The Western nuclear family is a very unnatural social arrangement. Anthropologists have found that in most hunter-gatherers, the average infant is held at one point or another by 30+ people in a typical day.
The nuclear family has the twin downsides of putting tons of stress on parents of young kids, who shoulder the entire childcare burden, and deprives a lot of grandparents, aunts, cousins, and others of meaningful childcare time. In the industrialized West, for most people it's either all babies all the time, or no babies whatsoever. Both extremes are suboptimal relative to the environment humans evolved for.
I'm not defending the nuclear family, but I don't think our primitive past says anything about what's "optimal". For example, human life expectancy is much longer now. I'd much rather be a modern person with modern technology and medicine than a hunter-gatherer. Evolution != good. It's just history, and history is often ugly.
I agree and disagree. I'm certainly not arguing that industrialization isn't miraculous. Even from a parenting perspective, I think most would rather raise their kids in a stressful nuclear family than watch half of them die from preventable diseases. If you read about the anthropology of childrearing it's filled with endless heartbreaking accounts of parents having to make choices about letting one kid die to focus their resources on more viable children.
But the point I do want to make is that our physiology and psychology is largely fine tuned by evolution for a certain operating environment. When we step outside that environment, it often introduces dysfunction in unpredictable ways.
An extreme example: as land animals we wouldn't survive very long at the bottom of the sea. More prosaic example: it's undeniable an environment with many more and tastier calories creates chronic health problems. Metabolic disease is virtually unknown in hunter-gatherers.
A rough heuristic is that removing purely adversarial elements from the evolutionary environment produces an improvements. Pathogens, predators, physical injuries, birth-related traumas, and famine. Removing or mitigating those elements are the main reason life expectancies have improved relative to hunter-gathers. But once you step outside the totally hostile elements, most environmental changes tend to be neutral at best and harmful at worst. Physiology and psychology rely on delicately tuned equilibria, which are easy to disrupt. The consequences aren't terrible, but do tend to subtly accumulate over time. Hunter-gathers die fast because they get a concussion and bleed out. Westerners die slow from the accumulation of plaque in their arteries.
> Physiology and psychology rely on delicately tuned equilibria, which are easy to disrupt.
Agreed. My point is just that we should look at physiology and psychology as guides, not anthropology (which is interesting but not necessarily prescriptive).
A diet of Twinkies and Coke is obviously terrible. But a finely tuned, balanced modern diet guided by nutritional science is likely superior to a primitive hunter-gatherer diet. There are plenty of people today who are in great physical condition; this is very feasible within our modern society.
Similarly, different modern countries often have differing familial arrangements, so we can look at empirical outcomes there instead of trying to guess at what our distant ancestors did, who had little choice but to do what they did, not having modern civilization as an option.
Longer on average, yes, but I highly doubt healthier. I think we'd be in awe of the average health/fitness of a 30 year old hunter gatherer from 100,000 years ago, compared with the average corresponding human in modern times.
> I think we'd be in awe of the average health/fitness of a 30 year old hunter gatherer from 100,000 years ago, compared with the average corresponding human in modern times.
They're different, not really better.
Hunter gatherers definitely got more involuntary exercise. But modern people can choose to get better (more specialized/effective) and safer exercise than ancient people ever could have.
Hunter gatherers had to eat what was around them, and would involuntarily periodically fast. It's much easier and cheaper for modern people to have a varied diet. Many modern people also periodically fast. But you have to choose to do so.
Ancient people typically struggled with parasites and various diseases. That is largely not a factor in modern life. Modern people sometimes are affected by serious pollution issues - modern air quality from burning fossil fuels may be such a crisis. Airborne lead from leaded gasoline was almost certainly one. It's difficult to compare the effects of such problems.
There's also a pretty strong selection effect going on here: lots of people 100,000 years ago used to die. People would die in childhood, people would die in adulthood. This mean that women had to have lots of babies, which means women died in childbirth a lot.
So, I think it's true that, left to their own devices, modern people tend to be somewhat unhealthy. Mostly due to laziness. But modern people also pretty clearly have the opportunity to be much more healthy than ancient people.
