Yes, they are. Especially they don't share the ideal that fathers should be at work and mothers at home: They have as an ideal that both parents should be at home. In practical life that is often not possible since work away pays better. But the Amish still don't believe that mothers should only take care of children instead of working. That way, Amish women get less different lives from having children compared to the majority population.
Moderate levels of individualism are really good - enough freedom and equality to reduce the threat of tyrants, and some leeway in escaping unbearable familial obligations like entrance into a despised profession or forced marriage to an awful partner.
Collectivism probably works better as the quality of people you're around improves. It's easy for people with the same attitudes and habits to get along. It's also easy for tranquil, unselfish, dependable, far-sighted, wise, sane people to get along, no matter their differences in attitudes and habits. The problem is when the total level of anger, selfishness, sloppiness, stupidity, and madness gets too high. It's probably not an average, but the total amount of dysfunction in any given social network that renders it inoperative. You want your network to contain zero problem people, but if it does, they have to be problem people you align with in as many ways as possible, so that even though they're selfish/mean/lazy/whatever, they still aren't a net drain.
This isn't pure conjecture; studies find that mental illness and obesity travel through social networks; for instance:
"Depressive symptoms... were strongly correlated with such scores in one's friends and neighbors. This association extended up to three degrees of separation (to one's friends’ friends’ friends). Female friends appear to be especially influential in the spread of depression from one person to another."
And really, this is what I'm directly experiencing right now. For a while our in-laws were dependent on us for a car, which put us into frequent proximity; now we're also dependent on them for a place to live for the month while our primary house is being renovated. The upshot is that we and our in-laws are staying together. And while we're living in a large three-story dwelling with an extensive basement area for the kids to play in - that's a home with *four* levels, including two kitchens - 90% of my time and energy at home has been devoted to social concerns and the management of mental illness. On the plus side, I've now realized where many problems in my own family had been coming from over the last few years: "Female[s] appear to be especially influential in the spread... from one person to another." On the minus side, well, the problems will still be there, even when we move out again.
So hell is not *most* other people. Just as was the case in my previous work environment, the overwhelming majority of people involved were just fine, with very few problems. But also, just as was the case at my last job, it only takes one or two stupid/selfish/crazy/wild/obnoxious people to absolutely wreck things out. Hell is that one or two other people.
On topic: I think there is a lot in what you are saying. When I have read books by Amish and ex-Amish people, I have seen a pattern: The choice to convert to another culture seems highly influenced by a few people in one's immediate family, most of all parents. Those who leave have a tendency to come from substandard families. The one who joined the Amish through marriage came from an unpeasant family and married into a very supportive family. I find it very likely that in every generation, a minority from families with unpleasant or non-functioning people choose an individualist lifestyle when possible, until individualism has become the norm.
Our house is close to done, now - mostly just painting, patching, hanging doors, finishing kitchen cabinets, that kind of thing. When we purchased it four years ago, it had been untenanted for a long time. The roof was starting to leak, there were holes in the walls, there were no functioning bathrooms, and there was so much animal feces and urine everywhere that we had to tear open the walls and floor to get rid of it. But the roof was the biggest problem. This climate is hard on buildings - we average more than a meter of snow every year. If we hadn't purchased the place and begun repairs immediately, it wouldn't have survived one more winter.
> until individualism has become the norm.
Yeah. Of course, ordinarily individualism probably couldn't become the norm that way. If not for high levels of societal trust and wealth, people who fled awful social circumstances wouldn't do very well on their own, and would probably tend to be picked up by some collective or another.
Hahaha! White, Tove. White walls, white ceilings, though there's some woodwork in the flooring here and there. We hope to be able to sell the house someday, just like we hope to sell those foolish cats we've been breeding; buyers like white.
In the meantime I awaken to the sound of yelling again. Time for more unpaid work as a therapist, I guess.
Why are we choosing individualism over living more communally? As a species we spent most of our formative time as hunter-gatherers, who are well known for being fiercely egalitarian. Anyone trying to control or tell someone else what to do is anathema to this way of life. As a result, I think that we all have an deep innate repulsion about being told what to do.
