Nuclear Family (and Christmas Materialism)

I think it's called the "nuclear" family because it's about to blow up.

Two adults are not enough to raise children. I'm convinced of this. I watch my friends struggle to keep sane while working and parenting. My family is faring better than most, probably because we live in a small city with low housing costs, so I can afford to run a business part-time. But in big cities with long commutes and high mortgages, I honestly don't know how they survive. There simply aren't enough hours in the day to do what has to be done.

Imagine how different it would be if grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins still all lived together, as was the norm in our culture less than a century ago. All adults back then had paying work of some kind, but all contributed in some way to the household unpaid work and the parenting as well. In effect, the childran had more than one mother, more than one father, and extra brothers and sisters. There was flexibility and durability to this family unit. Nobody needed layers of life insurance, health insurance, and retirement plans to protect against all of life's travails -- that was what the family was for.

Compare that with two dead exhausted parents siloed in their "single family homes" and high-stress lives and paying big money for it, wondering if this is the dream life they were sold the bill of goods on.

Why? Because a highly industrialized economy needs more portable workers. For this reason, back in the 1940s and 1950s, our culture invented The Career, luring people into thinking that they must structure their lives around their work, rather than around their people. This made industry more efficient, because it could move people around like chess pieces. For workers to be this portable, families had to be divided into smaller units -- nuclear families. Somehow, they managed to make this sound normal.

Of course, at that time, only one person in the family could have The Career. The woman had to stay at home to make up for all the other adults who were no longer part of the family unit.

Now that both parents are working again, the nuclear family is cracking under the strain.

In the meantime, we've built entire cities of single-family houses and commuter highways. We've taught seniors that they don't actually want to live with their adult children. We've invented the idea of the "empty nest" to justify the feelings of grief that come when the already tiny family unit disintegrates further. It's as if we've tried to shore up the nuclear family and career ideals so that we can never return to the larger families of earlier times.

I think we are homesick for the extended family.

And that's where Christmas comes in. Nowhere is this homesickness more evident than in Christmas traditions. The warm-fuzzy images are all of big tables with multiple generations together. We get in cars and planes and trains to get back to whatever extended family we still have so that we can get a smidge of this warm-fuzzy. But it's not the same. These are people we hardly ever see, only a notch above strangers. We have to work hard sometimes to manufacture the warm-fuzzy we're supposed to feel. Besides, there are always relatives who can't come, who won't come, etc.

How many of us haven't seen our nieces and nephews in months? Our grandparents or aging parents? Our aunts and uncles? We're all so far away from each other.

The nuclear family seems like a thin, sad substitute for the support, warmth, and economic stability of a larger family. Christmas merely pushes this into our faces.

We're homesick.

So we solace ourselves with cheap plastic junk.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the rise of Christmas materialism in the 1950s coincided with the rise of the nuclear family and the rise of The Career.