9 ms·

The Western nuclear family is a very unnatural social arrangement. Anthropologists have found that in most hunter-gatherers, the average infant is held at one p

The Western nuclear family is a very unnatural social arrangement. Anthropologists have found that in most hunter-gatherers, the average infant is held at one point or another by 30+ people in a typical day. The nuclear family has the twin downsides of putting tons of stress on parents of young kids, who shoulder the entire childcare burden, and deprives a lot of grandparents, aunts, cousins, and others of meaningful childcare time. In the industrialized West, for most people it's either all babies all the time, or no babies whatsoever. Both extremes are suboptimal relative to the environment humans evolved for.

leesalminen 6y ago
I’m the parent of a young child and I definitely feel some sort of internal pressure to be all babies all the time. I feel pretty guilty leaving him with anyone other than my wife. All I can think to myself is whether what I’m doing is really worth it compared to spending time with the baby.
- bobochan 6y ago
  I definitely remember those days. Both our kids are in university now and the part of the chart that spoke to me was seeing that steep drop off when the kids reach a certain age. It was a big change when the kids started high school and all of their sports and activities were based around the school instead of parent volunteers. It is fine now, and it is great to hear what the kids are learning in physics and math, and even cooler when they ask the old man for advice on a programming assignment. I would really love to have a couple of hours back though when we were all doing Lego robotics together. I miss those days.
- lojack 6y ago
  I don't even necessarily think its just leaving your baby alone with other people. Pre-covid with a <1 year old and a toddler we would have play dates all the time for a break. You stop being the source of entertainment and become a mediator, which is much less work. The baby then gets passed around to whoever has a free hand. I suspect there has always been pressure to not leave your baby with someone else and go off and do your own thing. The difference is now people are physically more distant from everyone else (I blame the ease of transportation) so being around close friends and family is the exception and not the standard.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  Unfortunately the culture of helicopter parenting is harmful.
- cmdshiftf4 6y ago
  >All I can think to myself is whether what I’m doing is really worth it compared to spending time with the baby. Ever think that your baby may be thinking to themselves "Man, am I ever going to get a break from this guy?" also?
mirekrusin 6y ago
We have preschools where they have close friends, tons of activities etc. it's not that bad.
_qulr 6y ago
I'm not defending the nuclear family, but I don't think our primitive past says anything about what's "optimal". For example, human life expectancy is much longer now. I'd much rather be a modern person with modern technology and medicine than a hunter-gatherer. Evolution != good. It's just history, and history is often ugly.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I agree with your general point, but much of the growth in life expectancy is driven by the massive drops in infant mortality. In general, modern advances have maybe added 10+ years to an average adult lifespan. The quality of the added lifespan is harder to assess though.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > The quality of the added lifespan is harder to assess though. Is it? In a sense, the choice is still available to adopt the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, if you wanted. I don't know many who would want to do that.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      I'm not aware of any plains with bountiful mammoth and fruit trees that I can colonise with my hunter-gatherer tribe, but then I'm not an expert in Google maps ;) Nonetheless, i'm not sure that the last ten years of my Dad's life (suffering from vascular dementia) were particularly good for him (I know that they were super hard for the rest of us). I think the general point is that it's hard to trade-off the quality of those extra years, which is the point I was trying (unsuccessfully, it appears) to make.
  - ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Even that increase in life expectancy is dubious, consider this passage from Psalms written in 1489 bc, which can basically be said about Americans today. > Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures
rm445 6y ago
As a parent without nearby family, I think you're right. It's hard work. We went away to university, got jobs, settled down and bought a house. To move back close to family now would be an upheaval - there was probably only one short window of time when it wouldn't have been as much effort. Persuading our parents etc to downsize and move close to us might have a better chance. It would be nice to live around extended family. People definitely do, but, here in the UK at least and excepting big-city-dwellers, it seems linked to lower economic status - people for whom one job is much like another. Maybe eventually the link between where you work and where you live will be weaker, for more specialised jobs.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
