The Nuclear Family is a social construct - it's just one form of family (and likely not the best
Key takeaways:
• The idea of a heterosexual monogamous couple raising their own biological offspring in a single family home is a unique family form.
• Human family forms exhibit a remarkable amount of diversity across different cultures and historical contexts.
• Humans have the ability to adapt their mating and child-rearing practices based on their environments.
• The book aims to challenge the notion that living in a nuclear family is the only way to organize family life.
• The organization of family life is contingent on historical circumstances that can change.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And I think that idea of a heterosexual monogamous couple raising their own biological offspring through bipurantal care in a single family home surrounded by their own private stuff Is really a unique family form. And as you said, it's an aberration. We can look across the world and we can look transhistorically, cross-culturally and transhistorically, and what we can see is that human family forms show a remarkable amount of Diversity, depending on climactic, geographic, economic, political, social circumstances. One of the things that makes humans so incredibly adaptive is precisely our ability to sort of shift our mating practices and our child rearing practices in order to better suit the Environments that we find ourselves in. So what I think that the book is trying to do most importantly is to destabilize this notion that living in the nuclear family and your own single family private home with your stuff and You're providing bipurantal care for your own biological offspring or your adoptive offspring is sometimes the case. That is just one way of organizing family life. And that way is completely contingent on a variety of historical circumstances that could change.)
- Time 0:06:09
-

The Disparity of Resources (Love, Care Invested in Children is a Product of Societal Inequality
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I'm saying that we should take the family units that we have and submerge them in wider networks of love and care and comradeship and support. And that can be done in all sorts of ways. That can be done through expanding the social safety net, which is what many countries in Europe and around the world have done. It can also be by creating more localized communities where we're sharing our affective resources more broadly. But in order to do that, I think that we have to understand that our biological investments in our children as they are right now are the product of an incredibly competitive society Where we have very high levels of inequality and where this intergenerational both transfer of wealth and privilege and love and affection, which is sort of interestingly tied to Each other, the biparental resources invested in children in the particular way that we're doing it is the product of highly unequal societies. If our societies were less unequal, if we lived in a more egalitarian world, the desire to see our biological offspring thrive. It's not going to go away, obviously, but it's not going to be as fraught. The fear that our own children won't thrive in the future. If we look at Thomas Moore's Utopia, he talks exactly about how when the Utopians shared their resources, all people in this society, even though they are in biparental families, right, They're secure in the knowledge that their children and grandchildren for as many generations as they can imagine will be safe and will be cared for. That's a kind of happiness, that's a kind of security that very few of us have in the way that we organize our families and our societies today.)
- Time 0:20:05
-

(highlight:: Communal Living is already prevalent, but it happens during specific phases of life
Key takeaways:
• Living in community is common during two phases of life: college years and elderly years.
• Communal living is normalized during important life phases.
• Raising young children requires a lot of help and support from others.
• Having wider networks of neighbors and family members can alleviate the pressures of parenting.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
One thing that brings up is that there are two phases of life right now where it's extremely common to live in community. So one is if you go to college and if you're young, you don't have that much money. So from 18 to, I don't know, 26 probably. I lived in community. I lived in a dorm. And then I lived with a bunch of housemates because I was making no money as an entry-level journal, some job in Washington, D.C. And then when you're elderly increasingly, it has to be because people often don't have family nearby or don't have much family nearby or their family can't take care of them that much. There are these huge retirement communities. I mean, you can think of things. I think it is a different name now, but what used to be called Leisure Village in Florida, elsewhere. Then you've seen your citizen homes. It's funny because all these sound radical when we talk about these experiments in communal living, but we've completely normalized it so much so that we almost forget it happens for Two pretty important life phases. Well, and for two quite long life phases, right?
Speaker 1
If you think about the time that you're alive that you're actually raising children, right, actively doing biparental care, which is really kind of the moment in life when you need The most help from other people. If you have young kids out there, you know that having helpful neighbors, family members, kin, colleagues, friends, anybody to babysit in a pinch or to help you out when you just need An hour away, you know, to those moments of our lives when we're parenting can be so taxing and, more importantly, right, the biparental unit can be so fraded by the work of that, right? So that so many relationships can't really withstand the pressures of parenting, particularly of young children, right? So that if there were these wider networks, if we had neighbors and family members, right?)
- Time 0:28:31
-

(highlight:: Children are public goods - supporting parents with publicly funded childcare
Key takeaways:
• Investing resources in publicly funded childcare can provide a social safety net for parents and benefit society as a whole.
• Utopian experiments can provide insights into ways individuals can make choices to create wider networks of care and support.
• Society can be changed incrementally through individual actions without relying solely on top-down social policies.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So what is the solution, right? Well, there are a couple of ways to go about it. So from a more sort of socialistic or democratic socialist or, you know, a wider social safety net point of view, you can invest resources in publicly funded childcare. Like universal, right? Give parents a break. Help them, right? I argue in the book following the work of Nancy Folberg, the economists that children are public goods. Everyone who is alive is benefiting from the work that we do as parents because we're making future workers and consumers and soldiers and taxpayers, right? If you can't get the state to expand the social safety net to make this easier on families, you can do it in a more local way. And that's where I think these utopian experiments show us ways forward, that there are ways in which you and I individually, just in our own private lives, can make choices about how We spend time with our friends, how we allow other adults into the lives of our children, how we expand our networks of comrades and colleagues and family members and friends and submers Our families in these wider networks of lateral care and support that incrementally, as we do it individually, starts to change society in really profound ways. Even without the sort of top down social policies of a state, we can do it from the bottom up.)
- Time 0:52:19
-

(highlight:: Intentional Living is an Experiment that Spans Throughout All of Human History
Key takeaways:
• There has always been a 1% that seeks to live differently and show alternative ways of being.
• These utopian groups consistently coalesce around similar core principles.
• Their practices and ideas have an important influence on society.
• The idea of utopia is to keep striving towards it.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
If we lived in a society with wider social safety nets, if we lived in communities of expanded care. And one of the things that I like to think about is this other 1%. So your friends in the Bay Area, right? They're part of a really long tradition that goes back, you know, historically we have records until like the 6th century BCE, right? Of people who said, no, we're not going to live this way. We're going to go off and we're going to do it differently. We have these sort of core principles. And whether they were Buddhist monastics or the Pythagoreans in Croton or Plato conjuring up the Republic reflecting on the way that the Spartans lived, you know, Thomas Moore and Tomasso Campanella and utopian socialist anarchists, environmentalists, feminists, there are so many different groups. They all kind of tend to coalesce around a very similar package of ideas, which I find really remarkable in their consistency over time. So there's always been this 1%, this other 1% out there, not the economic 1%, but this sort of utopian 1%. And what they do is they show us other ways of being. Not all of us are going to uproot ourselves and go off and live in a commune, right? But the idea that people are doing things differently and the practices that they're experimenting with, they trickle down into society in really important ways. You know, there's this wonderful quote by Eduardo Galliano where he says, you know, I'm paraphrasing that, you know, what is utopia, right? I walk two steps towards utopia and utopia, you know, moves two steps away from me. And then I walk 10 steps closer to it and it recedes 10 more steps, you know, no matter how far I walk, utopia keeps receding away from me. So what is the point of utopia? The point is to keep walking.)
- Time 1:06:55
-