Most likely we would not. There are whole classes of sicknesses that dissappeared last 200 years which were caused by lack of various nutricients. Both difficulty to get them and lack of knowledge played role.
Add to it easy to cure sicknesses, injuries that are nothing more and would kill you back then, their higher chance to contact said injuries and it is unlikely they would be so much healthier.
Also, there is reason why agrarian societies pushed away hunter gatherers - it is just easier to stay alive and healthy. Getting all the food a hunter gatherer in all seasons is hard.
In addition, childbirth in their society would both kill or forever damaged more women. They would also have harder time to leave physicly abusive situation, meaning likely more of it, meaning yet another negative impact on their health.
> Also, there is reason why agrarian societies pushed away hunter gatherers - it is just easier to stay alive and healthy.
No.
Agriculture exists because it supports more people per unit of land than what the traditional way of life did (on average). This is as hard of a fact about history as you're going to get.
Now, you need to be savvy about what the statement is not saying. It is not providing a reason for an individual, or group of people, to make the switch from hunter-gather to agriculture. History did not lay that choice upon the discretion of people. It plays out in a much more complicated way.
Since the relatively natural land will only support so-many humans per acre, what happens when there are too many children? They move. Okay, what happens when that next region has too many children? Do they start making farms based on their ledgers of expected food production to population ratio - NO. The people who have political decision power are not the same people who starve or get their heads lobbed off as a result of their decision. If anything, a leader would prefer the neighboring tribe lose a few heads to adjust for the starvation problem. Do people start "switching" to farms anywhere in this? No. Only over a vast period of time, many climates, lots of movement, tribal reorganization, do people start... semi-nomadic animal husbandry. One day this will lead to agriculture.
All of this is vastly more complicated than it is on the surface, and the newly-established farmer occupation, when it comes around, could possibly be seen as the sucker at the table. There was constant tensions between "civilized" societies and their tribal neighbors, and only over the super long term does the higher calorie density of civilization win out. Even if their soldiers are shorter and stupider, there are more of them. We don't read about this, because recorded history picks up at a time when superior organizational capabilities of civilization is starting to give them a quality advantage as well (and as a side-effect, writing).
You did not done much reading about history and military?
Anyway, easier way to get food and not get hungry or starwe is strong reason to switch lifestyle. Human societies of all kinds have been doing exact that decision over and over.
I don't think it's a question of good or bad, but of pragmatism in not fighting against the way that our bodies and minds were designed. Software is limited by the constraints of the hardware it runs on--engineers who try to ignore this will write slow and buggy software. Similarly, if we design lifestyles and societies that ignore, clash with, or subvert our biological and bio-psychological imperatives, we are likely to produce widespread physical and mental suffering.
> not fighting against the way that our bodies and minds were designed
Our minds and bodies were not designed. They evolved — slowly — under conditions of relatively harshness and scarcity that to a large extent no longer exist. The human "habitat" has changed radically in the past several hundred years. One might argue that we're no longer adapted to our environment. Evolution doesn't work quickly enough for that.
I'd also suggest there was widespread physical and mental suffering in the distant past. It wasn't the Garden of Eden in prehistory.
They were in a sense designed by an impersonal process--but I agree "design" isn't the best word since it implies intention.
I would agree that we are no longer adapted to our environment, and this seems to be the cause of many "modern" forms of suffering that are unrelated to scarcity, like mental illness and diseases of over-consumption. To me this implies that we have done a bad job in creating an environment for ourselves. We replaced suffering caused by scarcity (something we historically had little control over) with suffering caused by deliberate choices.
The point isn't that aligning our choices with biological and psychological needs will end all suffering. It's that not doing so pretty much guarantees a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Hunter gatherers did had mental illness and diseases. Takes something like schizophrenia or being bipolar. That is not something that is purely result of modern life. I dont think there is evidence hunter gatherers could not suffer from PTSD or abuse.
They did not had diseases of over-consumption, but they had diseases from under-consumption.