The western nuclear family is exactly what you get in agrarian societies of the past. It wasn't just some random thing the people of the 1950s made up on the spot. When 4/6 of your sons grow to adulthood you can't live in the same household as all of them. You live with one of them (probably the most or least functional one). 2 of the others have their own farms (one probably gets yours, maybe you split your farm between them if it's big enough) so you probably pick one of them. The 4th you never see because he runs a business making cart wheels or something in the next village over. The 5th left town to get a job in the port by the sea when he was 15 and you haven't seen him since. And of your daughters that survived childhood will all move in with their husbands. If you run the numbers for them it's the same thing. Multi generational households don't work at scale simply because of the numbers involved. Anyone pretending that that's how most people lived prior to the industrial revolution doesn't understand how many kids people had back then. At best you might get 10-25% of households having a grandparent around depending on the infant mortality rate at any given time. The birth rates and life expectancy just don't support more. 10-25% certainly isn't abnormal, but implying it is the default is Olympic level mental gymnastics.
- watwut 6y ago
  Multi generational households were the norm for much of the history.
  - iguy 6y ago
    Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not. I think the best data is for England, and centuries before the industrial revolution, the pattern is very strongly not multi-generational. Young couples expected to set up new households together, not to live with their parents. (The royal family & such of course were different, and still are.)
    - watwut 6y ago
      > Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not. This is definitely not true. At minimum you placed span from 1020, which means middle age, feudalism, powerty before French revolution and after, industrial revolution which meant completely overcrowded housing. Living in multi generational household was normal, expectation to care about parents was normal. Building new house at the time of marriage where couple would live alone was not the expectation - at minimum it would be unaffordable for huge parts of population. Plus your social system was family, whether in old age or in sickness.
jvanderbot 6y ago
A more "natural" arrangement occurs if we all don't run to large cities chasing glory and gold (which I have done, full disclosure, much to my child-caring woes). There is nothing wrong with nuclear families if you add in something like "nuclear communities". In many small towns or suburban cities, 3 generations live nearby, with all the aunts and uncles. Help with care is always next door, and children are raised with dozens of frequent visitors or caretakers. I'm quite jealous of the quality of life of my inlaws / extended family for these reasons.
- axaxs 6y ago
  I experienced this in the small town suburb I lived in once. There were always random kids in and out of the house, we'd give them food/water/bandaids whatever. Tell jokes/stories. Even though we aren't related, we all knew each other and our kids just kinda bounced around together. Definitely a cool experience. I think the media making the entire world out to be some bogeyman waiting to kidnap your child is as much to blame as anything.
  - dfxm12 6y ago
    making the entire world out to be some bogeyman waiting to kidnap your child is as much to blame as anything. The US president is certainly guilty of this, and it appears to be a GOP strategy to exacerbate and prey on this fear [0]. 0 - https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-26/republican-convention-analysis-unrest https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-26/republican...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dfxm12 6y ago
  I live in a top 10 US city (based on population), and it seems to be as you describe - generations of family living nearby, grandparents, etc. always around to help with the kids. Weekly (at least) family meals, parties where the whole neighborhood is invited, etc. I grew up knowing most of my friends' cousins and grandparents because they were just always around. Even today, I know my neighbors' kids and nephews because they live close by, too.
e40 6y ago
It's even worse than that. Every set of new parents gets no shared knowledge on how to best raise a child. I mean there are a literal ton of books on the subject, but they give wildly different advice. I have a single kid (turned 20 recently). I can tell you it's totally crazy figuring it out on your own. I approached it more methodically than most (IMO), and I don't think I made too many mistakes, but here's the thing: the mistakes I made didn't have to happen, had there been this shared body of knowledge that is passed on from generation to generation.
- selestify 6y ago
  How do we decide what shared body of knowledge to pass on when, as you say, all the books give wildly different advice?
  - e40 6y ago
    I personally think we need to value the idea of that body of knowledge, as a culture. Then, we can start to compare and contrast styles, etc. The whole tiger mom/dad routine is so horrible for children. The lack of autonomy can have dire consequences later in life, and I think we're just starting to see that. I know my tendency is to treat this like a problem, which needs data and analysis, refinement and tuning. But, if we were 10 generations into that process, I feel we'd have something to show for it. As is, every generation starts from zero (I think most people generally wing it).
    - selestify 6y ago
      Yeah, that’s fair. It strikes me as interesting that this isn’t a solved problem yet after millennia of civilization... Do you have any pointers off the top of your head for resources on the negative effects of tiger parenting, or about parenting in general? No worries if not, I just figure it would save me a lot of effort in my own research
didip 6y ago
I watched somewhere on YouTube that nuclear family is designed to enhance consumerism. You sell less stuff if there are multiple families sharing the same items.
ip26 6y ago
It does make the workforce more mobile, and has probably aided the cause of social progressivism.

