The Nuclear Family is a Failed Experiment

When has a nuclear experiment ever been good, honestly?

The Wonder Years, Arnold family portrait. Clockwise from top left: Dan Lauria (Jack Arnold), Alley Mills (Norma), Fred Savage (Kevin), Olivia d’Abo (Karen), Jason Hervey (Wayne). If it worked, it was because Norma stayed home.

I got to go on Virginia Sole-Smith’s Burnt Toast podcast this week, which was so awesome. I’m a longtime fan¹ of Virginia’s anti-diet parenting newsletter and podcast and grateful for the exposure to her large and wonderful audience. Welcome, Burnt Toasties! I’m so glad you’re here.

Virginia has developed this running and very useful extended metaphor where she compares various components of dominant contemporary culture to diet culture. It turns out so many things can illustratively be compared to diets. Heterosexual marriage! Air fryers! Summer reading lists! Breast reductions! Budget culture! Home organization! Feeling inspired, in my interview with Virginia this week I argued that the nuclear family is a diet. Heterosexual marriage and budget culture and the nuclear family alike are all imposed upon us to our own detriment and to capitalism’s benefit. They’re restrictive and they’re oppressive and they encourage consumption and they’re doomed to fail – just like a diet.

Talking with Virginia about the nuclear family got me thinking – and thinking – and thinking. Oh my gosh, it turns out there’s so much to unpack about how the nuclear family has been imposed upon us and how it fails so many of us – parents and families and childless people alike. We either can’t attain the nuclear family ideal in the first place, or if we do attain it, it turns out to pretty much suck. Far from producing happy, thriving parents and kids, the single-family household is routinely exploitative, isolating, untenable, and unsustainable. It’s very, very hard for single-family households to thrive unless they have a lot of support and help. The nuclear family, as the Brits might say, doesn’t do what it says on the tin.

Consider a Typical Nuclear Family

Consider a typical nuclear family in the United States. The parents are trying to do what they believe they’re supposed to do, create a “good” family in the “right” way, according to dominant American standards. Here’s how that unfolds.

A straight married couple is having their first baby. They might be thrilled or terrified or ambivalent or all of the above, but they don’t really know much about babies or kids so they start reading up, especially the mom. They get the gestation apps and they read articles online and books recommended by friends and books recommended online, absorbing lots of information that they didn’t already know and that, unfortunately, is often contradictory. They are nervous. They try to be prepared. Then the baby is born. The well-wishers come (and hopefully do the dishes) and then the well-wishers go, and the parents try to learn how to care for a baby. It’s hard, but they do their best to do everything right, do everything they’re told no matter how difficult or contradictory, keep reading up if they can manage it, get their hands on a good stroller and a good bassinet or co-sleeper thingy and good onesies and baby blankets and towels and diapers and wipes and butt creams. Then the dad goes back to work and the mom’s on her own all day. They’re getting very little sleep. They try not to fight, with varying degrees of success. After two or three months, the mom goes back to work. She feels like she’s bad at her job now and she’s also doing a worse job as a mother: lose-lose.

Over the months and early years, the parents closely monitor their child’s milestones – whether the child is ahead or right on time or behind – and if behind, they worry something is wrong and they read some more and they buy some more things and maybe they take their child to a specialist. They have another baby, and it’s easier this time, in that they’re less afraid that the baby will suddenly die, but also harder, in that now they have a preschooler who needs a lot and a newborn who needs a lot and it often feels impossible to meet both children’s needs at once. The parents’ relationship isn’t in a great place, but they’re trying. They don’t have time for couples therapy. They don’t even have time to try to find a couples therapist. As the mom tries to make the family and household schedule work, she goes in and out of working part-time or not at all (at least, not for pay). Her husband’s career is advancing and hers is not.

Thankfully, things get a little easier around the time the youngest child starts kindergarten. Now professional and middle-class families especially are entering a long phase of what education researcher Annette Lareau calls “concerted cultivation.” Their kids are doing sports and music lessons and tutoring and enrichment – activities meant to give them a well-rounded childhood and help them succeed in life, and which are labor-intensive for parents. Both parents spend a lot of time driving their kids to things and coaching things and watching things, and the mom additionally spends a lot of time coordinating all the rides and schedules and uniforms and costumes and summer camps and appointments and on and on and on. Both parents feel like it’s impossible to get everything done, and also the mom is sick and tired of all the additional labor she does that her husband doesn’t really acknowledge. They still don’t have time for couples therapy. They keep trying to do a good job, do right by their kids and right by each other, but they’re exhausted and overwhelmed and it’s been this way for years and will continue for years to come.

