuals involved as well as on society as a whole. Children from dysfunctional families are more likely to experience problems in school, mental health issues, and substance abuse problems. They may also be more likely to engage in criminal activity (Bertrand, 1962).

Additionally, children in nuclear families often don not have the benefit of learning from extended family members such as grandparents or cousins. They also miss out on the opportunity to develop close relationships with those relatives.

Researchers have denied the functionality of the nuclear family – in the sense of being isolated and socially mobile – since the 1960s (Cervantes, 1965).

Indeed, the family is not an isolated unit but one that is linked to other families through marriage, blood ties, and friendship networks. The family functions within a community of kin and neighbors where information, cultural values, and material resources are exchanged (Friedlander, 1963).

Even though the nuclear family has its own private domain – the home – its members cannot avoid interacting with people outside the immediate family. In reality, then, the nuclear family is embedded in a web of social relations.

The structure of the nuclear family has also been critiqued on economic grounds. Critics argue that the nuclear family is an inefficient way to organize society because it requires duplicating services that could be provided more efficiently by the government or businesses.

For example, instead of each family having its own washing machine, all the families in a neighborhood could share a laundromat. Similarly, daycare, eldercare, and schooling could be provided more efficiently on a community-wide basis rather than by individual families.

The nuclear family is also criticized for being too small to meet all an individual”s needs. In particular, it is argued that the nuclear family cannot provide the same level of emotional support as a larger extended family.

Additionally, because the nuclear family is so small, it is often unable to provide adequate financial support to its members during times of need. This can lead to feelings of insecurity and anxiety, particularly among children and older adults (Bengtson, 2001).

The nuclear family has been declining in prevalence since the late 20th century as a result of factors such as increased divorce rates, cohabitation, single-parent households, and same-sex marriage.

Economic stressors  such as the Great Recession, stagnating wages, and the inflation of housing prices have also contributed to the decline of the nuclear family through reducing access to isolated housing.

Multigenerational, non-nuclear households are on the rise as a way to reduce costs and the burden of childcare distributed to one person in the household.

The rise of women in the workforce has also lessened a need for defined nuclear family roles, as there is less need for a husband to be the sole breadwinner. Another explanation is that people are delaying marriage and childbearing until later  in life, allowing them to develop deeper ties within their birth families and communities. The median age of first marriage in the United States has risen from 20 for women and 23 for men in 1950 to 27 for women and 29 for men in 2018 (Hemez, 2020).

Alternative Family Structures

Non-nuclear families can take on many different forms, including single-parent households, same-sex parents, adoptive parents, childless couples, blended families, and more.

There are a variety of reasons why a family may not be considered nuclear. In some cases, one or both parents may be absent due to death, divorce, or other circumstances. In other instances, the family may simply choose not to live together in a traditional nuclear arrangement.

There are many advantages to non-nuclear families. For example, single-parent households often provide a more nurturing and supportive environment for children than two-parent homes, especially in cases where the family would have otherwise been affected by abuse.

Same-sex parents can provide role models of healthy relationships for their children, and adoptive parents often create tightly-knit bonds with their children that are just as strong as any biological connection.

One historical example of a non-nuclear family is the extensive nuclear family, which is common in many cultures around the world. In an extended family, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all live together in one household.

This arrangement provides support and stability for all members of the family, and offers a built-in network of caretakers for children. Increasingly over the past few decades, a new family structure is taking shape: grandparents raising their grandchildren.

This may be necessary when parents are not available to care for their children, such as by mental or medical or substance abuse issues.

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Nuclear Families, Childhood

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Families with a mother and father who reside together with biologically related children remain a common setting for socializing school-age youngsters in our society. A much debated, but common presumption in the existing scholarship is that these nuclear families are the optimal environments for children against which the efficacy of all other types of families are measured ( Popenoe, 1993 , Popenoe, 1996 ). Observers frequently identify the potential advantages of nuclear families as: (a) parents mutually supporting each other in child-rearing, (b) parents sharing the responsibilities of child-rearing by structuring a division of labor (e.g., traditional or egalitarian role divisions), (c) parents and children profiting from long-term, biologically-based ties that provide continuous support and guidance, and (d) parents and children benefiting from the socioeconomic advantages provided by two adult wage earners. Although the actual realization of these advantages varies widely among nuclear families, this type of family structure has often been studied in reference to how it protects children from developing problem behaviors and how it fosters children’s healthy development.

