Category: The Nuclear Option

This post is concludes my series based on David Brooks’ article entitled “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake”. Previous posts can be read HERE and HERE and HERE .

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Hopefully, my previous posts expressed some legitimate questions and concerns about the nuclear family, particularly the church’s idolization of a “ideal nuclear family” as a Biblical model.
The latter portion of “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake” addresses the future of families and possible solutions to the disintegration of families in our society. One thing I’m relative sure about is that the “ideal nuclear family” will not return and any efforts to accomplish such are useless and counter-productive.
“We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back”. 
I am not suggesting abandonment of the core values of God ordained family but am arguing for understanding cultural realties and reimagining family. Because thinking out of the box is an oxymoron in my Christian experience, reimagining family is subject worthy of its own discussion. I hope some of you biblical scholars will pick up the mantle on that.
In my view, manyWestern Christians are faced with a clear choice… push our heads deeper into the sand and tighten our grip on a nostalgic and unrealistic image of family OR wake up to the need to reimagine and rethink family and its future and our response as Christ followers to that reality. This is no small matter, and, above my pay grade, but not an impediment to my voice of concern.

The remainder of this post will be directed at Brooks’ examination of the future of families, particularly the idea of forged families.

Resurgence of extended families

..recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging. Many of the statistics I’ve cited are dire. But they describe the past—what got us to …where we are now. In reaction to family chaos, accumulating evidence suggests, the prioritization of family is beginning to make a comeback. Americans are experimenting with new forms of kinship and extended family in search of stability.

…a new set of values, has emerged. That may be happening now—in part out of necessity but in part by choice. Since the 1970s, and especially since the 2008 recession, economic pressures have pushed Americans toward greater reliance on family. Starting around 2012, the share of children living with married parents began to inch up. And college students have more contact with their parents than they did a generation ago. We tend to deride this as helicopter parenting or a failure to launch, and it has its excesses. But the educational process is longer and more expensive these days, so it makes sense that young adults rely on their parents for longer than they used to.
In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans—64 million people, an all-time high—live in multigenerational homes.
The revival of the extended family has largely been driven by young adults moving back home. In 2014, 35 percent of American men ages 18 to 34 lived with their parents. In time this shift might show itself to be mostly healthy, impelled not just by economic necessity but by beneficent social impulses; polling data suggest that many young people are already looking ahead to helping their parents in old age.
Another chunk of the revival is attributable to seniors moving in with their children. The percentage of seniors who live alone peaked around 1990. Now more than a fifth of Americans 65 and over live in multigenerational homes. This doesn’t count the large share of seniors who are moving to be close to their grandkids but not into the same household.

Resurgence of extended families is a promising aspect of a new family paradigm, especially for Christian communities. Extended family more closely resembles a biblical family model. From a covenant perspective, membership in the covenant community is more communal than individualistic.
“Extended families have two great strengths. The first is resilience. An extended family is one or more families in a supporting web. Your spouse and children come first, but there are also cousins, in-laws, grandparents—a complex web of relationships among, say, seven, 10, or 20 people. ”

Despite the positives of extended families, their re-emergence in today’s culture brings challenges. Beyond obvious changes such as residential requirements, there will be interesting challenges to Christian churches that have built their ministries on a nuclear family model. For example, structures that support the idea of nuclear families, such as separate teen ministries and worship which implicitly encourage separation and independence will be found to be impediments to support of extended families. Curriculums for family and child rearing will need to be reevaluated and revised.

Forged Families

Over the past several decades, the decline of the nuclear family has created an epidemic of trauma—millions have been set adrift because what should have been the most loving and secure relationship in their life broke. Slowly, but with increasing frequency, these drifting individuals are coming together to create forged families. These forged families have a feeling of determined commitment.  
….in at least one respect, the new families Americans are forming would look familiar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors from eons ago. That’s because they are chosen families—they transcend traditional kinship lines.

The forged family Brooks write about is both encouraging and frightening. I find it encouraging because it offers hope for redeeming family in the most idealistic ways.
“The scene is one many of us have somewhere in our family history: Dozens of people celebrating Thanksgiving or some other holiday around a makeshift stretch of family tables—siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, great-aunts. The grandparents are telling the old family stories for the 37th time. “It was the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen in your life,”

Forged families can be frightening:

Perhaps a metaphor of forged family and the future American family may be, ironically, the TV series Modern Family. I have not watched any episodes, but the description that follows seems prescient.

Modern Family revolves around three different types of families (nuclear, step- and same-sex) living in the Los Angeles area, who are interrelated through Jay Pritchett and his children, daughter Claire and son Mitchell. Patriarch Jay is remarried to a much younger woman, Gloria Delgado Pritchett (née Ramirez), a passionate Colombian immigrant with whom he has a young son, Fulgencio Joseph “Joe” Pritchett, and a son from Gloria’s previous marriage, Manuel “Manny” Delgado.
Jay’s daughter Claire was a homemaker, but has returned to the business world. She is now the chief executive of her father’s business, Pritchett’s Closets and Blinds. She is married to Phil Dunphy, a realtor and a self-professed “cool dad”. They have three children: Haley Dunphy, a stereotypically ditzy teenage girl;Alex Dunphy, an intelligent but nerdy middle child; and Luke Dunphy, the off-beat only son.
Jay’s lawyer son Mitchell and his husband Cameron Tucker have one adopted daughter, Lily Tucker-Pritchett. As the name suggests, this family represents a modern-day family and episodes are comically based on situations that many families encounter in real life.

Emergence of forged families will require Christians to face cultural realities. Forged families as defined in “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake” implicitly include: unmarried partners, same-sex marriage, single parents, unwed mothers, and sundry other non-conforming relationships.
Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin. It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.

All the while we are finding hope and encouragement for family, we will have to reconcile those opportunities with faith and doctrine. It is not an option to continue sticking our head in the sand.

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My previous post “The Nuclear Option” introduced the subject of nuclear families via David Brooks’ Atlantic article “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake”. The title is provocative, especially to my tender Christian sensibilities. Despite its length, I persevered and read and re-read Brook’s article. I found it challenging in numerous ways and am continuing to ponder some of his ideas and conclusions.
Rather quickly, I received a welcomed rebuttal shared by a friend entitled “The Nuclear Family is Still Indispensable”.

In the process of digesting Brooks’ lengthy missive I was reminded how significant the idea of nuclear family is to Christians. In my experience, much of our teaching and preaching presumes a nuclear family as a natural consequence of the Gospel. I am confident of the preeminence of marriage and family, for humans, in God’s creation. I am not so confident that the nuclear family as it has come to be generally understood… “a two-parent nuclear family, with one or two kids, probably living in some detached family home on some suburban street.”… is not the best vision for Christian families.

 From 1950 to 1965, divorce rates dropped, fertility rates rose, and the American nuclear family seemed to be in wonderful shape. And most people seemed prosperous and happy. In these years, a kind of cult formed around this type of family—what McCall’s, the leading women’s magazine of the day, called “togetherness.” Healthy people lived in two-parent families. In a 1957 survey, more than half of the respondents said that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic.”

I believe much of the Christian perception of the ideal family is a nostalgic remembrance of the glory days of the nuclear family of 1950-1965. As one who is a product of that era, I am sympathetic. Despite all the positive qualities of the nuclear family, sadly they are no longer prevail in our society.

For that reason, I am concerned that, for Christians in particular, our nostalgic perception of the nuclear family is our reality. If that is the case, it has powerful implications for us as we struggle to be Kingdom of God in this world. If we are reacting to the world as we perceive it, not as it is, our voice will be incoherent to the world.

A Reality Check.

• By 1960, 77.5 percent of all children were living with their two parents, who were married, and apart from their extended family.
  Today, only a minority of American households are traditional two-parent nuclear families and only one-third of American individuals live in this kind of family. That 1950–65 window was not normal.
• In 1980, only 12 percent of Americans lived in multigenerational households. But the financial crisis of 2008 prompted a sharp rise in multigenerational homes. Today 20 percent of Americans—64 million people, an all-time high—live in multigenerational homes.
• In 2014, 35 percent of American men ages 18 to 34 lived with their parents.
• Today many American males spend the first 20 years of their life without a father and the next 15 without a spouse.
• Nearly half of black families are led by an unmarried single woman, compared with less than one-sixth of white families. (The high rate of black incarceration guarantees a shortage of available men to be husbands or caretakers of children.) According to census data from 2010, 25 percent of black women over 35 have never been married, compared with 8 percent of white women. Two-thirds of African American children lived in single-parent families in 2018, compared with a quarter of white children. 
• In 1960, roughly 5 percent of children were born to unmarried women. Now about 40 percent are. The Pew Research Center reported that 11 percent of children lived apart from their father in 1960. In 2010, 27 percent did. Now about half of American children will spend their childhood with both biological parents. Twenty percent of young adults have no contact at all with their father 
• Americans today have less family than ever before. From 1970 to 2012, the share of households consisting of married couples with kids has been cut in half. In 1960, according to census data, just 13 percent of all households were single-person households. In 2018, that figure was 28 percent. In 1850, 75 percent of Americans older than 65 lived with relatives; by 1990, only 18 percent did.
• Over the past two generations, people have spent less and less time in marriage—they are marrying later, if at all, and divorcing more. In 1950, 27 percent of marriages ended in divorce; today, about 45 percent do. In 1960, 72 percent of American adults were married. In 2017, nearly half of American adults were single. According to a 2014 report from the Urban Institute, roughly 90 percent of Baby Boomer women and 80 percent of Gen X women married by age 40, while only about 70 percent of late-Millennial women were expected to do so—the lowest rate in U.S. history. And while more than four-fifths of American adults in a 2019 Pew Research Center survey said that getting married is not essential to living a fulfilling life, it’s not just the institution of marriage they’re eschewing: In 2004, 33 percent of Americans ages 18 to 34 were living without a romantic partner, according to the General Social Survey; by 2018, that number was up to 51 percent.
• The two-parent family, meanwhile, is not about to go extinct. For many people, especially those with financial and social resources, it is a great way to live and raise children. But a new and more communal ethos is emerging, one that is consistent with 21st-century reality and 21st-century values.

If you have not read “The Nuclear Family was a Mistake” in its entirety, perhaps this post has encouraged you to do so. There are numerous questions to be addressed, not the least of which is: “If not the nuclear family, then what?”

It is my intention to address that question and others in future posts.

To be sure, the isolated nuclear family detached from all social support is simply not workable for most people. 

The Nuclear Family is is Still Indispensable