I’ve been super turbo mega Auntie-ing for a long time, and I’ve seen this same story play out, with minor variations, over and over and over again. Parents will recognize it. Veteran Aunties and alloparents of all kinds will, too. Professional, middle, or working class, the story is mostly the same; the biggest difference that arises from socioeconomic class is how much childcare the family can afford to hire.

Now, to be clear, how much childcare the family can afford to hire does matter. It matters a lot. In fact, I’d suggest that the biggest factor affecting how much a nuclear family is able to thrive – especially the parents – is how much help they have. The nuclear family parents that I know (or know of) who have had a relatively happy, manageable time raising their kids have had lots of unpaid help in the form of Aunties and other alloparents (especially grandmothers), and/or they have been able to afford plenty of high-quality paid childcare and household support, and/or they live somewhere with a way more robust social safety net than we have here in the United States. There may be occasional exceptions – happy, thriving, not-unmanageably-exhausted parents of nuclear families who don’t have any of these things – but they’re rare. And it’s not that they’re doing something right while everyone else is doing it wrong; if anything, these parents got lucky and had really easy kids.²

Now, if you’re a parent of a nuclear family household and you recognize your own experience in the picture I’ve just sketched, no self-recriminations, please. The nuclear family was imposed on us, conditioned into us and incentivized, and the pursuit of alternative models is, in our culture, stigmatized and punished. We default to the nuclear family. We’re supposed to. It’s what we’re assured will make us happy – by dominant culture, by popular and entertainment media, and by our own loved ones, who have also been thus assured. So then if we can’t make it work, we assume it’s our own fault. It’s hard to even recognize how absolutely broken and dysfunctional and unsustainable the whole system is.

So here’s what I want to argue: The nuclear family is a relatively new social construct that benefits wealth and power and capitalism but does not benefit children or families or parents or non-parents or communities or the planet. For many people, forming a nuclear family isn’t possible; and for many, it’s not desirable. As a culture, we’ve been trying out the nuclear family for some generations now, and I think it’s time to declare the experiment a failure and build – or rebuild – something else.

Now let me unpack the argument I’ve just made.

The Nuclear Family is Relatively New

I’ve written about the nuclear family here at The Auntie Bulletin from time to time before, and on those occasions I thought it through and suggested that the nuclear family has only been around for a few generations – arguably, since after World War II. By that accounting, we’ve only been doing the nuclear family for three or maybe four generations, out of the approximately 8,000-10,000 generations of human history.³ Recently, though, I’ve been reading Michaeleen Doucleff’s excellent book Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising, Happy, Helpful Little Humans, and (unlike me) she talked to some actual experts on human history who trace the origins of the modern nuclear family back as far as 1500 AD or even earlier (at least in parts of England and Germany). The nuclear family is still a blip, on the timescale of human history – as Doucleff puts it, “for 99.9% of the time humans have been on earth, the nuclear family simply didn’t exist” – but her account of what went down in early modern Western Europe is illuminating.

“For hundreds of thousands of years,” Doucleff writes, “parenting was a multi-generational affair.”

Kids evolved to learn from a bunch of different people of all ages – great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, family friends, neighbors, cousins, and all the children that tag along with them.

Over the past thousand years or so, the Western family has slowly shrunk down from a multi-generational smorgasbord to a tiny amuse-bouche, consisting solely of Ma, Pa, two kids, and maybe a dog or cat. We not only lost Grandma, Grandpa, Auntie Fay, and Uncle Bill in the home, but also nanny Lena, cook Dan, and a whole slew of neighbors and visitors just hanging around the front porch or sleeping on the couch. Once these people disappeared from the home, most of the parenting burden fell on mom and dad.

As a result, for the first time in human history, moms and dads are suddenly doing this crazy-hard thing, called parenting, all by themselves (or even solo).

