[loganfrederick]

I have no direct connection to Rob Henderson but he's one of my favorite writers just from his Twitter and Substack because he dives into issues that are very close to my heart and life experience.

I've written past comments on HN about how I was raised by a father who was a professional con man who committed credit card fraud, drove family into bankruptcy, then ghosted on my mother and I. The depths of that process was deeply chaotic and disruptive at a formative time in my life (high school and college).

I've ended up having a solid career, but I have no doubt I'd have been able to make a bigger impact if the family drama hadn't dragged on my time and focus for years (basically in supporting my mother through the experience). Society's answer (at least in America) is basically to say "you could cut out your family if they're destructive" but that goes against one of the strongest aspects of human nature (to have a family). Choosing between chaos and isolation is a terrible dichotomy and a big job of society should be to ensure individuals have other warmer options.

Also identifying earlier and stopping those chaos agents like my father is an area of study that is under-researched compared to the upside for society in solving that problem. There are folks like the Mind Research Network (https://www.mrn.org/) working on this but IMO should be getting 10x the funding they currently do.

[diob]

Same, but my situation was different. From kindergarten to adulthood, straight bad. Alcoholic stepfather, suicide attempts included, eventually my older sister getting into drugs, alcoholic stepfather leaving, mother immediately going for a drug addict boyfriend who moved us halfway across the country. Separated from my other family for a bit to hang out with him and talk about how he had bugs crawling on him, he was paranoid and drugged out of his mind. He took me along on his drug pickups, and tried getting me to partake.

Got out of that situation in junior high only to move in with my dad and abusive step mother. Indoor chain smoking in a year-round hot climate, so I couldn't even open a window. Constant emotional abuse and isolation. Always getting in trouble for literally anything despite being a straight A student, not being given money for school lunches, the list goes on. Spent as much time out of the house as possible.

Finally got to college and things got a bit better since I was able to move away, but I had zero financial support outside of the academic scholarships I'd gotten. They also told me I didn't need to pay taxes since I didn't make enough money. That fucked me a bit.

For sure my life would've been way different with a stable loving family, or a society that could handle these sort of situations better.

[rayiner]

> Society's answer (at least in America) is basically to say "you could cut out your family if they're destructive" but that goes against one of the strongest aspects of human nature (to have a family).

It’s also not really an answer, because non-chaotic families are a source of added stability. My sister in law lives with us, and my parents live 10 minutes away. So for my kids there’s never any uncertainty—someone will always pick them up from school on time and take them to their after-school activities even if mom and dad get caught up at work unexpectedly. This is very different from my wife’s upbringing, where her parents divorced and had shared custody, so there were missed handoffs, changes to extra-curricular schedules to accommodate different living situations, no consistent place to leave her things, etc.

[Ozzie_osman]

It's also not always an option. If you're a child or a teenager you don't have a lot of options. If you're a romantic partner that is financially dependant you also don't have a lot of options.

[rayiner]

I agree it’s not always an option. My point is that cutting out family isn’t so much a solution as it is the least bad of what may be worse options.

[Dalewyn]

>one of the strongest aspects of human nature (to have a family)

I can't relate.

I treasure friendships, but I disdain familial ties enough that I have no intentions of making a family. Enough bullshit comes flying my way from the familial ties that predate my existence, I don't need nor want more.

[rayiner]

Normal people value their families first and foremost, which necessarily limits the closeness of non-kinship relationships. I tell my kids about their great grandfather, a man they’ve never met and who I met when I was five (but who my mom lionized). Your friends’ kids won’t talk about you. Now, obviously you won’t care because you’ll be dead. But it’s reflective of the difference in the depth of the relationship during life.

I don't say this to be an asshole, but to point out that, if you are a non-shitty person, you are a presumptive source of stability for some young cousin, niece, or nephew. Because their friends won't care about them as much as those friends care about their own families.

[mym1990]

I get where this sentiment is coming from, I wouldn’t put “normal people” at the start of it. Families are very complex and many normal people do not have normal relationships with any number of those people in their family, and the value proposition of these relationships are understandably low.

[marcusverus]

His usage of the word is correct and appropriate. Exceptions exist, obviously. So do norms. Valuing your family first and foremost is normal--thank god!