Since our current culture is hugely reliant on a population that can follow commands, our schools, culture and childrearing practices are doing their best to suppress or beat these tendencies out of us. But when it comes to the things we _can_ choose, like how to live, most people will choose a way that offers as little interference as possible.
There is also another way that our current cultural practices contribute to the falling fertility. The fact that we outsource most of our child rearing means that most young girls today are totally unprepared for becoming mothers.
Previously, a young woman would have grown up with small children all around her. She would have helped taken care of small siblings and any small children in the extended family/tribe. Nothing about child rearing would be a mystery for her. Not only would she know what to do, it wouldn't be a big lifestyle change to have a child of her own. It would just be natural continuation of what she was already doing.
Today having your first child is often a momentous event. Not only will you have zero experience to go on, and have to rely on books and online advice know what to do, it will also totally change your life.
It should be no surprise that people feel apprehensive about this and reluctant to take this step.
I have thought of this as the lumpiness of modern life. You spend years focused only developing yourself, then years working and isolated, then years being overwhelmed by the need and constant touch of several other humans, years juggling obligations, then a stretch at the end of boredom and uselessness.
This would all be much better if the phases were spread out evenly over time.
How does this work with a modern economy and need for long term human capital development? I can see part-time education and work playing a big role, as well as more consistent school calendars. Perhaps remote school and work would help here, if families could combine it with living in larger multigenerational households.
Yes, really. The market picks us in our prime, when we are the most useful and the least troublesome. Before and after, we are mostly someone else's problem.
I think you are right on point with the tension between the need for autonomy and community. Any time we have been presented that choice, we have chosen more autonomy, but at a huge cost.
The best attempt I know of when it comes to dealing with this dilemma, was actually an experiment done in England back in the 1920ties. It was a pair of doctors that noticed the declining health of the community, and attributed it to the social isolation, especially as experienced by the mothers of the family. So they created a centre explicitly with the purpose of improving the health of the entire family by giving them a community outside the home. It was called the Packham Experiment.
On the surface it looked like a community centre, but it was far more. You could only join as a family, and they had doctors on staff who actively worked to increase the health of all members. With activities for all ages, all the way down to open nurseries (where the parents could still be with their children), they gave parent something close to a tribal experience where they could be with their children without having to be _with_ their children.
In the video you will notice how they again and again mention that a key principle of the centre is that they will not in any way try to coerce the members to do anything, even in the face of evidence that it would be for their best. Aiming to let them keep their individual autonomy and freedom while still making them part of a larger "it takes a village" community.
It was a great success at the time, but was shut down by the war and never really recovered. There is quite a lot of info about it if you search online, but I can recommend the book "Being Me and Also Us" by Alison Stallibrass.
Very interesting! My spontaneous reaction was that such arrangements should be avoided. In reality it is not a problem for me because I'm a hundred years too late. But my typical reaction when I need to appear in public with my family among other families is caution. Parents judge each other all the time (I'm judging people, I know they are judging me back). Even worse, public employees are judging parents.
I think that you make a great point about family trends revealing preferences. On social media I've seen the idea of "it takes a village to raise a child" promoted by Hillary receiving a lot of pushback with a feminist retort that it usually just means unpaid female labor. Relatives are becoming less likely to babysit and even some older siblings say that they felt victimized by having had to provide childcare resulting in the trendy psychobabble concept of “eldest daughter syndrome”.
In the future we are going to see more and more of the child-free ideology becoming accepted and even less support and sympathy for parents.
It makes me think of Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and her reports about loving fathers who feel no obligation to support their partners and children because they earnestly believe it was "her choice not to have an abortion". When parenthood becomes a choice, the attitude to parents in general becomes the same.
Older sisters of today probably often feel the same isolation as parents when asked to take care of a younger sibling.
I think another large reason people don’t live together nowadays is that authority and who can resolve disputes is unclear. If you have a roommate who is being a total jerk you don’t have much recourse besides leaving.
Depending on your family structure/situation, it can be the same with in-laws. Most folks aren’t comfortable with anyone being the head of the household anymore.
>>I think another large reason people don’t live together nowadays is that authority and who can resolve disputes is unclear. If you have a roommate who is being a total jerk you don’t have much recourse besides leaving.
That's an important point. Overall I think that the lack of agreement to follow a certain ideas is one of the culprits. In traditional societies there tends to be some agreement that this or that stupid idea is the only right and just. When people try to think for themselves instead, they inevitably disagree.
Great piece. Thinking about communal/individual living arrangements strikes me as one of the areas where the evo-psych perspective is at its most useful. Why the right is generally pro-nuclear family has always confused me a bit, being vaguely anti-nuclear family seems like the obviously correct view for anyone considering it from this angle.
The fact that people just don't like each other that much is actually a pretty deep insight I think, simple as it seems, and probably it is the main reason communalism has declined. Another couple of more minor reasons might be the move to living in labour intensive to produce houses and more formalised rigid jobs. It's a lot more difficult to hang out with people regularly when you haven't got much control over where you live or work. Particularly for wage labour and private home ownership.
So I would have thought it's possible to have more communal norms and institutions despite some natural dislike of each other. I don't think there are any examples of HGs commonly living in isolated family units , even where material conditions would allow it.
If we're doing leftist arguments against the nuclear family, Marxists econ suggests it's exploitation that makes childcare so expensive. Professionalising childcare probably does make less efficient compared to the HG approach, like you mentioned, but it should still be extremely efficient. In the UK a career can look after 6 kids, so someone on the same wage as the career should be able to take home 5/6ths of that wage working a job after childcare costs. But because labour only gets paid a portion of what it produces, both at that job and for the career, the actual cost of childcare is about a half the median wage in the UK, i.e. capital takes 2/6ths, or one third, of those efficiency gains. Effectively raising a kid at home moves that economic activity out of the domain of capitalist relations and into the household (where's there's no exploitation in the Marxist sense), making it irrationally cheaper, if that makes sense.
I have very little talent for abbreviations - what is HG?
In theory, professional daycare should be the cheaper option. In practice, it is not as cheap as it should be. If I take a quick look at cost levels in Sweden they are almost half a normal salary, (when many children are there only part-time). Doing things professionally costs. Partially because of housing, but also because doing things professionally costs in general. Trust saves resourcesm
I expect it used to be cheaper when Sweden was more socialist. Google says child care costs were 1/10th an average wage in the USSR, which is more in line with what you'd expect under a system where everyone's time exchanges roughly equally, although child care was also quite heavily subsidised.
In Sweden child care is dirt cheap with subsidies, 3 percent of household income between about 1000 and 5400 dollars a month. But if subsidies are counted, it amounts to a substantial part of average salary. I think one reason is that the less trust involved, the fewer short-cuts can be taken. Like, for example, employing people just because they are good, without four years of education.
Tove, you are a genius. As the father of 3 children under the age of 5 and the husband of a SAHM who both loves and hates being a SAHM, you have captured the paradox exactly in modern living. I've had thoughts of these nature but in a more vague and half formed way. Seriously, this may be the most insightful thing I've read all year (and I devour a lot of Substacks). Bravo.
I do think there are likely more pieces to the puzzle though of the unhappiness of modern parenting besides the communitarian/multi-generational gap we have nowadays. A huge factor is also likely also the inherent difficulty of entertaining children in the modern era - which granted is in large part due to the lack of communitarian/multi-generational ethos - but cars have had a huge effect on children's ability to wander, and the economy wide transition to knowledge work also has too I suspect. I don't know about your toddlers, but I suspect they're far more willing to watch adults chop down trees and dig roots rather than watch those same adults stare at a computer screen and type.
Thank you for your kind words. I was preparing a pause in writing in favor of construction work and childcare when I found out that I could actually write about childcare.
>>I don't know about your toddlers, but I suspect they're far more willing to watch adults chop down trees and dig roots rather than watch those same adults stare at a computer screen and type.
You bet! That's a toddler universal. Early on I noticed that toddlers cooperate when their caretakers are doing something they understand is work, but will get restless and nervous if I read or write. In a perfect world the problem should be at least partially soluble, since staring into screens all day is not healthy for adults either.