How did the transition unfold? Doucleff talked to a bunch of experts who had a bunch of different answers – the Age of Enlightenment, capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, reduced child mortality, fewer children per family, our love of privacy – but although they all made sense, none was quite satisfying. Then she talked to Joe Henrich, a psychologist who researches societies that he and co-authors have termed “WEIRD” – Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.⁴ Henrich explains WEIRD societies’ transition to the nuclear family by pointing to the influence of the Catholic Church. His argument is fascinating and I hadn’t heard it before, so let me summarize. I hope you’ll bear with me for a little former-high-school-social-studies-teacher nerdery. (If you’re not in the mood, just skip to the end of this section).

Up until about a thousand years ago, families in Europe were expansive and kinship-based, just like in many other cultures both then and now. “Families’ homes were porous structures,” Doucleff writes, “where relatives, servants, workers, regular old neighbors, and friends floated in and out without much fuss.” Kids were cared for by lots of different alloparents – including older children – and had a lot of autonomy. However, parents still usually had the ultimate say in who their offspring married.

For most of human history and in most cultures – including in Europe at this time – marriage functioned to secure expansive kinship connections across multiple blood-related families. Parents encouraged (or required) their offspring to marry distant cousins, relatives of in-laws, god-relatives, or members of their own clan or another friendly clan. And by means of these marriages and alliances, extended families were bound together. Doucleff explains:

With these yarns families wove colorful – and strong – tapestries. The marriages kept land and property within the clan. Over time, the clan gained money, prestige, and power. And… more importantly for our purposes, the clan provided parents with plenty of help. Families stayed large, and children could be autonomous in a relatively safe way.

Now, during the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was spreading its influence across Europe. Starting as early as the 5th century AD, they started regulating who could marry whom, and over the centuries the Church’s influence spread and spread and marriage restrictions got stricter and stricter. By the 11th century AD the Catholic Church was super powerful across much of Europe – the Crusades started in 1095 AD, and as we know, war is great for consolidating power – and they’d prohibited pretty much all kinship marriage. (Widows could no longer marry their dead husbands’ brothers, for example). Anyone who violated the marriage laws had to surrender their property to the Church. Large clan-based kinship networks were dismantled, and households started looking decidedly nuclear.

Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1445, Matrimony, The Seven Sacraments

People still had a lot of help raising children at this time, though, Doucleff explains.

Wealthy and middle class families hired live in nannies, cooks, and cleaners, and poorer families continued to live in large, extended families for centuries. But by dividing up powerful families and clans, the church likely set off a chain reaction that shifted the way people think and what they value. In the study, [Henrich] and his colleagues found that the longer a community had been exposed to the Catholic Church’s marriage restrictions, the more likely people in that community thought like Westerners do – that is, they valued individualism, non-conformity, and other psychological traits unique to the West.

I don’t know about you, but I find this explanation compelling. It left me wondering: why did the Church restrict marriage in this way? So I did a little nosing around and found some more compelling arguments, although experts disagree and of course we can’t really know the motivations of popes a thousand years ago.⁵ Social anthropologist Jack Goody argued that marriage restrictions functioned to enrich the Church. They got to confiscate the property of anyone who violated the marriage laws, and by getting rid of extended kinship relations, they radically increased the likelihood that wealth would be bequeathed to them rather than kept within the extended family. And political scientist Francis Fukuyama has contended that the marriage laws also functioned to weaken the institution of kinship as a rival to the Church’s power. Regardless of why the Catholic Church outlawed kinship and transformed the structure of families in the West, it’s clear they benefited.

Okay, enough history. The point of all this is that humans mostly evolved, over thousands of generations, in extended, kinship-based family networks where there were always lots of alloparents around. Then very recently (four generations or 40, both are blip in human history), Western societies replaced kinship-based families with nuclear families. And geez, we’re just not built for the family structure we’re expected to live in today. We’re social animals, our offspring are born unusually helpless and take forever to mature compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, and consequently parents need so much more support than they get.

The Nuclear Family Benefits Capitalism, Not Us (The Nuclear Family is a Diet)

As I was saying at the top of the essay, Virginia Sole-Smith has a super useful argument about how lots of things are basically diets, metaphorically speaking. Here’s the logic; here’s how diets function.