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Peterson, G.W., Rose, H.A. (2003). Nuclear Families, Childhood. In: Gullotta, T.P., et al. Encyclopedia of Primary Prevention and Health Promotion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0195-4_104

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The Real Roots Of The Nuclear Family

But it is not well understood why the married couple—or nuclear family—works so well for kids. The most intriguing explanation I’ve seen can be found in a little-known 2002 book by the sociologist Brigitte Berger: The Family in the Modern Age . It recalls an old-fashioned era of sociology. There are no charts, regressions, or metrics; it is, rather, an exposition of economic, social, and demographic history. Yet it manages to anticipate and explain what today’s empirically grounded sociologists have repeatedly discovered about families and child wellbeing.

These habits were of little use to the idle, landed rich who were wedded to, and defined by, the ancestral property: think Downton Abbey . Similarly, in extended families, a newly married couple was required to move in with the larger maternal or paternal clan, and to work the family land or maintain the family trade. Under those circumstances, people, particularly women, married young, generally before 20. Between their youth and dependence, the couple was not capable of becoming effective strivers in a changing economy.

These observations are not unique to The Family in the Modern Age . But Berger finds another less appreciated advantage to the nuclear family: it was uniquely child-centered. In societies that rely on extended families, young women had plenty of time to have five or more children. The older brides of northwest Europe, on the other hand, had fewer fertile years ahead of them and smaller families, which enabled them to provide more focused attention on each child. Their children became part of a household already steeped in an ethos of hard work, future-mindedness, and ingenuity. This prepared them to take advantage of the new modes of labor introduced by the Industrial Revolution, which would eventually create an urbanized middle class.

But if we follow the logic of Berger’s history, another explanation presents itself: the children of married couples are internalizing their parents’ bourgeois aspirations and child-centeredness, both of which lie deep in the bones of the institution they have chosen to enter. Contemporary parents continue to marry late—at least those who do marry—and only after they are equipped to teach their kids the skills that they themselves have already learned. Their parenting style can be described as “concerted cultivation”: they devote great time and attention to developing their children’s skills. Single parents tend to be younger, less-educated, and more inclined to believe in the child’s “natural growth,” to use another of Annette Lareau’s terms.

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Beyond the Nuclear Family: Trends in Children Living in Shared Households

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Natasha V. Pilkauskas , Christina Cross; Beyond the Nuclear Family: Trends in Children Living in Shared Households. Demography 1 December 2018; 55 (6): 2283–2297. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0719-y

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Using data from the 1996–2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the 2009–2016 American Community Survey, we examine trends in U.S. children living in shared households (living with adults beyond their nuclear (parent/parent’s partner/sibling) family). We find that although the share of children who lived in a shared household increased over this period, the rise was nearly entirely driven by an increase in three-generation/multigenerational households (coresident grandparent(s), parent(s), and child). In 1996, 5.7 % of children lived in a three-generation household; by 2016, 9.8 % did likewise—more than a 4 percentage point increase. More economically advantaged groups (older, more educated mothers, married households) experienced the largest percentage increase in three-generation coresidence, although correlates of coresidence remained largely stable. Decomposition analyses suggest that the rise in Social Security receipt and changes in parental relationship status (less marriage, more single parenthood) most strongly explained the increase in three-generation households. Given the dramatic rise in three-generation households, more research is needed to understand the consequences of these living arrangements for children, their parents, and their grandparents.

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Factors associated with quality of life among joint and nuclear families: a population-based study

• Fahad Saqib Lodhi 1 , 2 ,
• Unaib Rabbani 3 ,
• Adeel Ahmed Khan 4 ,
• Owais Raza 5 ,
• Kourosh Holakouie-Naieni 2 ,
• Mehdi Yaseri 2 ,
• Umer Farooq 6 &
• Ali Montazeri   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5198-9539 7 , 8  

BMC Public Health volume  21 , Article number:  234 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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Advantages and disadvantages associated with joint and nuclear family systems can affect quality of life (QOL). However, there is scarcity of literature about QOL among joint and nuclear family systems. This study aimed to assess the factors associated with QOL in joint and nuclear family systems.

We conducted a population based cross sectional study in all 52 Union Councils (UCs) of District Abbottabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan from March 2015 to August 2015. Multistage cluster sampling technique was used to select participants from both nuclear and joint family houses. The validated Urdu version of World Health Organization Quality of Life Questionnaire-Brief Version (WHOQOL-BREF) was used to assess quality of life among participants. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to explore the associations of different socio demographic variables with QOL among both family systems. Also a multilevel linear regression using backward analysis to obtain final model for each domain was performed to find out the variables that are associated with QOL score in each of family systems.

A total of 2063 participants were included in this study (51.0% joint family, 49.0% nuclear family) with the response rate of 97.4%. In multiple linear regression analysis of each domain for joint and nuclear family systems, rural residence compared to urban ( p  < 0.001), being female ( p  < 0.001), older age ( p  < 0.001), having comorbidity ( p  < 0.001) and lower socioeconomic status ( p  < 0.001) were found to be a strong predictor of poorer QOL. Furthermore, social capital ( p  < 0.001) had a positive effect on joint and nuclear family QOL scores.

This study was the first of its kind which determined the factors of QOL in joint and nuclear families using the validated Urdu version of WHOQOL-BREF in Pakistan. Male gender, urban residence, younger age, higher socioeconomic status and social capital were positive predictors of QOL score while older age and presence of illness were associated with lower QOL scores among both family systems.

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Introduction

In general family is one of the fundamental units of societies and takes care of the diverse needs of people [ 1 ]. It is also one of the basic sources of providing care to all of its members. Because of this fact elderly persons of the house occupy respectful position in Asian culture. Family system encourages the life of individuals in all aspects which enables them to live happy and productive life [ 2 ]. Culture has been shown to regulate the family network by building family type, family size and form [ 3 , 4 ] and the family functioning by defining barriers, cooperation rules, connection patterns, adequate practices, regulation and ranking in the family [ 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ].

Family is a social group of one or more parents and their children. Family systems refer to members and their interrelationship (structure) with each other. There are different classifications of family systems [ 8 , 9 ]. Most commonly used classification has two types i.e. joint and nuclear family systems [ 10 ]. A nuclear family system is defined as ‘a two generation family consisting of a father and mother and children or a single, possibly widow, parent and his/her children’ [ 11 ]. Similarly, joint or extending family is defined as ‘three or more generations lived together with both vertical and lateral extension having a single line of authority, either patrilineal or matrilineal’ [ 11 ]. A number of advantages and disadvantages associated with each type of family has been reported such as social support, protection during crises, physical space, autonomy a freedom of decision making [ 12 ].

Extent of these systems varies from countries to countries and within countries as well. Traditionally Pakistan had joint family system and bonding within a family. Like other Asian countries, over the time, balance is shifting towards nuclear family system in Pakistan [ 13 ]. Multiple factors are responsible for this shifting trend from joint to nuclear system. These include; financial pressures, decreasing living space, movement for job and rapid urbanization [ 13 ]. It also seems to be an outcome of increasing prosperity. This trend is faster in urban areas than rural areas. The superiority of one of these systems is a matter of debate these days. The researchers are on a quest for evidence based information regarding the current debate about the quality of life of an individual, based on a family system [ 14 ].

In Pakistan, a large number of the aged people depend on their family especially on their children or grandchildren for physical, communal and financial support [ 2 ] which is more convenient in joint families. It was recommended by Mason (1992) that urbanization is expected to negatively affect the family’s capacity and willingness for care of the elderly and it will also decrease the chances of living grown up children with their parents [ 15 ]. Studies from Asian countries have shown that most of the help for the elderly people comes from their home by their children/grandchildren [ 16 , 17 ].

Limited studies have been conducted on different study populations that have assessed the predictors of quality of life. A study conducted among elderly population in India reported that occupation, higher income, 60–69 years age group, staying with partner and absence of co-morbidity were found to be the determinants of better QOL [ 18 ]. Studies from Kuwait and Lebanon also reported that female gender, older age, social disadvantage, and presence of anxiety/ depression were associated with poor QOL [ 19 , 20 ]. Although all of the works done before were on health-related QOL all around the world, there are no such study exploring the predictors of quality of life of people who live in nuclear or joint family system. Our study presented the predictors of quality of life scores in joint and nuclear family systems in Pakistani general population.

Study design and setting

We conducted a population based cross sectional study in all 52 Union Councils of District Abbottabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan from March 2015 to August 2015. We recruited 2063 participants for our study. Abbottabad is the main district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan having more than 1.2 million population living in 52 union councils. The primary language spoken here is Hindko (used by 94% of the rural population and 75% of urban residents) followed by Urdu which is also spoken and understood in rural & urban areas [ 21 ].

Sample size

We used the Statulator, an online statistical calculator for sample size determination [ 22 ]. Assuming a standard deviation of 12 units (derived from pilot study) and a design effect (DEFF) of 2, the study would require a sample size of 969 for each group (i.e. a total sample size of 1938, assuming equal group sizes), to achieve a power of 90% at 5% significance level (two sided) for detecting a true difference of 2.5 points in quality of life score between joint and nuclear family systems.

