Posted on 02/11/2020 10:10:43 AM PST by Faith Presses On
...This is the story of our times—the story of the family, once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin, fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation, the nuclear family, didn’t seem so bad. But then, because the nuclear family is so brittle, the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.
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...
The most interesting extended families are those that stretch across kinship lines. The past several years have seen the rise of new living arrangements that bring nonbiological kin into family or familylike relationships. On the website CoAbode, single mothers can find other single mothers interested in sharing a home. All across the country, you can find co-housing projects, in which groups of adults live as members of an extended family, with separate sleeping quarters and shared communal areas. Common, a real-estate-development company that launched in 2015, operates more than 25 co-housing communities, in six cities, where young singles can live this way...
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
As goes the American Family - so goes America.
It is no surprise that idiot liberal fanatics HATE America.
They hate our families.
Is the author’s pants creased well? I can’t take him seriously if they aren’t.
One of the first confirmed human footprints ever found shows a “nuclear family” trudging through a new ashfall: One set striding forward; a set of lighter, smaller footprints beside - that suddenly stop, turn-around and point towards a child’s footprints running behind.
Yeah. In the past 500,000 years, the nuclear family didn’t exist either, did it?
God was evidently wrong.
“In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, single-parent families into chaotic families or no families.”
Thanks to LBJ and the disastrous “Great Society” welfare programs.
Not invented here. Get over it. The nuclear family has been around for eons. I doubt it is going anywhere.
I prefer the Thermonuclear Family, but that’s just me.
He cannot be taken at all seriously.
His idea of “interesting” “families” are not families at all.
Yup, God, you screwed up again.
Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. …Here we go again.
— Communist Manifesto, chapter 2
“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.”
... err when did this happen? I thought we went from individual wild animals directly into families, THEN communities. He’s trying to make a point by inventing some fictional timeline.
David Brooks is a mistake.
I am as God made me..unless i am a transgender who believes i am black when i am really white?
He is describing Leftist families far more than those of us on the Right. Our people will weather far more difficulties and keep the family together, than those on the Left. People on our side of politics are far more committed to their families and that is likely due to religious affiliations. Leftists who do go to church usually belong to churches that don’t require integrity in their people. JMHO.
It’s our village and Brooks is our village idiot. NY Times, give him back. We will keep him safe from evil doers like you who would take advantage of his simple ways for your own foul purposes.
I agree. Seems many posters read only the title. :(
Well, David Brooks is the author. I certainly disagree with much of what he writes, but there’s quite a bit of material for social conservatives in this article, which is fairly long but takes a broad historical view that is pretty accurate in many respects.
Overall, the main point being made in it isn’t really a new one or actually controversial among conservatives.
He doesn’t mean that the nuclear family was somehow a mistake for all time, but really just that the community and extended family supports for the nuclear family that have existed going back to ancient times have largely been taken away in our era of high technology and hyperindividualism, so that weaker nuclear families more often than not don’t survive.
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