The basic logic of a diet is that there’s something wrong with us (in a literal diet, the thing that’s wrong with us is that we’re too fat). So then the diet sets ambitious, if not blatantly unrealistic, goals for what “good” or “right” look like (in a literal diet, “good” and “right” equal thin, naturally). There’s a compulsory and uniform ideal at work: we’re all supposed to want to be thin, and being thin is supposed to make us happy. So then the diet sets out a list of rules or steps to follow, and these might sound easy on the surface but they become difficult or impossible to sustain in daily life. (We’re supposed to count calories, restrict certain foods, only eat at certain times of day, enter everything we eat into an app, and so on). Restriction and over-efforting are expected. Restrict calories. Try as hard as you can, and then try harder. Our hard work has to be seen to pay off.

But then the diet doesn’t actually work, because that’s the empirical reality about diets. We fail to achieve thinness, or we can’t follow instructions, or we lose weight but inevitably gain it back. And we perceive this as our own fault. We feel guilty and inadequate and look around for a different diet that will work better. We’re willing to pay. We buy ever more goods (e.g., diet products) and services (e.g., weight loss programs, fitness classes) in an attempt to live up to an untenable standard that’s making us miserable. The dieter doesn’t benefit; capitalism benefits.

Now let’s apply this metaphor to the (delusional) social expectation that we will all form into nuclear families and be happy ever after.

The basic logic of the nuclear family is that there’s something wrong with us. If we live alone or with family members or groups of friends, we are losers. So then the compulsory nuclear family sets ambitious, if not blatantly unrealistic, goals for what “good” or “right” look like. In the nuclear family, “good” and “right” equal (heterosexual) marriage and (thriving, able-bodied, biological) kids. There’s a compulsory and uniform ideal at work here: we’re all supposed to want to live in nuclear family households, and doing so is supposed to make us happy. There are lots of expectation for a nuclear family – a list of rules to follow – and these may sound easy on the surface but become difficult or impossible to sustain in daily life. (We’re supposed to have clean, orderly homes and well-behaved children and be able to balance work and family life such that we can get ahead in the workplace and “have it all”). Restriction and over-efforting are expected. Restrict community. Take care of your own family and don’t ask for help. Try as hard as you can, and then try harder. Your hard work has to be seen to pay off.

Stress in America report, 2023

But then the nuclear family doesn’t actually deliver on its promises of happiness and wellbeing. In the U.S., 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function (as compared to 20% of non-parents) and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (as compared to 26% of non-parents). Parents in nuclear family households fail to achieve happiness and thriving. They worry they haven’t followed the parenting advice properly, or they haven’t followed the right parenting advice. Things get easier for a while but they keep getting harder again – often untenably, unsustainably harder. Their marriage often struggles. They perceive this as their own fault. They feel guilty and inadequate and look around for a different parenting approach that will work better. They’re willing to pay. They buy ever more goods (e.g., toys, screens, assistive devices to help their kid with ADHD, a bigger car) and services (e.g., more childcare, tutors, private school, fancier activities, visits to therapists and specialists) in attempt to live up to an untenable standard that’s making them miserable. The family doesn’t benefit; capitalism benefits.

The parents, like the dieter, are starved. They’re starved for support, for community, for practical, in-person, daily guidance and modeling from people who’ve been there.⁶

I feel like it’s a pretty good metaphor.

Now, let’s pause to do another self-blame check here. If you’re a fat person who can’t lose weight (or even a thin person who can’t lose weight), note that the research is pretty conclusive that it’s not your fault, and from an anti-diet perspective maybe weight loss isn’t a particularly awesome goal anyway. (Virginia has reviewed tons of high-quality empirical research demonstrating that claims about the correlation between high body weight and poor health may be seriously overblown). Similarly, if you’re a parent in a nuclear family and you’re not feeling particularly happy or energetic or thriving, you’re not a sucker or a chump. The story that the nuclear family is good, desirable, and delivers on its promises is the water we swim in. It’s very, very hard to perceive the water itself — especially at the stage in life when we’re falling in love and getting married and getting tons of messages from all directions about what’s supposed to happen next.

