Nuclear Families Explode

Time for another installment in our epic History of the Poor! Today's chapter concerns homelessness and the breakdown of the nuclear family.

Periodically, I read other people's opinions. Usually, it's by accident. My eyes are open, writing is in front of them, and I read it, mistaking it for a recipe for soda crackers. Suddenly I am shocked to find myself immersed in an alien world-view. The other day someone stuck a lament for the nuclear family in front of me.

It went like this: "In my day the nuclear family was strong. Mothers stayed home and took care of the kids. Dads put food on the table. They instilled their children with values, and the children always had a home. We didn't have youth homelessness in those days, because kids weren't estranged from their parents."

According to this lament, the nuclear family was the normal family until Roosevelt and the New Deal began destroying it.

Well, I got news for all these lamentators. Even the term "nuclear family" only dates to just after WW II. It's true there have been nuclear families since prehistoric times, here and there, but they have not been the norm.

Prior to WW II there were "families." Lets review, then, the history of families.

The word "family" comes from the Latin familia. It's the same word that "familiar" comes from, as in black cats and all. It meant servant or assistant. "You can undress in front of Grovulus; he's just one of our familiars." Since Rome was patriarchal, the wife and children were familiars to the ruling patriarch, who could therefore sit around in his skivvies all day long. So the family consisted of the patriarch, his wife, their children, their children's children, and whoever else he owned.

Variations, some matriarchal, of this scheme are called extended families. The extended family, not the nuclear family, is the norm among those cultures that have low rates of homelessness. If you want to blame homelessness on a breakdown of families, you have to lament the replacement of the extended family by the nuclear family, rather than the breakdown of the nuclear family. By the time the nuclear family has replaced the extended family social disintegration is inevitable, because the nuclear family sucks.

I'll explain that below. But first, why do people think the nuclear family is the norm? The reason is corporatism. The rise of corporate power and the establishment of legal rights for corporations, overwhelming the rights of human individuals, led to the geographical breakup of extended families. Employees faced choices such as lose work or relocate to the new plant. Mergers and corporate restructures that served only stock holders and management added to the problem. There might not be a new plant to relocate to; somebody still has to move out to find work in another county or another state.

At first these pressures were minor and rare. But they increased steadily, so much so that the breakup of extended families has become a part of our tradition.

Recent US Census data on internal migration shows that one out of every five people living in the United States over the age of one year lived in a different state one year before. Another one out of five lived in the same state, but a different county. With that kind of mobility there's no hope of reinventing extended families anytime soon.

We think nuclear families are the norm because corporations promote them. They don't want us nostalgic for extended families. They like us mobile and fluid. So corporations have used images of nuclear families in the majority of their advertising since Sears Catalogs. The propaganda has worked.

As for nuclear families sucking? Well, it took corporations, a massive civil war, a couple of massive depressions, a Dust Bowl, and two world wars to shatter the extended family. Whereas nuclear families collapse every day from their own inadequacy.

You can't expect a husband and wife team to handle that much stress alone.