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Comment by markshead | Hacker News Reader

The article wouldn't have been as marketable if the title was "Could Not Doing Things With Others Be The Reason We are Lonely?" Yet at the bottom of the article the author explains that she joined a group of other people who were also caring for their children and made friends. That has always been the solution to feeling lonely and isolated.

We could find all kinds of things to blame from television to HVAC systems to larger houses to the Internet. Picking nuclear families as a target seems like quite a stretch. There are plenty of pictures from the time period she mentions that show people outside talking over fences, on their front porches, helping each other, and otherwise interacting with people around them. When we stop doing those types of things, we get lonely. The social unit of nuclear families isn't the reason people feel isolated.

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The focus on the nuclear family, in American terms, seems to be a product of post-war development and suburban living in the 1950s. And yet even harsh critics of the 1950s mostly focus on the people excluded from or hurt by that lifestyle; atomization and familial loneliness are hardly ever raised as major objections.

(I've certainly seen the isolation of housewives raised, but that's not the same as "the nuclear family" and in fact was largely about a stay-at-home lifestyle.)

So I think you're exactly right here: the nuclear family is at worst one of many changes that enabled social isolation. The actual fact of isolation didn't set in until much later, and it's origin could be equally well blamed on problems from cheap consumer goods (no need to share or borrow) to the decentralization of media (no shared icons like Edward R. Murrow).

A proper treatment of the question would admit that the problem is polygenic and look for shared causes or solutions. But the hot-take approach is to pick one convenient issue and treat it as a singular cause.

It sounds like you've hit on an opportunity for further exploration and writing. Will you be taking that on, or were you just postulating? I'd be interested in reading it.

Well shit. I wasn't planning to write it up, but I do have a whole list of thoughts on this topic. Tell you what - I'll hit up this comment with some more extensive thoughts in the next two days?

Meantime I can recommend some relevant, interesting reading here (not my blog, but definitely one that's helped me think about this stuff): https://balioc.wordpress.com

Looking forward to this!

So as a sociological phenomenon, our relative aloneness is interesting, but I've been hearing about it for decades, not in a way that just applies to mothers. The whole "we used to know our neighbors!!" cry seems a bit dated now.

The interesting twist these days is social media. Even though you are being social using those apps, from what I've seen, it doesn't fill the gap.

Nuclear families though? I'm not sure how they get the blame outside of the general trend.

I think the question is a correlation versus causation question that sociology seems to have a hard time answering so far. Our society's increasing relative aloneness (to past societies, especially) is definitely correlated to a sense of the strong nuclear family as the preferred household unit (over various sorts of multi-generational or clan/tribe household units).

This article posits two causations, with ideas like the 50s suburban American dream (of advertisers) causing a stronger focus on nuclear family as household unit, and the stronger focus on nuclear family as household unit as a causation for increased relative aloneness.

If those posits are correct, then yes a case can be made that you can directly blame the modern conception of strong nuclear family as household unit for the general trend of relative aloneness.

Advancing the suburban SFH as the American Dream was probably Not Great, because the suburbs in general are sort of a mess on a lot of levels.

But I'd agree, it's not clear if that was a product of advancing the nuclear family, or if the nuclear family was a consequence of that.

Either way, I feel like that version of the American dream has been something young people have moved sharply away from the last couple decades, no?

I think another thing is the definition of nuclear family and making implications about that.

Nuclear family, in vernacular tends to mean a fam where there is a mother figure, father figure (this includes same sex couples) children and by extension associated relatives (grandparents, cousins, etc) who you have some contact with, as opposed to a family where there is either a missing mother figure, father figure or both or those figures are peripheral and often times absent (aka broken homes).

Of course, we can define a nuclear family to mean other things as well depending on context as well as to serve a narrative.

My understanding is that "nuclear family" means just two parents and their kids, and no more[0]. The associated relatives you mention are considered "extended family", and in this structure, usually do not live with the nuclear family.

If you consider cultures where it's common to have multiple generations and cousin-families living in the same house, that's in stark contrast to the nuclear family.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_family

> ... as opposed to a family where there is either a missing mother figure, father figure or both or those figures are peripheral and often times absent (aka broken homes).

Not at all. The nuclear family is a family as you describe, as opposed to one living with extended family (grandparents, for instance).

Isn't, however, this gandparental extended family just the previous gen nuclear family?

There is no reason to consider a nuclear family an island onto itself. Extended families are often times, but not always, the linking of multigenerational nuclear families. Now, one can have extended families that are not blood relatives.

But yeah, it is tricky sometimes. If you get shipped off to aunts and uncles or other relatives while mom and dad figs stay together because of issues beyond their control that may not be a nuclear family as it is disruptive to the kids.

I think the context in the article here is "nuclear family [as household unit]", with the elided part in square brackets implied. So there may be no reason in general to consider the nuclear family an island unto itself, but this article is referring to the trend to think of a nuclear family as a household unit (island) unto itself.

A nuclear family as a unit unto itself is most evident when people move to the city or cross country for [reason]. Then you rely on the tendrils offered by modern communication till you establish yourself and begin forming new local relationships. In some settings it may be difficult to do.

It can be difficult in the suburbs as elicited in Robert Adams's "New West"[1] and it can also be difficult in the dense cityscapes of Japan[2].

We can dream of the times people were born and died in the same house or village and lived in multigenerational houses out of need rather than will. Today economies are different and the way we organize depends on many things, economic ability, economic forces, culture, etc. Some for the better, others for the worse.

[1]http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/8618/robert-adams-...

[2]https://longreads.com/2017/12/01/a-lonely-death-the-extreme-...

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