[Barrin92]

Here in Germany around Munich we have quite a few cooperative communities for retirees where retired people live together, take care of each other, with some assistance from nursing staff or food delivery and so on if it's needed.

From what I have heard it works very well, is much more dignified because elderly people can take care of themselves, keeps people active and is significantly cheaper.

Lots of the crisis around the retired population seems to come from the degree with which it has been commodified. People isolated from their family or community, taken care of by strangers, no social life, no stimulation, just horrible.

In the US in particular it seems to be amplified by the dominance of the nuclear family.

[UncleOxidant]

There are some co-housing/intentional communities in the US but it's quite rare. The one I visited a couple of years ago had several what we would call townhouses surrounding a common area and a community center building in the center with a meeting area and a large community kitchen. The people I met who lived there were of all different ages from people with young children to retired folks in their 70s. There was a community garden area and even a small wooded area with a creek. Some of the residents were even doing beekeeping with a community hive. It seemed really nice, but, as I said, it's a rare living arrangement here.

[kyleee]

Do you have a negative opinion of the nuclear family?

[Barrin92]

yes because the loss of the extended family and the multi-generational home in my opinion is one of the largest drivers of disintegration of our social fabric, not just for the old but also the young, and also a driver of inequality. The nuclear family benefits people who can outsource what were traditional tasks of the family or community to the market, while the poor have no such options. There's also a racial component with marginalized peoples often suffering strongest from the fragility that is the result of the loss of larger family structures.

[octokatt]

I do. The nuclear family only works with a stay-at-home wife, a husband capable of always being employed with enough income to support four people (two adults, two kids, and a dog), and magically no one ever gets sick.

If one of those two providers gets sick or leaves, the system collapses. Either a maid or a pension (or both) is needed, and those are entirely outside the reach of the vast majority of Americans.

A more robust, anti-fragile system would involve support from either an extended family to help when things get hard, or a meaningfully robust set of public programs. The nuclear family has no support from extended family by default, and the public programs have been largely removed (as the article states).

The idea that nuclear families work is a lie. They don’t scale due to fragility.

[bitwize]

The nuclear family is an artifice probably promoted by suburban land developers and durable goods manufacturers during the 40s and 50s or something.

Humans naturally live in extended families three or more generations deep.

[cafard]

Gee, yesterday I was just reading in Hegel's Philosophy of Right that properly speaking the nuclear family is the family.

I can't speak to other countries, but the United States has tended to be unusually mobile. That can make the extended family household hard to maintain.