It seems to me that your timeline for the shift to nuclear families from large clan living and the decline in fertility doesn't quite line up. You cite the early 20th century as the time when a move to nuclear families became the norm, but the trend was in evidence long before then, at least in England and America. Likewise, the fertility decline you are explaining is more recent than the early 20th century, and so even if the nuclear family structure only became the norm by the early 1900s there is still a lot of population drop since then to explain. Otherwise we are left saying that multi-generational families were the norm up until what, 1970? 1980?
I would also like to note that you should be careful when using "individualistic" or "individualism" the way you are. One is likely to make the mistake of thinking that we should be more communistic, when really the locus of rights lying with the individual or the group is not at question here. Communist countries were certainly not known for their high fertility rates.
>I would also like to note that you should be careful when using "individualistic" or "individualism" the way you are. One is likely to make the mistake of thinking that we should be more communistic, when really the locus of rights lying with the individual or the group is not at question here.
I was thinking the same thing. To me, "individualism" means individual rights and liberties, not social isolation.
Indeed. There's been an odd habit for a lot of Substack writers (among others) to use individualism for the latter. That typically was the move of the socialist left in the mid 20th century, trying to discredit individualists by saying they rejected all society or favored social isolation instead of merely wanting individual rights and rejecting the forced "social" relations, as though saying "No, I do not want to part of your social welfare scheme" is the same as "I reject being part of a family, church or social club." It is strange that so many apparently more on the right have picked up the habit.
>>It seems to me that your timeline for the shift to nuclear families from large clan living and the decline in fertility doesn't quite line up.
It doesn't. The decline in clan living was gradual and rather early in Northern Europe (the Hajnal line and all that). But clan living is not the only communal child rearing arrangement. A nuclear family with ten children, some of whom work near the home, is very different from a nuclear family with two children.
The baby boom in the 1950s was clearly not a result of communal living arrangements. It was a kind of informal social experiment that was less and less repeated by subsequent generations.
That doesn't quite work either, however, as you don't have a mechanism for explaining why women went from nuclear families with 10 children to nuclear families with 2 children. So why did women decide that having more children because the older ones could help no longer worked and decided to stop with the older ones and not have more?
I don't think that saying "People stopped having big families with lots of children because they had big families with lots of children" actually helps the argument. If anything it highlights that changes in household structure are at best endogenous to the decision to have more or fewer children, suggesting that something else must be driving the decision.
That means the nuclear family question isn't the question at hand, but rather why people went from nuclear families with lots of children to nuclear families with fewer. There is also the question of how much contraception is used by married couples; I don't have any real evidence one way or the other on that one to hand, but I don't know many other people with kids that are using e.g. the pill, either.
But again, the question is "Why are people deciding not to have more kids?" It is possibly they wanted fewer kids in the old days too, but contraception was too hit or miss and abstinence was out of the question, but that just seems off since the shift wasn't terribly sharp when contraception became available. That is, if everyone was wishing to have fewer kids but for the pill or cheap and easily available condoms, when such things became available one would think it would have been much more readily taken up. That doesn't seem to be what happened.
The strains of taking care of small children is only one of several reasons why people choose to have few children. Economic reasons are probably more important to explain the fertility decline.
This supports your theory too: https://x.com/empty_america/status/1749819338448576821?s=46&t=lpe42kDwchPcrra0nzP53g
Thank you! Yes, although the conclusion sounds depressing.
There's a big move on various baby forums to make it a more corporate, formalized employer employee relationship rather than something informal.
This is good to reduce exploitation of the individual caregiver but perhaps in the drawing of these boundaries something is lost.
There are pockets of higher fertility inside developed nations, like Amish. Probably they all are also more communal.
Yes, they are. Especially they don't share the ideal that fathers should be at work and mothers at home: They have as an ideal that both parents should be at home. In practical life that is often not possible since work away pays better. But the Amish still don't believe that mothers should only take care of children instead of working. That way, Amish women get less different lives from having children compared to the majority population.
Moderate levels of individualism are really good - enough freedom and equality to reduce the threat of tyrants, and some leeway in escaping unbearable familial obligations like entrance into a despised profession or forced marriage to an awful partner.
