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The Nuclear Family Isn’t Bad, No. But It Could Use Some Tweaks, Yes.
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of “the nuclear family,” it’s a huge sociopolitical talking point (especially of late) that basically means a husband, a wife, two kids, a dog, and some cool appliances — probably in the exurbs. In the idealized nuclear family, the wife doesn’t work outside of the home. That used to be a much bigger chunk of the American suburban class, and now I’ve seen studies that 17% of American families are single-income. That’s still basically 1 in 5, but that ain’t amazing. Stuff is expensive and life is harder than it was in 1954, give or take. More convenient, and more “connected,” but still harder in some ways.
There have been a million takes in recent years on how the nuclear family concept was a mistake. I don’t think it’s a mistake, although ironically a lot of people also will discuss population decline as a real possibility, and the nuclear family as most-defined is actually below replacement rate. Two kids and two parents = no gain. You need at least three kids to put yourself above the replacement rate. So it is kinda funny that we’ve bitched about decline and deified the nuclear family, which somewhat contributes to the decline of population.
The battle lines of 2023 on the nuclear family are fairly obvious: conservatives tend to want to deify it and hold it up and some conservatives outright want a 1954 suburbs model as the model in America, which isn’t possible at the intersection of automation, greed, what jobs are created, and what people expect to get for selling their home. Liberals often talk about destroying the nuclear family, sometimes in the name of more gender-fluid families and sometimes just in general, and then conservatives attack them for being crazy, and the cycle just goes on and on.
This article summarizes a lot of the backstory and arguments pretty well, I’d say:
