[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.