The thing is, we don't need anthropology to tell us that inactivity and excessive calorie consumption are bad. And the solution to obesity and similar problems is certainly not to return to hunter-gatherer society. Evolution is just a red herring here. It can tell us how we got here, but not how to move forward.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for a return to hunter-gatherer society. But we should certainly consider the environment that our bodies and minds were developed and optimized for, and that our species lived in for 99% of its history, as we decide how to structure our current environment.
To say that evolution is a "red herring" is absurd. It has literally determined every aspect of our being. You can't move forward without understanding what got you where you are.
> It has literally determined every aspect of our being. You can't move forward without understanding what got you where you are.
So has physics. Why stop at hunter-gatherers, why not go back to the Big Bang? Would you argue that we need to study astrophysics to deal with obesity?
It's not absurd at all to suggest that evolution is a red herring, any more than it's absurd to suggest that astrophysics is a red herring. Prehistoric archaeology is highly speculative at best. I'm not saying it's unscientific, I'm just saying there are a lot of things about prehistoric societies that we could be very wrong about, due to lack of direct observation and evidence, and thus it would a poor guide for our current and future societies even if we decided to base our behavior on our ancestors (which we shouldn't).
Biologists actually do have to study physics (including the most advanced and theoretical physics) to understand metabolic processes, and their discoveries directly inform medicine, psychology, and other downstream fields like sociology. So that's not as clever of an argument as you seem to think.
No one is saying that we should live exactly like our ancestors.
Even that increase in life expectancy is dubious, consider this passage from Psalms written in 1489 bc, which can basically be said about Americans today.
> Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures
I'm becoming more convinced that the whole "but everyone's living longer!" thing is nothing more than another gaslight attempt to ensure we continue to love our betters.
I'm not aware of any plains with bountiful mammoth and fruit trees that I can colonise with my hunter-gatherer tribe, but then I'm not an expert in Google maps ;)
Nonetheless, i'm not sure that the last ten years of my Dad's life (suffering from vascular dementia) were particularly good for him (I know that they were super hard for the rest of us).
I think the general point is that it's hard to trade-off the quality of those extra years, which is the point I was trying (unsuccessfully, it appears) to make.
I largely agree with you, but I don't think there's reason to believe this is the only way to live modernity. Being an industrialized nation with modern technology and medicine doesn't come as a single package with the nuclear family.
For example, I'm Mexican. Here it's quite normal to spend plenty of time with your extended family, live near them, have your parents help you take care of your kids for extended periods of time, etc. at least in my experience. We're an industrial nation and have modern medicine, but this is more a matter of culture and social attitudes I think.
I've seen a decent amount of evidence suggesting that hunter-gatherer societies are generally quite a bit happier than members of modern society (here's an example of an article discussing this[1]). I think we often make the assumption that more is better, but it's quite possible that in our search for more we're putting ourselves in situations that run counter to our biological nature. Animals in captivity have many advantages over their wild brethren (they don't have to worry about food, about being eaten, they have access to advanced medicine, etc.), but I don't think we can say that they're clearly better off or happier.
Longer life expectancy is a statistical lie. My grandparents died around ~95 but life expectancy at that time was probably lower than ~40. My grandmother had 4 kids who died very young (around 1-2 years of age) and that skews the numbers significantly.
We are baby-sitting lots of adults that couldn't make it past 1-3 years old of age before the medical revolution. Some of them might never be able to be productive and only consume resources from their families or the public. So maybe evolution was not such a bad idea after all.
A more "natural" arrangement occurs if we all don't run to large cities chasing glory and gold (which I have done, full disclosure, much to my child-caring woes). There is nothing wrong with nuclear families if you add in something like "nuclear communities".
In many small towns or suburban cities, 3 generations live nearby, with all the aunts and uncles. Help with care is always next door, and children are raised with dozens of frequent visitors or caretakers. I'm quite jealous of the quality of life of my inlaws / extended family for these reasons.
I experienced this in the small town suburb I lived in once. There were always random kids in and out of the house, we'd give them food/water/bandaids whatever. Tell jokes/stories. Even though we aren't related, we all knew each other and our kids just kinda bounced around together. Definitely a cool experience.
I think the media making the entire world out to be some bogeyman waiting to kidnap your child is as much to blame as anything.
