David Brooks on the "failure" of the nuclear family
- Peter Lorenzi
- Feb 10, 2022
- 4 min read
"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."
What follows are some curated thoughts from a Maggie's Farm post concerning David Brooks' article in The Atlantic, claiming (see opening italicized excerpt) that the concept of the "nuclear family" has been a failure, meaning the traditional, "Ozzie and Harriet," mom, dad, and kids family unit is a failure. The nuclear problem is NOT the problem; it's the absence of a traditional family -- nuclear, corporate extended or otherwise -- that's the problem, including single-parent households, co-habitating unmarried parents, divorced families, and any other variation downward from the nuclear family.
As the comments point out, Brooks accuses the nuclear family as selfish and privileged, i.e., "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." He poses this is an equity issue and goes down the same, absurd path as those who think that children need to be taken from their parents, to unlink them from either the privilege or problems present in a stable, traditional, nuclear family, just to ensure equity.
This is also a good example of the conflict between Catholics and progressives. Progressives -- from BLM to, apparently, so-called conservative David Brooks -- want to end the nuclear family, while the pope supports the nuclear family. Same with progressive stance on abortion, vehemently opposed by the pope. Sadly, where the pope and progressives seem to agree is on using tax dollars to ensure equity (or even the Catholic belief in"universal destination"), either dismissing the value of charity or, in the Vatican's case, instead of using funds donated to help the poor to actually help the poor, the Vatican uses 90% of those funds to fund Vatican operations.
David Brooks Nuclear Family
Let's go back to the post by Maggie, here.
I have written on that topic over the years. Do any readers want to read something by David Brooks in The Atlantic?
If so, he makes some good points. 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.
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...
COMMENTS ON THE POST
"Corporate families" included mom, dad, and the kids. The rest were extras.
A guy who abruptly kicks his wife to the curb after 27 years to marry his research assistant who's twenty years younger might be a little .. conflicted ... when discussing topics of marriage and family.
The corporate families are just a set of related nuclear families living in close proximity. This is still not uncommon. I know lots of people who have their parents living with or close to them and using this for support of children and elderly adults.
He's so close but can't quite reveal any insight as to WHY the 1950-1965 model was successful or WHY the decline began after 1965. He points to falling wages in the 70s without offering explanation. He points to the benefits of a community of families without further wondering why families stopped feeling part of a coherent community. He points to benefits of stay at home moms, but simultaneously criticizes the culture women being expected to stay at home. Leftists like the idea of government-mandated socialism/communism, but reject the historical cultural practices that promoted community, in favor of individual autonomy.
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Putting it simply, in an embedded peasant economy, when the unit of production and consumption is the family household, it is sensible to have as large a family as possible, to work the land and to protect against risk in sickness and old age. To increase reproduction is to increase production. Yet as Jack Caldwell and others have shown, when the individual becomes integrated into the market, when wealth flows down the generations, when the cost of education and leaving for an independent economic existence on an open market occurs, children become a burden rather than an asset.23 In other words, capitalistic relations combined with individualism knocks away the basis of high fertility, and if this is combined with a political and legal security so that one does not have to protect oneself with a layer of cousin, the sensible strategy is to have a few children and to educate them well.
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