It’s not a universal good. It’s often good (I grew up this way, as did most of my friends and we’re mostly fine), but the nuclear family is also sometimes a breeding ground for the worst abuses. Insisting on it, giving it special privilege gives privilege to those abuses.
Kids absolutely benefit from stable, nurturing surroundings. But that could take so many other forms: multi-generational families, co-parenting, “it takes a village to raise a child”, queer families, polyamorous families; teens might find they benefit more from chosen families. Cultures around the world and across time have used many other systems to help parent. Focusing on the nuclear family is a distraction from the real aim and it might even cause more problems than it solves.
If it’s the broad average case, it doesn’t need government support. Most system design, including the law, is about managing edge cases.
The “progress” is in identifying the useful factors in nurturing people and providing societal tools to support those factors. Encouraging one model above all others got us into the pickle we’re in today.
If it’s the broad average case, it doesn’t need government support
disagree. having children as a goal in itself needs to be incentivized, financially and otherwise. germany is doing that by giving parents extra money unconditionally, among other things.
> disagree. having children as a goal in itself needs to be incentivized, financially and otherwise. germany is doing that by giving parents extra money unconditionally, among other things.
I can see how that might be of short-to-medium term benefit to an individual nation. I'll have to be less flippant with my arguments in future.
We can easily go down a rabbit hole there that's different from the one I was initially exploring. I'm gonna back-track:
The article and its defenders are arguing for even more media and legal support to encourage two-parent nuclear families. I argue that amplifying the already-common structure with stronger legal stature, and the cultural assumptions that will bring, is of detriment to the culture. I'm not saying "kids don't need stable families", they clearly benefit from that. But I am saying "that thing you call a stable family doesn't always look like two adults and their kids in one home". There are many, many other successful forms. The important factors are predictable, comfortable support from involved caregivers, ideally with a range of opinions. We should be centring the care and support on the children (and in fact, on people in general), rather than on "a two adult family". Centering on the family like that effectively outsources care to the family, making the assumption that "the family" can handle it. There are too many cases of two adult homes failing those they're assumed to support. There are even more cases of single-adult homes struggling to care for their kids because the system is built around "the nuclear family" and rejects supporting alternatives.
> but the nuclear family is also sometimes a breeding ground for the worst abuses. Insisting on it, giving it special privilege gives privilege to those abuses.
I doubt you will be able to prove, or show, that the nuclear family has even slightly higher rates of abuse per 100,000 than any of the other modern forms of family you have suggested. Until ~2013 with the legalization of gay marriage when it then became an unmentionable issue, even left-wing websites like The Atlantic, and mainstream publications like the BBC, were warning about how domestic abuse in LGBTQ relationships is at least possibly higher than a traditional marriage.
Whatever, I’m sick of some outliers discounting something that works as a whole. I don’t take your conjecture to be true. Even hunter gatherers societies that exist today, including uncontacted tribes have two modes of family. Nuclear/extended or polygamous. Those forms are inherent and what humans naturally coalesce around.
> I’m sick of some outliers discounting something that works as a whole
Whatever. I’m sick of the disinterested majority pretending real problems don’t exist and actively working against systems that would help more people, more fairly, because they’re not willing to use their imagination and compassion.
Your use of hunter-gather societies is a distraction. We don’t need to lean on poorly understood histories when we have contemporary examples to work with.
Also, “nuclear/extended” is two distinct categories, not one. And “polygamous” is a subset of polyamorous and carries some unhealthy ultra-patriarchal connotations and assumptions (I mean, I’m making some assumptions about what you mean).
Even if that's true (a big if), all we can infer is that that's what hunter / gatherer societies seem to naturally coalesce around. It's not what modern society is coalescing around. Some folks take that as a sign that modern society is fundamentally flawed, but I'd rather be born as a random person in modern society than a random person in a pre-historical hunter gatherer society. Perhaps that's just my bias towards modernity though.
The argument under consideration is that if our social lives are too different from those of our ancestors in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, that will lead to widespread mental-health problems like addiction and suicide. (The study of existing hunter-gatherers is relevant because we cannot go back in time and study our ancestors in detail.)
Your "I'd rather be born as a random person in modern society than a random person in a pre-historical hunter gatherer society" has no relevance that argument.
Hunter-gatherer societies do not represent some ideal state that we should strive for, but rather a particular societal adaptation to the environment at the time. We live in a different environment (one that I have zero interest in destroying in favor of trying to recreate some imagined ideal from prehistory), so the naturalistic fallacy is what has no place here.
The naturalistic fallacy: because something (e.g., marriage) has been part of life for so long, it must be good.
The hypothesis we are entertaining here: things that humans have no experience with over evolutionary timescales tend to be bad for us. Ice cream for example, has more sugar, fat and salt than anything humans had access to until very recently; evolutionarily speaking, we have no experience with it. Ditto alcohol and heroin.
That may be the hypothesis that you are entertaining, but that’s not the comment I was responding to.
Nor is it a particularly well-formulated or convincing hypothesis, your cherry-picked examples notwithstanding. We don’t have evolutionary-timescale experience with medicine, electricity, the written word, or democracy either. How we think prehistorical people groups may have arranged their societies is almost completely irrelevant for modern policymakers, which is what this article is actually about. We have a long list of better ways to make this decision than “Hmm, well, how do uncontacted Amazon tribes of a few dozen people structure things? Perhaps we should just copy that in our nation of 300 million people?”
Kids absolutely benefit from stable, nurturing surroundings. But that could take so many other forms: multi-generational families, co-parenting, “it takes a village to raise a child”, queer families, polyamorous families; teens might find they benefit more from chosen families. Cultures around the world and across time have used many other systems to help parent. Focusing on the nuclear family is a distraction from the real aim and it might even cause more problems than it solves.