We can do better than the nuclear family

Our modern ideas about family are making us lonely, tired and poor

Credit: US Government

When I was in my twenties and transitioning into the professional world, I gradually came to a sad realization: I had far fewer friends in my daily life than I thought I would. Though I theoretically did have many friends, most of us gradually ended up working in different cities. I made new friends, but over and over again those circles got smaller and, with busy lives, our interactions fewer. I wasn’t necessarily unhappy — I dug the relationships I did have — but life was a far cry from the Seinfeld or Friends experience I’d grown up expecting.

That never really changed. In fact, in terms of social interactions, things only got worse. More people, including me, moved. Other commitments gobbled up more and more time. Eventually my wife and I had a daughter. She was (and is) a joy, but because we lived far away from our friends and family, we lacked a meaningful support network. Watching our daughter 24/7 on our own with no relief at all was, of course, really great. But also, you know, kind of terrible too.

From talking to friends and family, I get the sense that many people are disappointingly nonplussed about the size of their adult social circles. And almost everyone I’ve met who has kids right now, or who has even contemplated having them, has mentioned feeling overwhelmed by the lack of a social safety net, be it formal or not.

When I was a kid, it was popular to say “it takes a village to raise a child.” But I’m hard pressed to think of anyone who has a village. When it comes to friendships and families, we’re going at it alone. Our villages are missing.

Sensing that this is not always how it was, nor how it needed to be, I did two things:

1. My wife and I moved our family from central Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. I love LA, but the Salt Lake metro area is where we have the largest concentration of family, and that’s why we chose it. (I was also extremely fortunate to get a good job that I enjoy and which allowed for remote work even before the pandemic.)

2. I spent the last year and a half researching where our ideas about family came from. My house is now filled with stacks of books that have titles like Family and Household in Medieval England and Patriarchy, Property and Death in the Roman Family. I perpetually have Chrome tabs open with scholarly papers with titles like “The Origins of WEIRD Psychology.”

My research has been eye-opening and fun (though maybe less so for my family that has been subjected to months of “interesting facts” about life circa 1100 AD.) This newsletter/blog is an outgrowth of that research, and of my attempts to rearrange my own life in a way that fixes the “missing village” problem. My posts here will be a journey. But for now, here’s the working thesis that I’ll be exploring:

Our modern ideas about the nuclear family are making us more lonely, more tired and poorer than we need to be.

There are lots of factors that led to this situation: Historically families were bound across multiple generations by shared economic interests, but today the basis of family relationships is more often emotional, and emotions can be fickle; thanks to job and housing markets, people often live far away from family, meaning that even if they’re emotionally close it’s harder to play an active role in each other’s day-to-day lives; the costs of housing and childcare are spiraling upward faster than wages, while individuals and nuclear family units are typically required to shoulder these burdens on their own.

I could go on.

However, what’s important here is that, over the course of my research, I’ve come to believe that we’re in a unique moment right now. Though families in the western world have taken a multitude of forms over the last 2,000 years, the last century and a half or so has seen significant transformations that seemed like a good idea at the time, but which ultimately whittled away that village we all need in order to have fulfilling social and family lives.

I think, or at least I hope, there’s a better way. And I suspect at least some of the keys to that way lie in our own past, before we became obsessed with each generation bootstrapping its way in the world all on its own.

So that’s what I’ll be exploring here, along with observations from my own experience and examples of ways that people have built back their own villages. If that’s something that appeals to you, please subscribe. Comment. Push back. Let me know what you think somehow, and thanks.