I live in a top 10 US city (based on population), and it seems to be as you describe - generations of family living nearby, grandparents, etc. always around to help with the kids. Weekly (at least) family meals, parties where the whole neighborhood is invited, etc. I grew up knowing most of my friends' cousins and grandparents because they were just always around. Even today, I know my neighbors' kids and nephews because they live close by, too.
Sure, I should amend my statement to emphasize _running_ (as in away) rather than _big city_. You can certainly flee family support in search of riches from or to big or small cities.
I’m the parent of a young child and I definitely feel some sort of internal pressure to be all babies all the time. I feel pretty guilty leaving him with anyone other than my wife. All I can think to myself is whether what I’m doing is really worth it compared to spending time with the baby.
I definitely remember those days. Both our kids are in university now and the part of the chart that spoke to me was seeing that steep drop off when the kids reach a certain age. It was a big change when the kids started high school and all of their sports and activities were based around the school instead of parent volunteers.
It is fine now, and it is great to hear what the kids are learning in physics and math, and even cooler when they ask the old man for advice on a programming assignment. I would really love to have a couple of hours back though when we were all doing Lego robotics together. I miss those days.
I don't even necessarily think its just leaving your baby alone with other people. Pre-covid with a <1 year old and a toddler we would have play dates all the time for a break. You stop being the source of entertainment and become a mediator, which is much less work. The baby then gets passed around to whoever has a free hand.
I suspect there has always been pressure to not leave your baby with someone else and go off and do your own thing. The difference is now people are physically more distant from everyone else (I blame the ease of transportation) so being around close friends and family is the exception and not the standard.
It's even worse than that. Every set of new parents gets no shared knowledge on how to best raise a child. I mean there are a literal ton of books on the subject, but they give wildly different advice.
I have a single kid (turned 20 recently). I can tell you it's totally crazy figuring it out on your own. I approached it more methodically than most (IMO), and I don't think I made too many mistakes, but here's the thing: the mistakes I made didn't have to happen, had there been this shared body of knowledge that is passed on from generation to generation.
I personally think we need to value the idea of that body of knowledge, as a culture. Then, we can start to compare and contrast styles, etc.
The whole tiger mom/dad routine is so horrible for children. The lack of autonomy can have dire consequences later in life, and I think we're just starting to see that.
I know my tendency is to treat this like a problem, which needs data and analysis, refinement and tuning. But, if we were 10 generations into that process, I feel we'd have something to show for it. As is, every generation starts from zero (I think most people generally wing it).
Yeah, that’s fair. It strikes me as interesting that this isn’t a solved problem yet after millennia of civilization...
Do you have any pointers off the top of your head for resources on the negative effects of tiger parenting, or about parenting in general? No worries if not, I just figure it would save me a lot of effort in my own research
As a parent without nearby family, I think you're right. It's hard work. We went away to university, got jobs, settled down and bought a house. To move back close to family now would be an upheaval - there was probably only one short window of time when it wouldn't have been as much effort. Persuading our parents etc to downsize and move close to us might have a better chance.
It would be nice to live around extended family. People definitely do, but, here in the UK at least and excepting big-city-dwellers, it seems linked to lower economic status - people for whom one job is much like another.
Maybe eventually the link between where you work and where you live will be weaker, for more specialised jobs.
I watched somewhere on YouTube that nuclear family is designed to enhance consumerism. You sell less stuff if there are multiple families sharing the same items.
The western nuclear family is exactly what you get in agrarian societies of the past. It wasn't just some random thing the people of the 1950s made up on the spot.
When 4/6 of your sons grow to adulthood you can't live in the same household as all of them. You live with one of them (probably the most or least functional one). 2 of the others have their own farms (one probably gets yours, maybe you split your farm between them if it's big enough) so you probably pick one of them. The 4th you never see because he runs a business making cart wheels or something in the next village over. The 5th left town to get a job in the port by the sea when he was 15 and you haven't seen him since. And of your daughters that survived childhood will all move in with their husbands. If you run the numbers for them it's the same thing.