Sampling procedure

Participants were selected from all union councils (UCs) of District Abbottabad. Multistage cluster sampling technique was employed in this study. Each union council was further divided into several blocks called Mohallah. We did proportionate sampling according to the 1998 population census [ 23 ] of UCs for the selection of Mohallah & on the next stage households. In the first stage we randomly selected these blocks (Mohallah) in each of the UC from a list by using simple random sampling technique. In the next stage we selected households in that selected block by using a random sampling technique again. The total number of houses selected in each block was also proportional to the population size of respective block. For the selection of family type, from the list of household of each block, we made a list of joint & nuclear family system households and enrolled equal number of houses from both family types. A simple random sampling technique was used for the selection of person (≥18 years) from each house. Simple random sampling was done by applying the lottery method for selecting the ≥18 year’s participant for the study. The inclusion criteria used for selection of individual were age greater than 18 years and permanent resident of union council for at least 5 years. Guests and temporary residents were excluded from the study.

We used the World Health Organization Quality of Life Questionnaire-Brief version (WHOQOL-BREF) for measuring quality of life. It is in public domain and contains 26-items that covers four domains of QOL (psychological 6 items, physical 7 items, social relationships 3 items and environmental 8 items). Each question scored on a scale from one to five, with high score indicating good QOL with the exception of three questions, which include pain and discomfort, need for medical treatment and negative feelings [ 24 ]. The seven items included in the physical health domain were mobility, daily life activities, pain, sleep, functional capacity and energy. The psychological domain measured negative thinking, self-image, positive approach, self-esteem, mindset, ability to learn, memory, consolidation, religion and the psychic conditions. Questions such as social support, sex-life and personal relationship come under the social relationship domain. The environmental health domain contains questions on financial assets, security, health and social services, living in natural environment, opportunities for advance learning experience, relaxation, and natural environment (air, noise, pollution and transportation) [ 25 ]. The total raw score for these four dimensions were transformed into 0 to 100 scale according to the standard procedure defined in WHO QOL user manual [ 24 ], and then analysis of this reconstruct score was done. Psychometric properties and validation of this WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire was done in the national language “Urdu”. The Cronbach’s alpha for each of four domains were 0.78, 0.71, 0.73 and 0.65, respectively [ 26 ]. To assess the feasibility and clarity of the items, a pilot study was conducted on 30 individuals conveniently selected from the study area.

We also developed a structured demographic questionnaire which included variables such as age, gender, marital status, type of family (joint and nuclear), residence type (urban and rural), house ownership (owner, not owner), respondent education (no education, madrassa, can read/write, primary- up to grade 5, secondary education-up to grade 12 and tertiary-up to grade 16 or above), working status (employed, unemployed and retired).

The socio-economic characteristics were assessed by taking household conditions, sources of drinking water, sanitation facilities, availability of electricity, housing facilitates, possession of durable goods, mean of transport, inventory of house hold and personal items such as chairs, clocks, buckets, radios, television sets, fans, stoves or cookers, cars, and telephones. This list was composed of 21 such items used in the Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey 2013 [ 27 ]. Wealth index was measured by an index constructed from principle component analysis (PCA) [ 28 ] of items indicating ownership of household durables and dwelling characteristics.

The World Bank’s Social Capital Integrated Questionnaire (SC-IQ) was also used to study social capital among families. It is an open-domain questionnaire and consists of 27 questions in six domains [ 29 ]. Of these five questions on overall trust, trust in local government, trust in central government, community cooperation and safety at home were selected and used in this study. These questions were translated by the research team into Urdu and then back translated into English by independent bilingual expert to assess the validity of the translation. The internal consistency of the items as assessed by the Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was found to be acceptable (alpha = 0.64). The concurrent validity as assessed by correlation between the trust subscale of the SC-IQ and the social relationship of the WHOQOL-BREF showed satisfactory result (r = 0.74).

Data collection

One-day training session was conducted for administering the questionnaires prior to data collection for lady health workers of all UCs by principal investigator. In 1994, Pakistan’s Ministry of Health (MOH) implemented the Lady Health Worker Program (LHWP) as part of a national strategy to reduce poverty and improve health by bringing health services to the doorsteps of underserved communities. Lady health workers are out reach health workers who provide preventive and health promotion services specially for maternal and child health issues [ 30 ]. The questionnaire was administered through face to face interviews in the households by trained lady health workers of that union council. To ensure privacy and confidentiality, interviews were conducted in an independent room or area separate from other members of the family.