leesalminen 6y ago

I’m the parent of a young child and I definitely feel some sort of internal pressure to be all babies all the time. I feel pretty guilty leaving him with anyone other than my wife. All I can think to myself is whether what I’m doing is really worth it compared to spending time with the baby.

bobochan 6y ago
I definitely remember those days. Both our kids are in university now and the part of the chart that spoke to me was seeing that steep drop off when the kids reach a certain age. It was a big change when the kids started high school and all of their sports and activities were based around the school instead of parent volunteers. It is fine now, and it is great to hear what the kids are learning in physics and math, and even cooler when they ask the old man for advice on a programming assignment. I would really love to have a couple of hours back though when we were all doing Lego robotics together. I miss those days.
lojack 6y ago
I don't even necessarily think its just leaving your baby alone with other people. Pre-covid with a <1 year old and a toddler we would have play dates all the time for a break. You stop being the source of entertainment and become a mediator, which is much less work. The baby then gets passed around to whoever has a free hand. I suspect there has always been pressure to not leave your baby with someone else and go off and do your own thing. The difference is now people are physically more distant from everyone else (I blame the ease of transportation) so being around close friends and family is the exception and not the standard.
eeZah7Ux 6y ago
Unfortunately the culture of helicopter parenting is harmful.
cmdshiftf4 6y ago
>All I can think to myself is whether what I’m doing is really worth it compared to spending time with the baby. Ever think that your baby may be thinking to themselves "Man, am I ever going to get a break from this guy?" also?

mirekrusin 6y ago

We have preschools where they have close friends, tons of activities etc. it's not that bad.

_qulr 6y ago

I'm not defending the nuclear family, but I don't think our primitive past says anything about what's "optimal". For example, human life expectancy is much longer now. I'd much rather be a modern person with modern technology and medicine than a hunter-gatherer. Evolution != good. It's just history, and history is often ugly.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
I agree with your general point, but much of the growth in life expectancy is driven by the massive drops in infant mortality. In general, modern advances have maybe added 10+ years to an average adult lifespan. The quality of the added lifespan is harder to assess though.
- _qulr 6y ago
  > The quality of the added lifespan is harder to assess though. Is it? In a sense, the choice is still available to adopt the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, if you wanted. I don't know many who would want to do that.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    I'm not aware of any plains with bountiful mammoth and fruit trees that I can colonise with my hunter-gatherer tribe, but then I'm not an expert in Google maps ;) Nonetheless, i'm not sure that the last ten years of my Dad's life (suffering from vascular dementia) were particularly good for him (I know that they were super hard for the rest of us). I think the general point is that it's hard to trade-off the quality of those extra years, which is the point I was trying (unsuccessfully, it appears) to make.
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  Even that increase in life expectancy is dubious, consider this passage from Psalms written in 1489 bc, which can basically be said about Americans today. > Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures

rm445 6y ago

As a parent without nearby family, I think you're right. It's hard work. We went away to university, got jobs, settled down and bought a house. To move back close to family now would be an upheaval - there was probably only one short window of time when it wouldn't have been as much effort. Persuading our parents etc to downsize and move close to us might have a better chance. It would be nice to live around extended family. People definitely do, but, here in the UK at least and excepting big-city-dwellers, it seems linked to lower economic status - people for whom one job is much like another. Maybe eventually the link between where you work and where you live will be weaker, for more specialised jobs.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

The western nuclear family is exactly what you get in agrarian societies of the past. It wasn't just some random thing the people of the 1950s made up on the spot. When 4/6 of your sons grow to adulthood you can't live in the same household as all of them. You live with one of them (probably the most or least functional one). 2 of the others have their own farms (one probably gets yours, maybe you split your farm between them if it's big enough) so you probably pick one of them. The 4th you never see because he runs a business making cart wheels or something in the next village over. The 5th left town to get a job in the port by the sea when he was 15 and you haven't seen him since. And of your daughters that survived childhood will all move in with their husbands. If you run the numbers for them it's the same thing. Multi generational households don't work at scale simply because of the numbers involved. Anyone pretending that that's how most people lived prior to the industrial revolution doesn't understand how many kids people had back then. At best you might get 10-25% of households having a grandparent around depending on the infant mortality rate at any given time. The birth rates and life expectancy just don't support more. 10-25% certainly isn't abnormal, but implying it is the default is Olympic level mental gymnastics.

