Author and commentator DAVID BROOKS laments nuclearisation in the revealingly titled ‘The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake’, an essay published in the March 2020 issue of The Atlantic. After a brief golden age, from 1950 to 1965, writes Brooks, the nuclear family — two parents and their offspring under one roof — has undergone a severe breakdown. A sprinkling of statistical data helps draw a striking picture of the wreckage: single-person households at 28 per cent in 2018, up from 13 per cent in 1960; 45 per cent the current divorce rate, as opposed to 27 per cent in 1950; a 72 per cent marriage rate in 1960, whereas in 2017 nearly half of the adult population is single and largely reporting that marriage and even romantic relationships barely figure in its life aspirations; the current birth-rate at approximately 50 per cent of what it was in 1960; pet ownership currently more widespread than childrearing; 18 per cent of persons over the age of 65 living with relatives in 1990, as opposed to 75 per cent in 1850.1 This state of affairs ought to trouble not only the socially conservative and the nostalgically inclined, Brooks contends, because the disintegration has affected two vulnerable groups especially adversely: many children now lack ‘a secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood’; and many senior citizens die in Dickensian circumstances, alone and destitute. Attempts to revitalise the nuclear family, however, Brooks sees as exercises in futility. The product of a rare constellation of forces and conditions, it was never going to last. The postwar manufacturing economy allowed working-class men to support a nuclear household on a single income. Meanwhile, the experience of the Second World War had significantly bolstered social cohesion. One of the manifestations of this cohesion was an apparent alignment of the interests of capital and labour. Another was the inter-family support and communal childrearing in suburban communities — a best-of-both-worlds arrangement: nuclear-family autonomy with extended-family perks. The window was brief. When manufacturing migrated to the developing world, both working-class incomes and working-class political clout declined, making single-income nuclear households less viable. But the decisive blows came from the cultural sphere. The nuclear family simply was no match for the baby-boomer generation’s brand of hyper-individualism, nor for the assertiveness of an increasingly militant feminism, both of which identified the family as a mortal enemy early on. The traditional alternative to the nuclear family, the extended family, is a far more robust institution, the author submits. When multiple generations and distant family members share a home, they benefit from the pooling of material and mental resources, and the strains of childrearing are more thinly distributed. It is the relegation of women to the kitchen, however, that is the extended family’s lynchpin, Brooks concedes. So, having found the load-bearing capacity of the nuclear family woefully inadequate, and the extended family incompatible with gender egalitarianism, Brooks urges us to get creative. The ‘forged family’, as some refer to it, is one in which lived experience, rather than blood, supplies the adhesive. It is made up of those people in one’s life who have proved themselves dependable. It combines the resource-pooling of the extended family with respect for contemporary social norms — especially the tolerance of gender-role diversity. Compelling or not, Brooks’s treatment of this fraught topic has undeniable grace. He delivers a piece that is polemical, yet exquisitely mannered; he is forthright about his conservative value commitments, yet sees through the hollowness of both right- and left-wing rhetoric on the subject; spread across several pages and packed with official data, scholarly references and anecdote, his narration remains engaging and galloping. ‘The Nuclear Family’ contains just about all that is worth salvaging out of the journalistic enterprise.
The author cites U.S. data and addresses a U.S. readership but the pertinent lessons are universal.