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.
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.
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.