Indeed, forming into nuclear families is – like dieting – a logical survival strategy in a capitalist (and patriarchal, and racist) society. Marriage and kids make us seem respectable, and many of us need to seem respectable in order to receive others’ respect. The further we are from various cultural ideals – thin, white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, neurotypical, financially stable, native English speakers, U.S. citizens – the more the nuclear family functions as necessary cover, conferring legitimacy that our neighbors and coworkers might not otherwise afford us. If you’re a working-class immigrant parent of color but you have a two-parent household and you own a home, that’s protection that’s not only financial but also social. If your kids appear to be thriving, if your hard work appears to pay off, if you don’t have to ask for or take help, that’s social legitimacy, respectability, and a higher probability of social mobility for your children.

Who the Nuclear Family Leaves Out

For many people, the nuclear family is not attainable or not desirable.

Let’s consider what it takes to form a nuclear family, according to the dominant ideal. Society communicates to us that we can and should choose to form a nuclear family: we should get married and have kids and own a single family home in a desirable location. These are choices we can make. But the reality is, there’s so much luck and so much privilege that goes into the attainability of the nuclear family ideal.

In order to form a nuclear family that matches the dominant ideal, you need to be able to and want to get married. Ideally, you should be straight and your marriage should be heterosexual and monogamous. But lots of people don’t find the right partner or don’t want to get married. Lots of people aren’t heterosexual. And lots of people aren’t monogamous – whether they openly disclose that to their partner or not. Single people and queer people and ethically non-monogamous people don’t fit the nuclear family ideal. As for cheaters, the nuclear family might give them cover, but ask these people’s partners if they’re having a good and happy life and see what they say.

In order to form a nuclear family that matches the dominant ideal, you need to own a home and you need to be able to choose where you live. Ideally, you should live in the best home, in the best location, that you can afford. This is so important that many families purchase beyond their means – which is why we had a sub-prime mortgage crisis in the late aughts and so many people lost their homes. But lots of people can’t afford to buy a home in the first place. Lots of people don’t want to. Lots of people can’t afford to live where they’d like to live. And lots of people choose to compromise on their other housing ideals in order to live near loved ones. Non-homeowners and people who live in supposedly-undesirable places don’t fit the nuclear family ideal.

In order to form a nuclear family that matches the dominant ideal, you need to be able to and want to have kids. You need financial stability. You need a baseline level of physical health. You need reproductive fertility or the ability to pay for fertility treatment or surrogacy or adoption. But lots of people aren’t able to have children, for many different reasons including infertility or health problems or not finding the right partner or not being able to afford to have kids. And lots of people just don’t want kids. Childless people don’t fit the nuclear family ideal.

In order to form a nuclear family that matches the dominant ideal, you need the physical stamina and emotional wellbeing to be able to work hard most of the time, and you need to have enough privilege and luck that your hard work pays off. Hard work will be necessary both at work and in the home. You’ll need to earn enough money to support your family. You’ll need to have enough energy left in the tank to parent your kids (and the nuclear family ideal often calls for some pretty intensive parenting practices). If you’re like many people, basic okayness depends on feeling more or less successful at work and more or less successful as a parent. But lots of people have chronic illnesses or disabilities that preclude constant hard work. Lots of people work their butts off and never get ahead at work or have no job stability in the first place. Lots of people throw their whole souls into parenting and still feel like failures. People without job security and career success, and people who feel like unsuccessful parents – neither fit the nuclear family ideal.

In order to form a nuclear family that matches the dominant ideal, you need to have happy, healthy, thriving children. Your kids should not be sick or disabled, and they shouldn’t struggle with mental illness or addiction. They should, on turning 18, go out into the world and make something of themselves. You should never lose a child. And yet lots of people’s kids are sick or disabled. Lots of people – no matter what great, loving, supportive parents they are – have kids who struggle with mental illness or addiction. Some people’s children die. And parents of kids who aren’t okay, aren’t thriving, aren’t outwardly successful – they don’t fit the nuclear family ideal.

In order to form a nuclear family that matches the dominant ideal, you need to be able to pay for all the services you would otherwise get from community and kin, or else you need to be able to afford for one parent to opt out of the workforce. You need financial stability at minimum, although wealth is better. You need one parent to be able to stay home, or else you need the resources and know-how to hire childcare providers, maybe housecleaners, maybe tutors, maybe coaches. Maybe you have enough wealth to send your kids to private school – the dominant nuclear family ideal loves private school. But lots of people don’t have wealth, don’t have financial stability, don’t even have access to credit. And poor people don’t fit the nuclear family ideal.

In order to form a nuclear family that matches the dominant ideal, it’s best if you’re white and you were born in the United States and your first language is English. It’s best if you’re straight and cisgender and able-bodied and neurotypical. These identities legitimize everything else. You won’t be perceived as an interloper, a foreigner, a weirdo, someone who’s taking jobs, taking valuable real estate, living parasitically off others or the state. If you’re a straight, white, English-speaking, able-bodied legal citizen, you’re perceived as entitled to the nuclear family and the status and respectability it confers. And you’re much more likely to be able to access resources that will allow you to hire help.

In order to form a nuclear family that matches the dominant ideal, you need privilege and you need luck. You also need to want that kind of life, which a lot of people don’t. Many of the specifics above are actually out of our control. Maybe all of them. Who we are, the circumstances of our lives, our desires and proclivities – how much of this do we really choose? Not a lot, if you ask me. And this means that the nuclear family ideal is not only an oppressive crappy diet that fails to deliver on its promises, it’s also arbitrarily available to some and not available to others. This huge component of our perceived success in life – and often of the opportunities that come our way – is an accident of birth, of inheritance, of luck. (If you even want to call it lucky to live in a nuclear family household).

It’s Time to Build – or Revive – Kinship-Based Alternatives to the Nuclear Family

The nuclear family is a failed experiment. We’ve tried it and it’s not serving us. It doesn’t work without lots and lots of help – paid, unpaid, or both.

The alternative, of course, is remembering how to build extended networks of kinship and community care. We need some people to actively choose Auntiehood instead of parenthood, so that parents can have a village. We need lots of people to choose to live with or near loved ones, to prioritize proximity to our people over proximity to cool neighborhoods or supposedly good schools. (I recently wrote about how, when a school has a bad reputation, that’s often due to racist and classist assumptions about the school’s students and community). We need to prioritize travelling to and supporting our people, occasionally putting these kinds of trips ahead of vacations. We need to advocate for policies and infrastructure that support as many people as possible to live in community. (How I long for a community kitchen in my neighborhood!)

And we need to start naming and disrupting dominant cultural assumptions about collectivism, expansive kinship, chosen family, and community care. The hard-to-perceive reality is that collectivism is viewed as disreputable in dominant U.S. society – probably lots of other societies, too. And – real talk – the reasons for this have a lot to do with colonialism and racism and homophobia.

Collectivism and big families and complex inscrutable kinship relations are associated with Indigeneity and Blackness and Brownness – non-whiteness, non-Westernness, bad difference. For example, the nuclear family was weaponized to displace and replace Indigenous clans and kinship networks across North America (and in lots of other places, too). Native people were expected to assimilate, get married, and own private property, and if they didn’t make their families seem respectable by white European standards fast enough, their children were taken away. As Dakota Indigenous studies scholar Kim TallBear has argued, “the clearly unsustainable nuclear family is the most commonly idealized alternative to the tribal and extended family.”

Collectivism and chosen family are associated with queerness, and queerness is associated in dominant culture with weirdness, deviance, and peril to children. Members of the queer community have been seeking out and forming their own families for generations – including lovingly raising not only their own children but also queer and trans children who have to flee their families of origin.

Collectivism and community care and dependence on others are associated with disability, and disability is associated in dominant culture with unfitness – for society, for jobs, for caring for children. Disabled people are leading the way on building and sustaining interdependent networks of care. As writer and disabled parent Jessica Slice asks, “What if we judged every parent by how good they were at marshalling help for the sake of their children? If that were the metric, disabled parents would be among the best.”

When anyone, of any ethnicity, cultivates extended kinship relationships, we associate ourselves with a form of family that is, in turn, associated with Nativeness and Blackness and Brownness. When anyone, of any gender or sexual orientation, cultivates chosen family, we associate ourselves with a form of family that is, in turn, associated with queerness and transness. When anyone, of any ability, cultivates interdependence and community care, we associate ourselves with a form of family that is, in turn, associated with disability. And non-whiteness, queerness, disability – all of these are (still), according to the dominant culture, bad and disreputable and dangerous for children.