Statistical analysis

The data was analyzed using the Stata version 13.0 (Stata Corp, College Station, TX, USA). First, we conducted descriptive analyses such as frequencies, proportions and means. Then, we carried out univariate linear regression analyses with domain scores as dependent and other variables as independent variables. Next, in the multivariate analysis, we included all independent variables and used stepwise backward approach to eliminate variables with a p value > 0.05. Finally, multi-level analysis was performed with two –level continuous random intercept model with individuals nested within clusters was applied to explore the variability explained by individuals and cluster level variables taking the correlated nature of data into account. P -value of < 0.05 was considered as significant.

Demographic characteristic of study participants

A total of 2116 households were approached. Of these, 56 refused (non-response 2.64%) to participate in this study giving a total number of 2063 [1053 (51.04%) belonged to joint family system and 1010 (48.6%) to nuclear family]. Younger (18–30 years) and elderly (> 50 years) were more in joint families (39%) and (20%) respectively compared to (20%) and (10%) in nuclear families. Educational status of the participants was comparable in two groups as proportions of individuals with no education were 15.5% and 15.7 in joint and nuclear families respectively. Majority were living in their own houses 849 (80.5%) in joint and 750 (74.3%) in nuclear family. A higher proportion of the participants (80.5%) in joint family groups owned a house compared to (71%) in nuclear family group. Proportions of employed persons were (56.5%) in joint families and (56.1%) in nuclear families. Higher proportion of the participant were satisfied in living in joint family system (87.5%) compared to (81%) in nuclear family system (Table  1 ).

Joint family system WHO QOL-BREF scores

Table  2 shows mean score of WHOQOL-BREF scores of participants in joint families. Those living in the urban areas, had significantly higher scores in all four dimensions. Male had higher scores in physical and psychological domains compared to females. However, no differences were observed in relationship and environmental domains. Younger age group < 30 years had higher scores than elderly > 50 years of age. Divorced had highest scores in physical and psychological domains while married had highest scores in relationship domain. No significant differences were observed in environment domain between different categories of marital status. Lack of education, presence of any physical disability or disease, unemployment, lower socio-economic status and low social capital were associated with lower scores in all domains.

Multivariate linear regression model for joint family system

Table  3 shows the results of the multivariate linear regression model for joint family system. In multivariate model, rural residence was negatively associated with physical, psychological and environmental domains QOL scores and there was 4.59 units [95% CI: − 7.77 to − 1.41], 3.54 units [95% CI: − 6.44 to − 0.63] and 5.32 units [95% CI: − 8.75 to - 1.89] reduction when changing from urban to rural ( P  = 0.001) respectively. There was no significant association with relationship domain. Female gender was also negatively associated with QOL scores in physical, psychological and social relationship domains − 3.94 units [95% CI: − 5.88 to − 0.01], − 3.10 units [95% CI: − 4.7 to − 1.47] and − 0.11 units [95% CI:-3.06 to- 0.84] respectively, and no significant association was observed in environmental health domain. Increasing age was negatively associated with QOL scores. One-decade increase in age lead to 0.22 units [95% CI: − 0.29 to − 0.19], 0.11 units [95% CI: − 0.2 to - 0.05] and 0.12 units [95% CI: − 0.19 to − 0.05] reduction in scores of physical, psychological and relationship domains respectively. Presence of disease was also significantly associated as scores declined with the presence of disease in physical and psychological domains. However, there was no significant association of disease status with relationship and environment domains. Socio-economic status also had a significant association as a change in SES from high to low resulted in a reduction of QOL scores in all the domains. Similarly increase in social capital was also positively associated with QOL scores in all four domains.

Nuclear family system WHOQOL-BREF scores

The mean score of each domain among different subgroups in joint family system is presented in Table  4 . Pattern of differences between the subgroups in nuclear family system was similar to joint family system. The mean of all four domains was significantly higher among those living in urban areas. Male had higher scores than female. Younger age people < 30 years of age had significantly higher scores than elderly in physical domain only. There were no significant differences in other three domains with respect to age. House ownership did not affect the QOL scores in any of the domain. Significant differences in scores were observed across different marital status strata. Those with no education generally had lower scores than others. Presence of any disease or disability significantly reduced the QOL scores. Compared with working/employed subjects, unemployed subjects had lower QOL scores. Participants with higher socioeconomic status, and social capital levels had higher QOL scores in all domains.

