In this story for the March 2020 issue of the Atlantic, David Brooks writes about U.S. society's "shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families" and the "devastation it has wrought," including how it "ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor."
Brooks writes about how the shift to emphasis on nuclear family has meant a decrease in the support of extended family. "A code of family self-sufficiency prevails: Mom, Dad, and the kids are on their own, with a barrier around their island home," says Brooks. This, Brooks writes, has led to families in the U.S. growing more unequal as affluent families are able to buy the supports that the extended family once provided such as babysitting, professional child care, tutoring, coaching, therapy, expensive after-school programs.
Brooks also describes how federal and state policy for the last 50 years has focused on "strengthening the nuclear family, not the extended family." Furthermore, "many mothers who decide to raise their young children without extended family nearby find that they have chosen a lifestyle that is brutally hard and isolating."
On kinship groups, Brooks writes "we think of kin as those biologically related to us. But throughout most of human history, kinship was something you could create." Brooks writes that now is a "chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms."