In many ways, the claims DBrooks recites here about the collapse of the nuclear family are obvious. It's open to all, who can afford the childcare costs. And then, once you can afford them, you don't see your kids anymore and instead of an extended family, you have an extended network of contracted, semi-professional "childcare providers." But his solution - what he calls the "forged family," an apparently random agglomeration of strangers whom we choose to treat as family for however long it's convenient for us - seems almost to be the worst of all worlds.
If the thing that held the (good, beautiful) multi-generational, extended family together originally was the demands of agricultural production, and the thing that killed it was urbanization and industrialization, we clearly have not at all brought back the conditions that would allow the extended family to thrive again, even if we also haven't sustained the conditions for the success of the nuclear family. The multi-generational family was, in Brooks's telling, the result of economic necessity - the labor demands of farm life and its immobility. The nuclear family too, in its heyday, grew out of economic necessity. Urban loneliness led to early marriage, and distance from extended family along with constrained income to afford large housing led people to focus on only the most immediate blood connections.*
But if you take an economically deterministic view of all previous family arrangements, then why should a choice-driven one suddenly work or make sense now? The argument that Brooks seems to want to make is that a new economic necessity has actually arisen: people need help with the basic tasks of living like childcare, advice, and emotional and financial support during hard times. That help that used to be provided by extended families or neighbors. But the new, market-based substitutes for that help have become too expensive for most people to access. So they need a free version, but the only existing model for free help is the family, so they form families of choice to provide this help. The problem with this argument is that economic necessity in play here already has its own economically-determined solution (market-based services); it's just not a very egalitarian solution and Brooks doesn't like it. But his alternative requires people to break out of economically-determined behavior entirely, and it's not clear why they'd do that now, under these circumstances, if they never did it before under previous ones.
Choice may be in keeping with the spirit of the times, but given how poorly autonomously-chosen commitment has worked for sustaining marriage - a permanent relationship with just one person - how well should we expect it to work for sustaining entire networks of permanent relationships? Take the example Brooks gives of his own "forged family" experience: five years ago, he joined a couple that was hosting their son's poor friends at their home for weekly dinners, and they have become his "chosen family." Except, it seems, that family is actually collapsing too. The kids have grown up and "need us less," and the couple that started the whole thing moved away. So this "forged family" lasted all of five years, and then gave way to the same pressures that are sinking nuclear families - the desires for flexibility, mobility, and time-savings.
The same pressures will come to bear on co-housing and the other sorts of "chosen family" schemes he discusses. People may want or crave more family life, but not more than they want or crave professional success and financial security, and if these things demand all their time and attention to attain and they're not willing to sacrifice them for their own biological families, they are unlikely to sacrifice them more for strangers. As long as those are the priorities, all "chosen families" based on freely revokable choices will be composed of free-riders and will dissolve when their members move away for new educational and professional opportunities elsewhere. Maybe this can be addressed by forcing them to sign contracts promising to stay for a certain number of years or to provide some predetermined set of community benefits, but once you get into the world of contracts, it's not a family anymore; it's a co-op or an insurance policy.
And indeed, many of Brooks's examples - including his own - are of non-profit organizations dedicated to helping at-risk youth. These are commendable things and they serve an important social purpose, but charity organizations are hardly a cutting-edge 21st century phenomenon; they have existed as last-resort alternatives to families for centuries. They play a compensatory role for those who lack families, but they're fundamentally unlike families because their purpose is time-limited: get the at-risk kids safely to adulthood so they can start their own families, and then your job is done. If all goes well, their kids won't have to become clients of the same non-profit. By contrast, in an extended family, if all goes well, all subsequent generations of children will become regular clients of the institution.
If you reject all this economic determinism from the outset, then using public policy to encourage and support the extended, non-chosen family does seem like a pretty reasonable solution to what I agree is a big problem for current families. None of Brooks's hurried proposals at the end will do that because they are all confusingly aimed at supporting the nuclear family. But if you start from the economic and social incentives that militate against multi-generational, extended families and think about policies to counter them, maybe you will get somewhere. My proposal is to allow seniors to receive their full Social Security payouts early if they can demonstrate that they are providing full-time or at least substantial childcare for their grandchildren, which would require them to live very near, if not literally with, their kids. That is my "nice" idea. My "less nice" idea is to conscript them into said childcare against their wills. I will let you choose which policy you prefer to enact.
Finally, I want to make the minor point to the editor of this essay that it is unclear why we should be troubled about "senior citizens dying alone in a room." Should they die on the front lawn instead?
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*I'm not saying this history is accurate, just that it's what Brooks says happened. I think the rise of the nuclear family was a much longer-term and trans-Atlantic phenomenon. Also, what I know of early American agricultural life was not especially multi-generational or extended. People had more kids living in their homes, sure, but not more aunts and uncles. But that's just my impression, since I've never looked into that question on its own.