Multivariate linear regression model for nuclear family system

Table  5 presents the results of the multivariate linear regression model for nuclear family syste. In multivariate model, rural residence was negatively associated with physical − 2.55 units [95% CI: − 5.42 to − 0.33], psychological − 1.90 units [95% CI: − 4.9 to − 1.13] and environmental domains − 3.69 units [95% CI: − 7.27 to − 0.09]. Female gender was also negatively associated with QOL scores in physical, psychological and social relationship domains − 2.64 units [95% CI: − 4.59 to − 0.68], − 3.56 units [95% CI: − 5.5 to − 1.65] and − 1.92 units [95% CI: − 3.91 to − 0.07] respectively, no significant association was observed in environmental health domain. Increasing age was negatively associated with QOL scores. One-decade increase in age lead to 0.27 units [95% CI: − 0.35 to − 0.20], 0.15 units [95% CI: − 0.2 to − 0.06] and 0.12 units [95% CI: − 0.05 to − 0.12] reduction in scores of physical, psychological and relationship domains respectively. Presence of disease or disability led to significant decline in the QOL in physical domains. However, there was no significant association of disease and disability with QOL scores in other domains. QOL scores significantly declined with changing socio-economic status from high to low in all four domains. Social capital was also positively associated with QOL scores in all the domains.

Our study is one of its kinds to assess the predictors of QOL domains in joint and nuclear families in Pakistan. We found that male gender, urban residence, younger age, higher socio-economic status and social capital were positive predictors in both types of family systems. Increasing age and presence of illness were associated with lower QOL scores in joint and nuclear families. Predictors were similar in for all domains of QOL across two types of families with few exceptions.

Family type has been reported to affect the mental and social wellbeing. A study from India reported that adolescents from joint family have better mental health compared to nuclear family [ 31 ]. Another study from India found no difference in the QOL scores between joint and nuclear family types except for social relationship domain where scores were significantly high for those living in nuclear families [ 18 ]. One study from Pakistan reported that elderly living in joint families had better social support and quality of life than those in nuclear families [ 32 ]. Another study from Japan reported that couples living as couples did not have any significant difference in the perceived physical and mental health while they were more likely to have severe hypertension compared to those in extended families [ 33 ].

Our study found higher scores for males in all four domains of QOL. This finding is similar to a study from India where females had lower scores [ 18 ]. A study from Kuwait also reported negative association of female gender with QOL scores [ 19 ]. A study from Iran also found that there were significant association between QOL and greatly varied by socio-demographic variables including gender [ 34 ]. These findings indicate that family members even within same family have different views about the family environment which could affect their QOL [ 35 ] and that of female members.

Ageing is associated with physical and mental changes in the body which affects the health and QOL. We found that increasing age was associated with decrease in the QOL scores in all domains except environmental domain in both types of families. Other studies have also reported similar association of age with QOL scores [ 18 , 36 ]. With the increasing life expectancy countries will experience increasing proportion of elderly population. This calls for reorientations of systems and services to ensure healthy elderly.

Our study found significant association of socio-economic status with QOL scores in both types of families. Socio-economic status is associated with availability of resources and access to services which ultimately affect QOL. Studies on different populations have shown positive association of higher socio-economic status with higher scores in different domains of QOL [ 18 , 34 , 36 ]. Likewise, social capital was also associated with higher QOL scores in all domains a finding similar to studies from China and Malaysia [ 37 , 38 ].

We found that presence of diseases was associated with lower scores in physical and psychological domains in joint families and with physical domain in nuclear families. Presence of any physical deformity or illness affect the physical and psychological health. Studies have consistently shown negative association of QOL with presence of diseases [ 19 , 36 , 39 ]. A study reported that people with mental and physical illness had significantly lower scores than healthy people in all three domains of QOL life except environmental domain [ 40 ].

We did not find any significant difference in the predictors of QOL among both family types. Our findings are interesting in a way that it is considered that QOL differs in both family systems and their predictors would also be different. There is a need to do further studies to explore this finding.

Our study is one of its kinds from Pakistan to assess the levels and predictors of QOL in joint and nuclear families from the randomly selected general population. We used robust statistical procedures and performed multi-level analysis to draw conclusions. However certain limitations need to be considered while interpreting the results of this study. First our sample was drawn from a single city which may limit the generalizability of our results. Second, questionnaire was administered by the interviewer which could introduce social desirability bias in the response. To minimize this, we ensured privacy during interviews and no other household member was allowed in the interview room. Thirdly, this was a cross-sectional study and temporal associations could not be ascertained with certainty and we cannot say surely whether the predictors of our study preceded the quality of life.

