Photo by Rajiv Perera on Unsplash
There is clear evidence that children thrive in families with both parents. No one is arguing to the contrary of that. But the idea that the nuclear family is the original and final model of this, some idealized version of “Judeo-Christian values,” is not supported by facts. Historically in both Jewish and Christian families, and in families of other religions and cultures, by the way, there was an extended family model living together under one roof or compound that was supported by the larger family of the community.
The idea that we haven’t picked and chosen from these ancient cultures as we pleased is just ridiculous. The Old Testament allowed for polygamy. Women were married as young as 13. Marriages were arranged by parents. Fathers had the right to kill or sell their children into slavery. And people lived together in extended family groups. That’s the “Judeo” part of these values, right?
Or perhaps they’re referring to Paul’s exhortation that it is better not to marry. That seems to be a Christian value for sure, although one the modern church ignores wholesale. In more than three decades of church attendance, I don’t ever remember a sermon on that passage.
But really, it seems clear that when people talk about “family values” they’re referring to the era of a more modernized version of “Judeo-Christian” that has crystallized as 1950-65, according to in David Brooks’s March 2020 article in The Atlantic, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” Never mind that “family values” included segregating white children from black children in school. This was a period of 15 years when up to 77.5 percent of children lived with two parents and no extended family.
And yet it appears to have been an outlier throughout history, a short time of less than two decades. In addition to what we know about ancient historical families, Minnesota Population Center professor of history and population studies Steven Ruggles’s data analysis in “Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America” shows “the frequency of extended families in England and America doubled between 1750 and 1900” in contrast to the previous, mistaken belief that the Industrial Revolution destroyed the extended family.
Regardless, it would appear that the creation of the single-family household is largely driven by economics rather than “Judeo-Christian values”—just as its modern dissolution is. It takes a certain amount of wealth to live with only two parents and their children in one household. Another study by Ruggles entitled “Patriarchy, Power, and Pay” found that in 1961, men ages 25-29 were earning up to 400 percent more than their fathers did. (This didn’t last; wages began declining in the mid-70s.) According to David Brooks, “Affluent people have the resources to effectively buy extended family, in order to shore themselves up.” And this also goes for elderly family members who are no longer being cared for by extended family but by in-home nurses or assisted living facilities.
So although the success of nuclear family clearly requires financial excess, within this model we see also the lack of financial freedom available to women, who were first not allowed to vote or work outside the home, then to open a bank account or credit card without a man’s signature. The end of this in the 1970s had a singular impact on the nuclear family, at least as much as the rise of the individualistic mindset and . Women who had no other option financially than to stay married now had a variety of economic freedoms available to them that were previously difficult to impossible to obtain.
Even now, the single-family, two-parent household continues to be extremely disadvantageous to women (with all due respect to it supposedly being better for children, but I believe time will tell as the toll on women’s mental health continues). The physical and mental stressors of bearing children and caring for infants and toddlers take an extreme toll without extended family help and caregiving to both the mother and the children. We see the result of this in the massive increase in diagnoses of postpartum depression and anxiety; the isolation and unrelenting nature of child care would wear down anyone. Imagine if you had to do your job every day, without a weekend, without an end to the workday, even during the night. Every single human would eventually break down under the strain. We have now gaslit an entire generation of women into believing they are suffering from postpartum depression when instead they are exhausted, isolated, hopeless, and malnourished.
Those who insist that America needs to return to “family values” are talking about returning to a system that oppressed women and isolated families in a vacuum, not to the historical model of supportive communities that allowed families to thrive.
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