Of course, all of these stories are oppressive and false.

And we might think we don’t buy into them, but oh, the individualist conditioning can be so subtle. We might be all about racial justice and gender and sexuality justice and disability justice and collectivism and still, without hardly noticing, buy into the dominant culture’s scripts about why the nuclear family is good and collectivism and extended kinship and interdependence are bad. We’re conditioned to associate single-family households with privacy and independence and autonomy, and communal living with mess and noise and kids running wild. We experience the nuclear family as basically respectable, whereas there are all kinds of cultural scripts about divorced families and single-parent households and kids being raised by people who aren’t their parents. No matter how much I love and support the many ways a family can look, I still sometimes get a subtle little voice at the back of my head thinking “what went wrong there?” It’s gross, and as soon as I notice that little voice I’m happy to send it on its way – but the point is, it’s in there. And I want it out.

The nuclear family isn’t serving us. It’s time for something better.

Related Reading from The Auntie Bulletin

“The Need for Help is Not Reserved for Disabled People”

Grown Ups Share

Building Kinship and Community in the Age of Collapse

Feeding Snacks to Kids

A Tale of Two Surgeon General's Warnings

Auntie Collective Wisdom

Full disclosure, there have been times in my life when I was intimidated by teenagers – partly because they were sometimes mean to me when I was one. Becoming a high school teacher cured me of my fear of teens, but many adults who don’t have regular contact with teenagers tend to be low grade intimidated by them. For November, I’m planning a crowdsourced post tentatively titled “Don’t Fear the Teens,” in which we draw on the wisdom of our community to surface everything we know about building loving, supportive, fun relationships with the teenagers in our lives.

So I’m running yet another survey (because you know I love a survey). This time I want to know:

• Have you ever felt nervous about interacting with teenagers?

• What have you learned about how to connect with them?

• What’s a positive memory of connecting with a teen in your life?

• What advice do you have for adults who feel low-grade intimidated by teenagers?

• What do you still want to learn?

Be warned, these are open-ended questions, so they’ll take a little more thought and time. Feel free to think broadly and creatively, answer expansively, and answer the questions you wish you’d been asked rather than the ones I’ve actually asked you.

I’ll be collecting your ideas all this month. Click below to share your perspective – and be entered to win a 12-month paid-tier subscription to The Auntie Bulletin!

Tip: if the survey doesn’t work, double-check that you’re logged in to Substack.

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1. Weird how, in these 2020s, I can claim to be a “longtime fan” of something when I’ve been reading and/or listening to it for three years. On the timescale of technologies like Substack, I feel that three years can defensibly and accurately be referred to as a long time. Meanwhile, my partner moved to Seattle in 2010 and I still treat him like he’s new to town, the poor dear. I’m such a jerk!

2. Take it from this veteran Auntie with tons of beloved kids in her life, and who over the years also taught thousands of teenagers. There is no magic wand for having and raising “easy kids.” There just isn’t. You get who you get.

3. I’m doing my own rough calculation here and I admit it’s not at all scientific. I’m just calculating about 25 years per generation ÷ 200,000-300,000 years of human history = 8,000-10,000 generations.

4. With his co-authors Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan, Joseph Henrich co-authored in 2010 one of the most influential social science research papers of the 21st century: “The Weirdest People in the World?” Here’s a teaser from the paper abstract, and if you don’t mind academic jargon, it’s well worth a read (or a skim – for an academic paper, it’s quite accessible, but also very long). “Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers—often implicitly—assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population…. [This paper’s] findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans…. Overall, these empirical patterns suggest that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity.” Following the (huge) success of this paper, Henrich published a book on the same subject, which I haven’t read but which I assume is probably written in more accessible language for a general audience.

5. Can we really know anyone’s motivations? Can we even know our own? #deepthoughts

6. Hat tip to my wise and wonderful buddy Zena Sharman for the point about starvation. She texted me about Virginia’s podcast. I texted back about today’s post. She sent me a voice memo about whiteness and colonialism and “all the things that restrict our bodies, restrict our webs of relationship, and keep us starved.” I’ll be interviewing Zena about her queer multiparent family in the new year (she’s one of four parents to three kids in one household). It’s going to be awesome.