What even is a ‘family’?
Family Values vs. The Value of Families: Towards A New Community Relationships Theory
“Studies of symbiotic interactions must reach across disciplinary boundaries” — Merlin Sheldrake, ‘Entangled Life’, p.215.
If we’re conscientious about the challenges facing the world today alongside attending to our own well-being, then we urgently need to think about what we expect of our family structures and how they work best for all members to thrive. What is fair to demand from the experience of being in - or having - a ‘family’? And what hierarchies and assumptions are these dependant upon?
A Brief History
The 2020s mark a century since a major turning point in our society. Back in the 1920s, a crossover moment occurred when parents and children lived in a ‘nuclear’ setup together, detached from wider kin and household members. It was a huge shift in the way families had been organised throughout human history.
In industrialised, western nations like the US and UK, “The decline of multigenerational cohabiting families exactly mirrors the decline in farm employment” (Brooks, The Atlantic, 03/20) and the rise of work in factories and urbanisation correlated to earlier marriages and migration away from home towns. The story of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Era leading up to this was fundamentally shaped by a capitalist, colonial, patriarchy (i.e. globalised inequitable economy, extractive of invaded territories, devaluing indigenous and female labour) that’s degraded our environment irreversibly.
The concept of ‘family’ is anchored in the idea of property and initially carried none of the implications of attachment and affiliation it’s imbued with today! The household was purely a financial arrangement, comprised of many agents of production. Interestingly, it was only really until the late 1960s, that the revered ‘nuclear’ family, i.e. the 2-parent multi-child household, thrived. Today only around a third of households in the US live in such arrangements and the majority of UK households in 2022 had no children, and yet this image of stability prevails as aspirational.
A vision of ‘traditional family values’ is projected onto a unit that’s really such a recent and convenient invention, and then bandied about by politicians who don’t go on to deliver budgets that serve working parents and our future voters effectively… At the first Republican candidates’ debate in August, Ramaswamy argued that “The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind” in the same breath as he laid the blame for crisis in education at the door of single mothers! Please.
Can we talk about universal ‘family values’ without interrogating the meaning of family? The etymology of the word ‘family’ from Latin is “slaves of the household” and when it started being used in place of the Old English word in the 15th century, it represented the shift from ownership of land, to ownership of the members of the home at a time of huge economic change. Around the world, the concept of ‘family’ has historically been defined by authoritarian domestic power over both property and persons living together.
“By expanding the linguistic understanding of family, our expectations of family may also begin to break down. And as people create their own forms of families, our expectations and understandings of what a family is may also begin to shift as we realise the potential of human relationships,” (Manoukian, 2022).
Psychotherapist and author Dr Nicole Le Pera recently listed ‘boundaries with family’ as the key factor in a successful partner relationship, noting that focusing on the partnership and not having your relations (own parents etc.) influence decisions was what sets apart couples who stay together. This might not apply across cultures but in the West particularly, not only are we less likely to co-habit with our wider families, we also apparently require healthy emotional separation from them and to focus on our partner and offspring as our core family unit.
Further, ‘family’ urgently needs fresh characterisation, given that the shape of family is changing. Essentially, how we experience familial relationships of care in our lifetime will be very different from just a generation ago:
We face a permanently declining birth rate combined with fewer children in families overall.
Note that there is more incidence of multiples, correlated to increased in demand for IVF, and parents are increasingly likely to be older at the age of having their first child. Parents with further advanced careers, and perhaps greater hopes and expectations of becoming parents, come to these roles with certain perspective on family life.
Then there’s increasing diversity in what a family ‘looks’ like too: blended and step-families and LGBTQIA+ families, apart from outdated hetero- and gender-normative ‘nuclear’ units.
All of this while life expectancy steadily increases, recasting roles and expectations for grandparents and what ‘caring’ means for adult children, too.
Post-Nuclear families for the win
🧠 In the last thirty years there’s been nothing short of a revolution in neuroscience, enlightening our species about how it develops and operates for the first time. We’ve mapped the human genome and all kinds of mechanisms that go with it. The key evidence we have is of the power of the early years specifically, their importance in shaping our future relationships and success, even ahead of our education, so the family is truly the crucible of society.
We now actually know what humans need to thrive, and yet our infrastructure and mainstream attitudes simply haven’t yet caught up. We are facing a crisis of both mental and physical health, with lifestyle-related illness being the top causes of death and strain on our healthcare systems and record levels of depression and anxiety. Heart disease is our biggest killer. Families haven’t been enough to successfully protect our young people from these maladies. Several research studies suggest that only around half the population is “securely attached” to their primary caregiver, meaning the other half may experience problematic relationship patterns.
