The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

As of 2014, America ceased to have a dominant family structure (what many of us used to imagine as two parents with 2.5 kids). Diversity and fluidity have shot up, driven by cohabitation, divorce, remarriage and non-marital recoupling. In one study over a three-year period, about a third of kids who were younger than six years old had already exper

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Even individuals who are raised in nuclear families usually experience it as merely a small unit within a larger unit of extended kin. Capitalism and patriarchy together, as structures of domination, have worked overtime to undermine and destroy this larger unit of extended kin. Replacing the family community with a more privatized small autocratic

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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.