Atomic Families and Radical Moderation

What Safety Nets and Unchosen Pluralism Share In Common

The CBC had a great article last week about the changing nature of the family.

Despite what the media tells us, the most radical change to the family in recent years likely isn’t single motherhood or same-sex marriage. It’s the declining number of cousins. Or, more accurately, it’s the overall decrease in family size - both extended and nuclear - and what that means for the moderating bonds that families create.

Atomic Families and Moderation

The most extreme version of this trend are families that are characterized by only children who then go on to have an only child. The resulting child not only doesn’t have siblings, but he or she also lacks cousins, aunts or uncles.

In my book on the family I call these families “atomic” families and I argue that they have important implications for moderation and polarization.

These atomic families are most common in China, where the one-child policy has created a generation of only children who not only lack siblings, but who also lack cousins. Lauded as “little emperors" and lavished with the laser-focused attention of both parents and grandparents - six adults focused entirely on a single child - this generation is now awakening to the profound loneliness of living in a world without siblings, cousins, aunts or uncles.

The effects range from emotional to financial: while these children experienced greater financial security and deep emotional engagement growing up, they are now solely responsible for the care of aging grandparents and parents, unable to share the emotional and financial burden with the usual extended family.

Atomic families serve as an important comparison group to more traditional nuclear and extended families where, even in the prototypical smaller nuclear families of the 1950s, children would grow up with one sibling and a handful of cousins. That landscape is changing as people limit family size on economic, employment, climate, and other grounds.

Extended Families Extend Moderation

The loss of extended family ties has important implications for moderation in large part because the family is fundamentally different from every other social group in our large, complex society. And its differences are precisely what help moderate the worst excesses in human social life.

Here are just a couple ways the family contributes to moderation:

1. Families are unchosen, forcing us to engage with pluralism: We don’t get to choose our vegan cousin or our Republican aunt. And that’s the point. We may not like our siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles and they may not be the kind of people we’d freely spend our holidays with, but we’re forced to interact with them - at least in some capacity - whether we like it or not.

2. Families moderate ideological extremism (at least at the dinner table): the unchosen nature of family bonds provides a minimal (sometimes very minimal check) against polarization and extremism. It’s no accident that one of the first things cults (and abusive partners) do is separate people from their families. Families serve as a reality check against our ideological commitments. Even when they’re wrong. Your racist uncle may not be right about anything, but his existence at Thanksgiving at least reminds you that people like him exist and vote and need to be accounted for.

3. Families provide a hedge against catastrophe, preventing state and civil society safety nets from being overwhelmed. When the brake lines on my Oldsmobile rusted out outside of Battle Creek, Michigan on the way back to grad school outside Chicago, I had no cell phone and around $20 in the bank. Fortunately, I had an aunt and uncle two hours away who were able to drive out on a Sunday to pick me up and give me a twin bed to crash on until my car was ready a week later. My parents were able to help me with a loan for the car repairs, but they would have been minimally helpful from New York in the immediate crisis. While mine was a very middle class crisis, despite my acute poverty at the time, the reality for most Americans is that family ties provide a hedge against catastrophe that keeps other safety nets operating. Those who need state help the most are those who have been cut off from or by their families due to addiction or mental illness (or some combination of the two) or whose needs exceed those any family could reasonably provide. But it’s precisely because families help buffer people from less extreme crises that the state has (at least some) ability to help in the more extreme situations. The more extended the family, the looser the ties, but also the greater the ability to spread the load.

4. Extending that thought, families spread the load of caring for and about other people: as the “little emperor” generation in China is finding out, caring for other people takes a lot of bandwidth. The tradeoff of having doting parents and grandparents entirely devoted to you as a child is that you are solely responsible for caring for aging parents and grandparents when you grow up. And it’s not just aging parents. Having family around means that you have a built-in network of people who can stop by to check on your your elderly grandmother or who can drop off casseroles or help answer questions about finances for your elderly uncle. This doesn’t mean other people can’t do this too - friends and neighbors are incredibly important. But the sense of duty that family connections often (though not always) creates helps spread the load a bit and provides a network of people you have a reasonable expectation that you could reach out to if needed.

5. Extended families provide a middle ground between our nuclear families and the world outside. Getting back to cousins specifically for a moment, one benefit of cousins and aunts and uncles is that they understand your particular family’s brand of crazy while also being a kind of escape hatch from that unique dysfunction at the same time. Cousins don’t compete for parental attention the way siblings do and they’re usually not caught up in the day-to-day drama of living in your house. Because of that, they make great confidants and sounding boards. And even if they’re not good for that, they can offer a couch to crash on in a pinch. But it’s this unique middle ground between the nuclear family and the world outside that has implications for moderation. Extended families help moderate the excesses of the nuclear family while at the same time providing a buffer from the the world outside.

Unchosen vs. Chosen Families

While the CBC article notes that people are replacing cousins with “chosen families” and suggests that this might be just as good in the end, I’m not convinced. And that’s because chosen families don’t have the same moderating force precisely because they are chosen. My parents wouldn’t have chosen to spend sweltering summers visiting a cranky Alabamian uncle in rural Tennessee or Christmas Eves with Mormon missionaries at my uncle and aunt’s house if these unchosen bonds hadn’t been thrust on them. We choose our friends in a completely different process from the one by which we find our families. This isn’t to say that chosen families aren’t incredibly important for people who - for a variety of reasons - don’t have or can’t trust their own families. But the political and social effects of chosen and unchosen families are very different.

Unchosen families force us to deal with people we might actively otherwise avoid. And they ask us to see (or at least try to find) value in people we might never have given a second look in the first place. Chosen families allow us to avoid precisely this outcome. And while that’s a feature and not a bug at the extremes of abuse or active bigotry, in the large and variable middle, being around people we don’t agree with or sometimes even like very much is an important part of growing up and learning to live in a pluralistic society.

And back to cousins again: the larger the unchosen extended family, the more room you have to make for pluralism and different ways of life.

Families Come with Tradeoffs

None of this is to say that cousins and extended families are a utopian solution to what ails us. Families in general can be abusive and immoderate and harmful. Families can pass on the cycle of generational abuse and generational poverty. But one advantage of extended families is that you increase the chances that there will be one person watching who can lean in and help out. The larger your familial network, the greater the chances there’s one person who is keeping an eye out for serious harm. Even for vulnerable people like LGBTQIA kids, having a large extended family increases the chances that you’ve got one non-bigoted family member who can help you get situated somewhere else.

Extended families provide a kind of escape hatch or release valve from the pressure cooker that nuclear families can represent while also providing critical supports for people who might otherwise fall through the cracks.

This doesn’t mean we always like our cousins or aunts or uncles. Because these are unchosen ties, there’s a good chance you dislike members of your family, sometimes deeply. But having to break bread with someone you really dislike once or twice a year is a healthy moderating activity itself. And the benefits of that ripple outward.

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