Of course the challenge is structural as well as individual. Faith in political leaders, institutions, science, and business has tumbled in recent years, in 2023 the proportion of people in the UK expressing economic confidence, stating ‘my family will be better off in five years,’ fell 7 points versus the previous year to an all-time low of just 23%! It’s only through more effective partnership between government actors and business that these challenges can be addressed.
The point is, the ‘village’ style of family life has been proven worldwide and throughout history to be a more nurturing environment for humans to grow. This means ‘parenting’ taking place adjacent to various kinds of support, be it their own parents and siblings; or paid household and childcare workers whom many rely upon in ways their own parents didn’t; or extended ‘family’ of neighbours and friends. This has been the case through other times of instability and change, such as wars, but where we are now is a crucible moment of climate emergency and global insecurity, alongside information and technology innovation.
The Opportunity
A ‘family’ scientifically-speaking, refers to a factual relationship of belonging, but as soon as a human group residing together builds friendship ties with other families, it can be so much more than a fixed structure, hierarchical arrangement for productivity.
We’ve seen time and again at Playhood moments when peer support from parents sharing experiences (Members), combined with advice from parents experts in child development with their extensive experience with children (Staff), has bridged gaps in emotional and practical help by wider family or paid-for childcare. Where like-minded others in close proximity are turned to first. Where solidarity creates healthy conditions for us to explore better relationships, creativity or professional ambition.
Nationwide research we ran last month revealed that 84% of parents have reassessed their family priorities since the pandemic began, prioritising localised community. 8 in 10 say they parent differently to how they were parented. Kindness and socio-emotional skills are what they want from their child’s educational setting, above academics. There is a real shift here in attitudes and needs. 2/3 UK parents say the pandemic increased their appreciation of the value of the early years yet the same proportion say they need more childcare help. Parents and educators must work together at the grassroots level to expand the definition of family:
We are equipped with access to — and ways to distribute — knowledge, empowered by technology in ways unimaginable before the nuclear family experiment began.
We can come together over values that aren’t necessarily determined by a religious or political allegiance.
We have the chance to play and iterate, to run a live experiment, comparing notes with like-minded others in a more ‘open-source’ learning environment, drawing insights in real time from around the world.
Our sense of neighbourhood can provide a sense of purpose and value if we participate in innovating and supporting services that meet residents’ needs.
Today’s opportunity is to reinvent what that experience looks and intentionally assemble communities that serve actors in enriching ways. Not fronts for funnelling wealth and hoarding resources, functions that things like suburbs and private institutions perform. But mutually-beneficial and sustainable commitments to infrastructure and care. Hopefully, also ones where ‘power’ is decentralised, too.
The pandemic revealed not only the fact we are interconnected (to others within our species, and to the natural world and animals) but that we are eminently capable of forming bonds in times of need (e.g. mutual aid and local organising, rules and protocols like lockdowns and masking, innovation in technology to solve problems and improve human connection etc.)
Discussion of interconnectedness with plants and animal kingdoms mustn’t neglect the revelations in recent years about the contribution of fungi to the experience of life on earth. Learning that we rely upon networks of sensory organisms constantly regenerating without central control is surely a thought-provoking model for our own communities, at a time when we need fresh inspiration to recast “the village” as more than kinship within economic hierarchy?
Closing thought: be like lichen!
Taking this natural world metaphor further, astonishing and nourishing collaboration becomes possible when different skills come together. Our society’s divisions run deep right now. Talking about tolerance and kindness isn’t enough.
You might just have noticed them as patchy growths on trees, but lichens are actually highly resilient collaborations which adapt to certain environments; a mutually-beneficial symbiosis between fungi and algae. It’s astonishing how apt this playful relationship feels for the partnership between parents and educators! “One critical condition had to be fulfilled: each partner had to be able to do something the other couldn’t achieve on its own. The identity of the partners didn’t matter so much as their ecological fit” (Sheldrake, 2020, p.87). A. Laurie Palmer also writes about the power of learning from such local, small-scale systems in ‘The Lichen Museum’: “It seems paradoxical because lichens are so small, and the crises destroying the earth and shattering human relations now are so overwhelming… But attending to lichens is attending to relationships, to qualities of connection”.
Growing together, responding to local needs…like lichen.
There is a potential future where we exist in nurturing companionship together and with the natural world, possible through acknowledgement of our interdependence with ecosystems. The ’symbiocene’ is a useful label by Dr Glenn Albrecht (‘Earth Emotions’, 2019) for the post-human centric worldview. A safe and healthy planet is intimately tied to safe and healthy human connection. Let’s start at home and school.
By Georgia Norton & Karen Partridge, November 2023