Our study determined the levels and predictors of QOL scores of individuals in joint and nuclear families using validated WHO QOL BREF. Predictors were similar across both types of families. Male gender, urban residence, younger age, higher socio-economic status and social capital were positive predictors of QOL score while increasing age and presence of illness were associated with lower QOL scores among both family systems. These findings call for policy actions such as women empowerment, improvement in facilities in rural areas and poverty alleviation to improve quality of life. We also recommend further studies in different segments of population to further characterize the predictors of QOL.

Availability of data and materials

Corresponding author will provide all the relevant data used in this study upon request.

Abbreviations

Quality of life

World Health Organization Quality of Life Questionnaire Brief version

Standard deviation

Beta coefficient

Confidence Interval

Reference group

Social Capital Integrated Questioners

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Acknowledgements

This study was originated from the Ph.D. thesis of the first investigator at Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics of Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran. We also acknowledge the efforts and collaboration of Non-Communicable Diseases Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.

This research was funded by International Campus Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.

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Authors and affiliations.

Department of Community Medicine, Women Medical and Dental College, Abbottabad, Pakistan

Fahad Saqib Lodhi

Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

Fahad Saqib Lodhi, Kourosh Holakouie-Naieni & Mehdi Yaseri

Family Medicine Academy, Qassim, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Unaib Rabbani

Saudi Board Program of Preventive Medicine, Ministry of Health, Mecca, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Adeel Ahmed Khan

School of Public Health, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan

Community Medicine Department, Ayub Medical College, Abbottabad, Pakistan

Umer Farooq

Population Health Research Group, Health Metrics Research Center, Iranian Institute for Health Sciences Research, ACECR, Tehran, Iran

Ali Montazeri

Faculty of Humanity Sciences, University of Science and Culture, Tehran, Iran

Contributions

FSL and AM conceptualized the study, conducted literature review, and drafted the manuscript. KHN and AM supervised the study. MY was the study advisor and contributed to analysis. UR, AAK, OR, and UF helped in data collection and provided input on the successive version of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ali Montazeri .

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Ethics approval and consent to participate.

This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of Tehran University of Medical Sciences and by health and political administrative bodies of Abbottabad District, Pakistan. All participants provided written consent prior to the interview.

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Not applicable.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Lodhi, F.S., Rabbani, U., Khan, A.A. et al. Factors associated with quality of life among joint and nuclear families: a population-based study. BMC Public Health 21 , 234 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10265-2

Received : 03 June 2020

Accepted : 19 January 2021

Published : 28 January 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-021-10265-2

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• General population

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Why the nuclear family might not be enough

Writing in the atlantic, david brooks calls for greater reliance on extended families. family experts say that’s a beginning..

By Jennifer Graham

SALT LAKE CITY — New York Times columnist David Brooks eulogized the nuclear family recently, saying the model of a married couple and their children living alone doesn’t work well for everyone and calling for greater reliance on extended family.

In the article , published on The Atlantic’s website, Brooks said the nuclear family has been good for the economically privileged, but “ravages the working-class and poor” who need the support that a sprawling family network provides. Such support acts as a shock absorber when things go wrong, and children benefit from the guidance of their relatives. “Multiple adults teach children right from wrong, how to behave toward others, how to be kind,” Brooks wrote.

If the bad news is that the nuclear family has become brittle, as Brooks said, the good news is that Americans are inching toward a system that worked well in generations past.

Twenty percent of Americans live in multigenerational homes today, compared to 12 percent in 1980, a change driven by young adults moving back in with their parents and seniors sharing homes with their kids, Brooks wrote.

And young adults are building family-like networks with people who aren’t relatives as “a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values,” he wrote. He cited a website where single mothers can connect with other single mothers to share housing, and also mentioned Salt Lake City’s The Other Side Academy, which helps connect felons with a community that acts as an extended family.

While Brooks’ overarching theme was the need for denser networks of familial support, his indictment of the nuclear family as a “catastrophe” that has led to broken families and loneliness was provocative, and on social media and elsewhere, reaction was swift and strong. On Twitter, Dr. Melody McCloud wrote, “It‘s not that the nuclear family is a mistake; it’s the crumbling of the nuclear family that’s a mistake. ... We need intact nuclear families.”

And the Institute for Family Studies, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, responded immediately with a weeklong online symposium to give family scholars a chance to respond to Brooks’ arguments.

Among them was Kay S. Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who wrote, “The disaster confronting less prosperous Americans is not the nuclear family, but the erosion of socioeconomic conditions that help them sustain lasting pair bonds.”

Here’s a summary of Brooks’ arguments, and how some leading family scholars have responded.

Honey, we shrunk the family

In the 19th century, almost all Americans worked on farms or in family businesses, and these lifestyles supported — even demanded — large, intertwined families, Brooks explained. “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.”

