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The problem revolves about having somebody who is dedicated towards supporting you. Take a mother with two small children - a conservative biological norm. Who
by thriftwy 4y ago
The problem revolves about having somebody who is dedicated towards supporting you.
Take a mother with two small children - a conservative biological norm. Who is going to stick around and help her financially and with their time? Would your hippie anarchist commune provide for her? Or a female partner biologically unrelated to her children? All of these arrangements may work for a time, but they are much less durable than a nuclear family overally, because raising a family is hard work.
Mother and father of children are likely to work. Mother and her parents living together would likely work (that may be the actual future of family). Mother and father's mom may work. Mother and her sister may work. Mother of two and a random person who enjoys elaborate sex with her, would likely NOT work. Possible but not likely. These arrangements are made for enjoyment not for chore.
- dTal 4y agoI think your "hippie anarchist commune" (aka "society") is the closest answer. They say "it takes a village to raise a child". Very young children need at least one dedicated caretaker, it is true, but by age 5 or 6 - around the time we start sending them to school - they are independent enough, and low-maintenance enough, to be reliably looked after by other adults. By age 10 or so they are more or less ready to move through the world autonomously and without supervision, and at this age the relationships with the adults around them begin to shift from "babysitter" to "friend". We aren't meant to be helicoptered by a single parental unit from birth to age 18 - we're meant to engage with society, from pretty early on. So if we imagine a world where we aren't so damned estranged from each other - doesn't have to be a hippie commune, could be a cozy urban village like Sesame Street - the durability of a family unit probably experiences diminishing returns as the child exits infancy, provided they still have access to at least one parent. And it wouldn't be at all surprising if the fabled "7-year itch" was a biological reflection of this.
- thriftwy 4y agoI don't believe that's going to work. Unrelated people's families living together leads to huge amount of toxicity. There's no housing or legal framework to support this, but more importantly, people just don't and can't live that way, en masse. Add to that the financial question which turns out hard even for nuclear families. It becomes better when they're all relatives of each other, but still quite toxic so in the end, people are dying to get their own home with a locking door, even at consderable expense. It's all been tried in the Soviet Union with its housing shortages and shared apartments.
- dTal 4y agoI'm talking about villages, not hostels. Villages are not toxic.
- fxtentacle 4y agoYou're ignoring the fact that raising kids in the US is a huge financial investment. Who pays for clothing and food? Who is going to pay $200000 for university, if not the biological parents?
- thriftwy 4y agoAlso, how they are going to divide inheritance and parential support, on which the youth happen to depend more and more? You are either going to launch these community kids essentially naked into the hostile world when they came of age, or figure out who specifically has to cough out the cash to support them in early adult life. If there is an entangled group of children, but only one of them is inheriting the house since it happened to be one biological parent's property, it's going to get ugly.