4 minute read
The TV show Full House is based on the implosion of a nuclear family and its replacement with a forged family. Danny is a widower who temporarily brings in two bachelors, his long time best friend and his brother-in-law, to help raise his three young girls, including a baby. Eventually their unusual family configuration expands further as Uncle Jesse gets married to Aunt Becky and they have twins with Joey still there living in the basement. It’s a big, lovable mess with everyone living under one roof. It’s not a nuclear family, but it meets their need for a healthy family.1
To those wondering about my allusions to alternative kinship structures, put on your thinking cap because there are a wide array of creative possibilities. Wisdom suggests the list start with a return to an actually traditional kinship model.2 After that are options like forged families, cohousing within intentional community, intimately living in geographical proximity to chosen family, or a modified extended family with no blood relation formed by what sociologist Eugene Litwak calls “a coalition of nuclear families in a state of mutual dependence.” It’s all on the table.3
According to David Brooks, “For millions of people, the shift from big and/or extended families to detached nuclear families has indeed been a disaster. As the social structures that support the family have decayed, the debate about it has taken on a mythical quality. Social conservatives insist we can bring the nuclear family back but the conditions that made for stable nuclear families in the 1950s are never returning.” Christians need to accept that this kinship structure is neither viable nor sustainable for most people anymore. These people are not the outliers.4
Yes, the detached nuclear family model can be great for those who are fortunate enough to have the affluence and/or social support network as well as health to successfully pull it off. For those who are less fortunate, however, it’s a living hell of ever-increasing exhaustion and loneliness.5 That is the problem. When it’s expected as the cultural norm, demanded as the societal standard, exalted as the spiritual ideal, and prescribed as the panacea to every major life challenge from finances to child rearing, it further hoses over people who already don’t have those means.6
I’m going off-script again… A friend grew up in a tight-knit nuclear family with traditional gender roles, so he was zealously intent on replicating that experience.7 Then his siblings scattered to pursue careers, his parents met untimely deaths, and his wife was diagnosed with M.S. I’ll give you one guess whose worldview transformed.8 They now live in a large house together with another married couple and their children, a married couple with no kids yet, and a single friend in what he calls “one big family.” To his credit, he also publicly apologized for his past stridency.
I remember evangelical Christians in my life who hated Full House. I mean HATED. They claimed it was inappropriate for the show to depict Danny, Jesse, and Joey as three male figures together parenting DJ, Stephanie, and Michelle. I even remember a former pastor going off on a rabbit trail about this from the pulpit. He said the premise was fine for addressing a short-term crisis, but he didn’t allow his own family to watch past the first couples seasons because it’s “pathetic”, “effeminate”, and “disgusting” to see this evolve into a long-term familial arrangement. Once again, it’s American evangelicalism’s Focus on the (Nuclear) Family worldview. To those harboring such ignorant views, I offer a dismissive and heartfelt, “Oh, fuck off.” I’m fine with people who love nuclear families and if traditional gender roles work for them, cool. All good. You do you. My issue is with the assclowns who try to hegemonically prescribe those practices for everyone else regardless of their particular circumstances. If it seems like I have zero patience for that shit, it’s because I do.↩
i.e. extended families all living nearby, with some even living in attached housing, as a resilient, interconnected web of reciprocal support.↩
I see no good reason whatsoever why detached nuclear families should be held up as the ideal over these other kinds of creative kinship structures. People need the stability of family. I’m anything but dogmatic about what form it takes.↩
It was only a viable and sustainable model for about 15 years. As Brooks explains, “That 1950 to 1965 window was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired, wittingly or not, to obscure the essential fragility of the nuclear family.” The detached nuclear family reached a cult-like status during that brief period and it has persisted in the decades since even though the economic and social conditions have made it increasingly difficult for each subsequent generation to live up to this ideal.↩
As Brooks writes, “This is the story of our times. The story of the family. Once a dense cluster of many siblings and extended kin fragmenting into ever smaller and more fragile forms. The initial result of that fragmentation of the nuclear family didn’t seem so bad, but then because the nuclear family is so brittle the fragmentation continued. In many sectors of society, nuclear families fragmented into single-parent families, then single-parent families into chaotic families or no families. 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; we’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families–a married couple and their children–which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options… It ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working class and the poor.”↩
You already don’t have enough resources to make ends meet, then are guilted and shamed for it. It’s a classic example of rubbing salt into the wound. The people who do this are assholes.↩
He’s a pastor who often prescribed the nuclear family as “God’s ideal” and even preached a sermon entitled “The Sanctity of the Nuclear Family.” He narrowly saw it as the way the world is and should be.↩
Interesting how that works, is it not?↩