Multi generational households don't work at scale simply because of the numbers involved. Anyone pretending that that's how most people lived prior to the industrial revolution doesn't understand how many kids people had back then. At best you might get 10-25% of households having a grandparent around depending on the infant mortality rate at any given time. The birth rates and life expectancy just don't support more. 10-25% certainly isn't abnormal, but implying it is the default is Olympic level mental gymnastics.
I think you greatly overestimate population growth rates in the past here. A world where 4 successful sons was the norm has population doubling every decade or so, no society has done that. A world with just 2 has doubling every 25 years, and this was extremely unusual in the pre-industrial world. A few places in the new world (like Quebec) managed this for a while, and it was an astonishing phenomenon to people (like Malthus) who saw the numbers.
Most places were much closer to equilibrium, with about the same number of people farming a given district from one generation to the next. Something more like 3 adult children, one of whom never has a family, is what you should imagine. And then it's easy to picture multigenerational households being common. As they were, in many (but not all) parts of the world.
> The western nuclear family is exactly what you get in agrarian societies of the past.
Absolutely not - and I have direct experience of this.
First: multi generational households are extremely common.
Second: people, including children, spend tons of time with other people outside of the parent-child relation. Relatives, often cousins, granparents, and neighbors.
This is still the case for most agrarian societies outside of the English-speaking world.
The obsession with the hyper nuclear and exclusionary family is very american.
>Absolutely not - and I have direct experience of this.
Everyone who has direct experience of this time has been dead for half a century at least.
>First: multi generational households are extremely common.
Define "extremely common". What percent of people in a given society in a given time period do you think grew up in one?
>Second: people, including children, spend tons of time with other people outside of the parent-child relation. Relatives, often cousins, granparents, and neighbors.
Nobody is debating this. Of course prior to the industrial revolution people moved around less so your friends and neighbors are more likely to be your cousins and if grandma is nearby she'll wind up babysitting more. I don't see this as being meaningful to this discussion since they are outside one's household.
>This is still the case for most agrarian societies outside of the English-speaking world.
Back this up with numbers. Grandma has to live somewhere, but for an child in any given agrarian society to be more likely than not to have have grandma living under the same roof birth rates need to be low to the point of apocalyptic.
>The obsession with the hyper nuclear and exclusionary family is very american.
Is the fact that it's an American obsession supposed to be a bad thing?
Yes, multi generational households were far, far more common from the grandparent's perspective in the past because elderly parents living alone was far, far less common. But from the perspective of the child growing up they still far from the default. The birth rates are simply too high for them to have been default. Nobody here is saying mutligenerational households are bad but the people who think they were default have a skewed understanding of history. Calling something that just has to happen by mathematical necessity "unnatural" (i.e. the comment my initial comment replied to) seems a little over the top.
Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not.
I think the best data is for England, and centuries before the industrial revolution, the pattern is very strongly not multi-generational. Young couples expected to set up new households together, not to live with their parents.
(The royal family & such of course were different, and still are.)
> Depends where, but in western Europe for the last thousand years, probably not.
This is definitely not true. At minimum you placed span from 1020, which means middle age, feudalism, powerty before French revolution and after, industrial revolution which meant completely overcrowded housing.
Living in multi generational household was normal, expectation to care about parents was normal. Building new house at the time of marriage where couple would live alone was not the expectation - at minimum it would be unaffordable for huge parts of population. Plus your social system was family, whether in old age or in sickness.
There is pretty good data on this from pre-industrial England.
What you are asserting is what historians widely believed before they actually looked at the data, around the 1960s. They said this by looking at the more recent past of less developed places (like rural Russia, pre-1917) and assuming that the far past of England looked the same, and thus that nuclear families became common only recently. And they were wrong.
Of course, there are many places even further away than Russia. Lots of other cultures did have multi-generational families as the pattern, and many still do.
The nuclear family has the twin downsides of putting tons of stress on parents of young kids, who shoulder the entire childcare burden, and deprives a lot of grandparents, aunts, cousins, and others of meaningful childcare time. In the industrialized West, for most people it's either all babies all the time, or no babies whatsoever. Both extremes are suboptimal relative to the environment humans evolved for.