watwut 6y ago
Multi generational households were the norm for much of the history.
- iguy 6y ago
  Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not. I think the best data is for England, and centuries before the industrial revolution, the pattern is very strongly not multi-generational. Young couples expected to set up new households together, not to live with their parents. (The royal family & such of course were different, and still are.)
  - watwut 6y ago
    > Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not. This is definitely not true. At minimum you placed span from 1020, which means middle age, feudalism, powerty before French revolution and after, industrial revolution which meant completely overcrowded housing. Living in multi generational household was normal, expectation to care about parents was normal. Building new house at the time of marriage where couple would live alone was not the expectation - at minimum it would be unaffordable for huge parts of population. Plus your social system was family, whether in old age or in sickness.

jvanderbot 6y ago

A more "natural" arrangement occurs if we all don't run to large cities chasing glory and gold (which I have done, full disclosure, much to my child-caring woes). There is nothing wrong with nuclear families if you add in something like "nuclear communities". In many small towns or suburban cities, 3 generations live nearby, with all the aunts and uncles. Help with care is always next door, and children are raised with dozens of frequent visitors or caretakers. I'm quite jealous of the quality of life of my inlaws / extended family for these reasons.

axaxs 6y ago
I experienced this in the small town suburb I lived in once. There were always random kids in and out of the house, we'd give them food/water/bandaids whatever. Tell jokes/stories. Even though we aren't related, we all knew each other and our kids just kinda bounced around together. Definitely a cool experience. I think the media making the entire world out to be some bogeyman waiting to kidnap your child is as much to blame as anything.
- dfxm12 6y ago
  making the entire world out to be some bogeyman waiting to kidnap your child is as much to blame as anything. The US president is certainly guilty of this, and it appears to be a GOP strategy to exacerbate and prey on this fear [0]. 0 - https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-26/republican-convention-analysis-unrest https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-08-26/republican...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dfxm12 6y ago
I live in a top 10 US city (based on population), and it seems to be as you describe - generations of family living nearby, grandparents, etc. always around to help with the kids. Weekly (at least) family meals, parties where the whole neighborhood is invited, etc. I grew up knowing most of my friends' cousins and grandparents because they were just always around. Even today, I know my neighbors' kids and nephews because they live close by, too.

e40 6y ago

It's even worse than that. Every set of new parents gets no shared knowledge on how to best raise a child. I mean there are a literal ton of books on the subject, but they give wildly different advice. I have a single kid (turned 20 recently). I can tell you it's totally crazy figuring it out on your own. I approached it more methodically than most (IMO), and I don't think I made too many mistakes, but here's the thing: the mistakes I made didn't have to happen, had there been this shared body of knowledge that is passed on from generation to generation.

selestify 6y ago
How do we decide what shared body of knowledge to pass on when, as you say, all the books give wildly different advice?
- e40 6y ago
  I personally think we need to value the idea of that body of knowledge, as a culture. Then, we can start to compare and contrast styles, etc. The whole tiger mom/dad routine is so horrible for children. The lack of autonomy can have dire consequences later in life, and I think we're just starting to see that. I know my tendency is to treat this like a problem, which needs data and analysis, refinement and tuning. But, if we were 10 generations into that process, I feel we'd have something to show for it. As is, every generation starts from zero (I think most people generally wing it).
  - selestify 6y ago
    Yeah, that’s fair. It strikes me as interesting that this isn’t a solved problem yet after millennia of civilization... Do you have any pointers off the top of your head for resources on the negative effects of tiger parenting, or about parenting in general? No worries if not, I just figure it would save me a lot of effort in my own research

didip 6y ago

I watched somewhere on YouTube that nuclear family is designed to enhance consumerism. You sell less stuff if there are multiple families sharing the same items.

ip26 6y ago

It does make the workforce more mobile, and has probably aided the cause of social progressivism.