[mym1990]

You are misunderstanding. I am not saying that valuing family is not normal, I am saying that because a person does not do so, given certain circumstances, does not make them abnormal. Family is a part of someone's life, and if you choose to define that person based on their family relationships, that is a mistake. There are so many people who are perfectly normal, and do not have close ties to a majority of their family. I have friends who are absolutely like brothers and sisters to me, and my kids will know and hear about them as well.

If you think people having abnormal families is a exception, you need to step outside your front door. I would say almost every family has people that other family members would not go out of the way for, and the circumstances are all that can define those situations, not a blanket "family is everything" statement.

[skissane]

> I am not saying that valuing family is not normal, I am saying that because a person does not do so, given certain circumstances, does not make them abnormal

I'm abnormal, in various ways. Some of those are (at least partially) my fault, some of them are entirely the fault of people other than me, some of them are nobody's fault. Everyone is abnormal, in at least a few ways. All families are abnormal–in some respects. Whether anybody should be ashamed to be abnormal depends entirely on the details of the specific abnormalities we are talking about.

People don't have relationships with their families for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, their family deserves all the blame, and they are an innocent victim. Sometimes, they deserve all the blame, and their family is an innocent victim. Sometimes, everyone is to blame. Maybe, sometimes, nobody is to blame. All those situations are abnormal (in the sense that normatively they should not occur), and a person or family in an abnormal situation is (in a certain sense) themselves abnormal. But, as I said, whether anyone ought to be ashamed of that abnormality depends on all those details, of how exactly they ended up in that situation.

[Dalewyn]

I am happy to be abnormal then. I value friends first and foremost, family dead last. If my family wants something from me, they can line up with everyone else; if I consider them a friend I'll value them like all my other friends.

Put another way, I don't treat blood ties as anything special because doing so leads to bullshit. If that's abnormal, so be it; not my loss or problem.

[mym1990]

Nothing wrong with this, family ties can be ripe with abuse... free loading, mental abuse, etc...

For many people keeping a level playing field is the only way to keep the bullshit out, although I doubt anyone manages to get rid of all of it.

[nec4b]

If I understand you correctly, you value your kids or your spouse less than your friends? How does this work in practice?

[beedeebeedee]

> His usage of the word is correct and appropriate. Exceptions exist, obviously. So do norms. Valuing your family first and foremost is normal--thank god!

Yet, so many normal people do atrocious things- countless examples of normal mothers and fathers who abuse their kids, etc. You can say they are not normal, but that is just falling into the true scotsman fallacy.

[skissane]

> Yet, so many normal people do atrocious things- countless examples of normal mothers and fathers who abuse their kids, etc.

The problem is the word "normal" is ambiguous. It has both descriptive senses (e.g. "normal" as within two standard deviations of the mean) and normative senses ("normal" as conforming to norms which tell us how things should be), and people often shift between the two or mix them up without making that distinction clear.

> You can say they are not normal, but that is just falling into the true scotsman fallacy.

I don't think this is the "no true Scotsman fallacy" at all. Whether child abuse is "normal" in a descriptive sense is a factual question–I don't know the answer, but there are means available to produce one non-fallaciously (e.g. prevalence surveys). Whether child abuse is "normal" in the normative sense (conforming to norms of how things should be)–I hope we can all agree that "no, it isn't", and there is no fallacy in saying that.

[jancsika]

> Your friends’ kids won’t talk about you.

They likely will if the kids witness how their parent treasures that friendship.

By your own logic, even. What could "value their families first and foremost" possibly mean if the love a family member has for a friend-- and vice versa-- doesn't end up deeply affecting the bond the rest of the family has with that same person?

The exception that comes to mind is when a family has real question about whether that same level of love/respect is reciprocal-- e.g., they suspect their family member is being used by their friend, or perhaps both are involved in a spiral of drugs, etc. Outside of that, a family disrespecting a close friendship would make me question the health/depth of the familial bonds.

[rayiner]

> What could "value their families first and foremost" possibly mean if the love a family member has for a friend-- and vice versa-- doesn't end up deeply affecting the bond the rest of the family has with that same person

We have many close family friends, since we immigrated far from our biological family. They can be loved and respected. But they’re still in a circle outside your family. Like, if you had to pick between your uncle’s life or your family friend’s it wouldn’t even be a close call for most people.

Frankly, this conversation would come across as bizarre to most people because it’s so obviously true. I think the only reason this fallacy exists is this western individualist yearning for complete self determination. This desire to transcend relational networks imposed by birth and believe that relationships built on choice can be as strong.