Industrialization eventually drove young Americans to work at factories in cities, where the nuclear family was born, along with its attendant mythology. By 1960, more than three-quarters of children were living with married parents, away from extended family. The economy was strong; divorce rates were down and fertility rates were up. The nuclear family seemed, for a brief, shining decade and a half, the Camelot of family units, a reputation that stuck even when circumstances changed. Only one-third of Americans currently live in a nuclear family.

In fact, Brooks wrote, “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.”

In their relative isolation, nuclear families afford individuals mobility and freedom, but deprive children of stability and a rich, important social tapestry. “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,” Brooks wrote.

“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.”

As such, children are the ones who suffer most when the nuclear family disintegrates. Only about half of American children spend their childhood with both biological parents; 1 in 5 young adults have no contact with their fathers. And, Brooks writes, “American children are more likely to live in a single-parent household than children from any other country.”

Affluent families can more easily withstand negative events, he says, by essentially buying extended family with goods and services. The poor can’t. And the negative effects persist even after the children have grown. Brooks says that this broken ideal contributes to the problem of loneliness in the U.S. “Today’s crisis of connection flows from the impoverishment of family life,” he writes.

‘Bring back the big tables’

In interviews with the Deseret News and in responses published by the Institute for Family Studies, scholars said that Brooks’ article started an important conversation, but said there are other issues that deserve consideration.

Regarding The Atlantic’s provocative headline, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, said, “It’s a mistake to think you can go it alone as a nuclear family.”

“In the last century, too many Americans have tried to go it alone. It’s certainly the case that many hands of kin and kith make the work of family life lighter.”

But Wilcox said Brooks’ prescription of “chosen” or “forged” families ignores the importance of marriage to a family and to the nation.

“His prescription seems to me fundamentally inadequate because it doesn’t recognize that children and communities are much more likely to thrive when marriage anchors them because marriage gives meaning, direction and purpose to families, and to kids in particular.

“We know, for instance, that kids who are being raised in multigenerational families with a single parent in the middle do about as poorly as kids being raised without a third generation. We know that kids being raised by uncles and aunts do worse than kids being raised by their own parents. His conclusion doesn’t really acknowledge that there’s something fundamental about being loved by, and loving, your parents in your own home, and when you don’t have that, there’s a fundamental sense of loss that a lot of kids experience.”

Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families and a history professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, wrote about idealized families in her 1992 book “The Way We Never Were.” She said Brooks does a little idealizing of his own in talking about the glories of large families in the 18th and 19th centuries, although he does acknowledge that the structure was no ideal for women for spent most of their days cooking and cleaning for a dozen people, or two dozen, or for the slaves and servants that supported these large households. But, she says, Brooks doesn’t go far enough.

 “His solution stresses the need to promote new forms of chosen kin, and I agree those are good. But in our huge country, with its regional disparities and growing segregation by race and class, local initiatives are not enough. We don’t just need a new family paradigm. We need a new social paradigm.”

Coontz said that economic factors weigh heavily on American families, both nuclear and extended, and that business models that bow to shareholder profits do so at the expense of families and communities. “While we’re thinking, let’s think about how we can begin to recognize that we’re all part of an interdependent society,” she said. “We need to rebuild not just the social safety net, but also the psychological sense that we’re all in this together.”

Without economic stability, Coontz said, marriage is not an option for many Americans. “In the midst of this growing inequality, the only people who can take the risk of marrying each other are those who are almost already there in terms of their emotional and economic security. Marriage can be tremendously helpful to those who have the emotional and economic security to make sure it will work, but in today’s society, where we have freedom, for better or for worse, to leave a marriage that does not satisfy us, it’s a risky endeavor for those who are under economic stress.”

Likewise, writing for the Institute for Family Studies symposium, Scott M. Stanley, a research professor at the University of Denver, noted the correlation between income and education and family stability. “As a group, those with higher education and incomes —those with the most options — are now overrepresented among those with stable marriages and nuclear families.”

And Stanley noted that a major obstacle blocking societal change is the vaunted American love of individualism, privacy and space, which Brooks acknowledges when he writes, “Family bonds are thicker, but individual choice is diminished. You have less space to make your own way in life.”

Moreover, nuclear families tend to perpetuate themselves. “People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mindset than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan,” Brooks wrote. “People with an individualistic mindset tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption.”

But that’s all the more reason for a movement to enlarge our most important and nurturing network, either biological or forged, according to Brooks. “For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin,” he says. “It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.”

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