It’s absolutely not a fiction that the nuclear family is the most important human social arrangement. In every language I’m aware of, a child’s first word is ‘mother’ and in most languages ‘father’ follows shortly thereafter. Other social arrangements are important (we live in societies or tribes or clans, after all), but throughout most of human history, people grew up with their mother, father, and siblings being the most important people in their lives.
You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.
>throughout most of human history, people grew up with their mother, father, and siblings being the most important people in their lives.
Throughout most of history people grew up with their mother, 3 aunts, their dad, 5 uncles, and grandparents if they are lucky, learning the single trade of their entire family. The "Nuclear" family is the atomisation of this corporate family through modern practices (Finance, Tertiary Education, Suburbia)
> You seem to have a definition of nuclear family which differs from the consensus.
I’m a simple man, so I like to use the dictionary when there’s a disagreement about what something means. In this case, my phone’s dictionary, which cites the Oxford American dictionary as its source, has the definition of ‘nuclear family’ as “a couple and their dependent children, regarded as a basic social unit” and I’m not seeing how anything I wrote is in disagreement with that.
Sure, people often grow up with other relatives. But we have other terms for them, which belies their reduced importance in our lives vs our parents and siblings.
It's the basic social unit part. In society that actually exists, they're not a basic unit. You can obviously find couples and their dependent children, just like maybe you can find a monad in a Java program, but they're not basic units.
If nuclear families were not of fundamental importance, you would not see “mother” and “father” universally conserved across all languages as the first words that people learn. This is like the thing with the two fish who don’t know what water is; nuclear families are so pervasively important that you just can’t see it.
This doesnt even seem like you are arguing for nuclear families.
I feel like you have conflated the nuclear family (a method of organising the basic social unit of a society) with "The importance of parents". The nuclear family simply isnt the only basic social unit with parents in it.
>nuclear families are so pervasively important
Parents are very important. The nuclear family does not have a monopoly on parents.
Kids that don’t grow up with their parents do not learn them as first words. Kids that do grow up with their parents, often still learn something else as their first words.
Learning X as your first word does not prove that X is a foundational unit of society, it simply does not follow.
"Nuclear" here is in reference to households with only mother, father, and children, in distinction to the norm of multigenerational households throughout history and in most of the world today excepting the West.
No, that’s baggage that people are bringing to the conversation. It merely means a couple and their dependent children. Whether or not they live separately from extended family has no bearing on the term.
> if your father and the clan's patriarch give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?
Good question, here’s one for you: if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?
The existence of a layer cake of social units doesn’t argue against the primacy of the nuclear family. Here’s another question for you: who’s more likely to advocate for your interest, your father or the clan’s patriarch?
> if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?
This goes to show that you, along with many other commenters here, do not grasp the concept because it’s so different from your experience.
Extended family would often raise your kids, I know a person that was taken away by extended family as a child because the father had anger management issues.
They are not functionaries like police, they actually share responsibility. In case of conflict, loyalty is highly situational. And if your mother dies, they would be expected to take you in, even if your father is alive and well.
It's very odd to me seeing nuclear family being propped up in an exclusive/or relationship with a strong extended family. Every strong extended family dynamic that I've seen is the result of a strong nuclear family from a generation before.
To be clear, I am not arguing that nuclear and extended families are exclusive of each other. I think most of the people arguing against me are confused about this. Anthropologists dichotomize societies by nuclear family vs extended family because Western societies basically don’t have extended families as an important social unit at all, whereas in many societies the extended family is an important social unit. And the difference usually has a lot of implications. Hence the dichotomy being useful. But this does not mean that in societies where extended families are important that they are more important than nuclear families. And really this shouldn’t be surprising: we’re not bees. We form reproductive pairs. Our children are twice as related to us as our nieces and nephews. There’s no way it could ever come to be that the nuclear family would not be the primary human social institution.
> Western societies basically don’t have extended families as an important social unit at all
Like with low birth rates, this appears to stem more from modernity than anything else. Both Western and non-Western societies placed more of an emphasis on extended families in the past, and both have placed less of an emphasis on them as they've modernized. Western societies have been at the forefront of a lot of modern changes, so these changes were more noticeable in them.
