Of course it is. Just not within the parameters of how we've defined family and parenthood.
There's a reason societies used collective parenting for centuries and only recently with the push towards individualism that has stopped. There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
We've built our society and economy around the idea of 2 parents and some children. This is an arbitrary decision we've made and it wasn't how we came to this point. A push for accepting multi-node families would help nudge us in the right direction. Just changing the tax law to support and provide the same benefits to a union of multiple parents would be extremely useful.
We've codefied a single way of living. Maybe we should change that and allow for more dynamic family structures.
Anthropologist Jean Briggs [0] made baffling observations while studying Inuit [1] collective parenting [2] in the 60s https://text.npr.org/685533353
Briggs quickly realized something remarkable was going on in these families: The adults had an extraordinary ability to control their anger.
...
She was walking on a stony beach in the Arctic when she saw a young mother playing with her toddler — a little boy about 2 years old. The mom picked up a pebble and said, "'Hit me! Go on. Hit me harder,'" Briggs remembered.
The boy threw the rock at his mother, and she exclaimed, "Ooooww. That hurts!"
Briggs was completely befuddled. The mom seemed to be teaching the child the opposite of what parents want. And her actions seemed to contradict everything Briggs knew about Inuit culture.
"I thought, 'What is going on here?' " Briggs said in the radio interview.
Turns out, the mom was executing a powerful parenting tool to teach her child how to control his anger — and one of the most intriguing parenting strategies I've come across.
Could you provide more data here? The only information that I found was traditional families, where the grandparents and relatives take the responsibility for the education too.
I lived some years in South American, and I was impressed how many middle class families have their Nanny taking care of their kids (bringing to the school, cooking, controlling home work, taking care while they were sick, etc).. could be that be seem as "collective parenting" too?
> There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
Would provide more data here? I'm interested to see how they are doing.
At the same time, all kids go to school these days. That is a kind of collective parenting. All kids in a country learning the same stuff. Sure, most is about cognitive skill, but you also learn social conventions, manners. And if you have a good teacher, possibly some self esteem and discovery of your talents.
It's so normal, you don't think about it, but it is less than 200 years since every regular kid can attend school. Before that this was only available for the upper class.
'We' never did 'collective' parenting in the broader sense.
Both Asian and Western families were essentially nuclear, but multigenerational, and closer ties to extended family.
70 years ago, this was generally normative - and frankly often today - in that families were 2 parents + kids, but grandparents, uncles/aunts /cousins were part of the mix.
Obviously, more so in some places than others (particularly with parents living-in i.e. Asia, Italy)
Even today: 100% of my buddies who are married live within 2km of their mother-in-laws.
I think the term 'collective' is just a little bit too broad, and Romanticizes these quasi-aboriginal notions of truly more collective parenting, which frankly hasn't been part of the mix for a very long time (i.e. millennia) in most places.
The basic, communitarian concepts which we are mostly all familiar, which is to say 'quasi nuclear with strong extended family ties' will work just fine.
I think both neoliberalism and certain kinds of progressive social ideologies, without necessarily intending to move away from this, are effectively doing this, and pushing us into the 'hyper nuclear' (i.e. 1 or 2 parents only) scnenarios, which I think is less than ideal.
Having grown up in a single parent situation, and then two parents later on, it took me 30 years of reflection to realize how much single parenting is a massive disadvantage. Surprisingly, there is reluctance among many progressive circles to recognize this, whereupon the notion of 'single motherhood' is contemplated on equal footing with 2 parent families. (Though I think this is usually derived from concerns over the fact that single parent households are often the result of abuse etc.)
This odd paradox can be seen within the African American community whereupon well over 50% of kids grow up without having much of a relationship with their fathers. To some, this is an abomination, and a 'root cause of malaise' (and I'm not pointing fingers here, there are lot of men in jail that don't need to be), but surprisingly among many, they just don't see it as a problem for a variety of triggering reasons.
The nuclear+extended and obviously - community participation (i.e. teachers, role models) I think will work just fine so long as we recognize it.
And any parents who adopt foster children are straight up heroes, of that there is no doubt.
> Even today: 100% of my buddies who are married live within 2km of their mother-in-laws.
Assuming your buddies are male, you make an interesting observation: mothers support their daughters in raising kids more than they support theirs sons with it.
Biological bonding with baby is recorded to happen after 80% of births at first sight. The bonding is so strong that parents will literally lay down their lives to protect a child.
I highly doubt that this type of bonding forms for people who aren't the biological parent of the baby. When choosing their own lives or the baby's life, most unrelated people will choose their own life. Therefore under "collective parenting" it is likely that the other "parents" function more as "caretakers" and are tertiary to the parents that formed the biological bond.
Foster care is largely comprised of tertiary care that is missing the primary care of the nuclear biological mother and father. So foster care is essentially the same as collective parenting just without the actual biological parents. This is the causative factor and the essential missing link:
Foster care doesn't have enough people who are willing to invest the same amount of blood, sweat and tears as actual biological parents.
That is why I said such support services are unsustainable. People don't have enough energy, resources or will-power to spare for a stranger that is not their own biological progeny.
You also need to consider the evolutionary logic behind this type of behavior. Does it make sense for a biological entity to maximize Darwinian fitness by caring for children that have less genetic relation to them? No. Obviously there will be an evolutionary imperative for parents to spend the most resources on the child that is most genetically related to them.
The 2 parent system exists as a primary biological component rather than some "idea" because a child can only have 2 biological parents.
> There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
> societies used collective parenting for centuries
I see these claims made regularly in discussions about kids, families, etc, but I never see a clear example. Which parts of the world have collective parenting? How do you even define that? During which periods did we have collective parenting? What forms did it take? I would be really interested in seeing real examples I can look into to understand better how they could potentially be used as inspiration.
There's a reason societies used collective parenting for centuries and only recently with the push towards individualism that has stopped. There's still collective parenting in places of the world that don't have that same desire of individualism.
We've built our society and economy around the idea of 2 parents and some children. This is an arbitrary decision we've made and it wasn't how we came to this point. A push for accepting multi-node families would help nudge us in the right direction. Just changing the tax law to support and provide the same benefits to a union of multiple parents would be extremely useful.
We've codefied a single way of living. Maybe we should change that and allow for more dynamic family structures.