Collectivism probably works better as the quality of people you're around improves. It's easy for people with the same attitudes and habits to get along. It's also easy for tranquil, unselfish, dependable, far-sighted, wise, sane people to get along, no matter their differences in attitudes and habits. The problem is when the total level of anger, selfishness, sloppiness, stupidity, and madness gets too high. It's probably not an average, but the total amount of dysfunction in any given social network that renders it inoperative. You want your network to contain zero problem people, but if it does, they have to be problem people you align with in as many ways as possible, so that even though they're selfish/mean/lazy/whatever, they still aren't a net drain.
This isn't pure conjecture; studies find that mental illness and obesity travel through social networks; for instance:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832791/
"Depressive symptoms... were strongly correlated with such scores in one's friends and neighbors. This association extended up to three degrees of separation (to one's friends’ friends’ friends). Female friends appear to be especially influential in the spread of depression from one person to another."
And really, this is what I'm directly experiencing right now. For a while our in-laws were dependent on us for a car, which put us into frequent proximity; now we're also dependent on them for a place to live for the month while our primary house is being renovated. The upshot is that we and our in-laws are staying together. And while we're living in a large three-story dwelling with an extensive basement area for the kids to play in - that's a home with *four* levels, including two kitchens - 90% of my time and energy at home has been devoted to social concerns and the management of mental illness. On the plus side, I've now realized where many problems in my own family had been coming from over the last few years: "Female[s] appear to be especially influential in the spread... from one person to another." On the minus side, well, the problems will still be there, even when we move out again.
So hell is not *most* other people. Just as was the case in my previous work environment, the overwhelming majority of people involved were just fine, with very few problems. But also, just as was the case at my last job, it only takes one or two stupid/selfish/crazy/wild/obnoxious people to absolutely wreck things out. Hell is that one or two other people.
What's wrong with your house?
On topic: I think there is a lot in what you are saying. When I have read books by Amish and ex-Amish people, I have seen a pattern: The choice to convert to another culture seems highly influenced by a few people in one's immediate family, most of all parents. Those who leave have a tendency to come from substandard families. The one who joined the Amish through marriage came from an unpeasant family and married into a very supportive family. I find it very likely that in every generation, a minority from families with unpleasant or non-functioning people choose an individualist lifestyle when possible, until individualism has become the norm.
Our house is close to done, now - mostly just painting, patching, hanging doors, finishing kitchen cabinets, that kind of thing. When we purchased it four years ago, it had been untenanted for a long time. The roof was starting to leak, there were holes in the walls, there were no functioning bathrooms, and there was so much animal feces and urine everywhere that we had to tear open the walls and floor to get rid of it. But the roof was the biggest problem. This climate is hard on buildings - we average more than a meter of snow every year. If we hadn't purchased the place and begun repairs immediately, it wouldn't have survived one more winter.
> until individualism has become the norm.
Yeah. Of course, ordinarily individualism probably couldn't become the norm that way. If not for high levels of societal trust and wealth, people who fled awful social circumstances wouldn't do very well on their own, and would probably tend to be picked up by some collective or another.
We are looking forward to a Things to Read post with many pictures on your choice of interior design!
Hahaha! White, Tove. White walls, white ceilings, though there's some woodwork in the flooring here and there. We hope to be able to sell the house someday, just like we hope to sell those foolish cats we've been breeding; buyers like white.
In the meantime I awaken to the sound of yelling again. Time for more unpaid work as a therapist, I guess.
Anders hopes that you will write about your house.
Therapists probably are like sex workers: The unpaid ones are the best.
I feel lucky I wasn't eating, because I would have just spat it out all over the table
Why are we choosing individualism over living more communally? As a species we spent most of our formative time as hunter-gatherers, who are well known for being fiercely egalitarian. Anyone trying to control or tell someone else what to do is anathema to this way of life. As a result, I think that we all have an deep innate repulsion about being told what to do.
I can recommend this article by Dr. Peter Gray on hunter-gatherers' egalitarian ways: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways
Since our current culture is hugely reliant on a population that can follow commands, our schools, culture and childrearing practices are doing their best to suppress or beat these tendencies out of us. But when it comes to the things we _can_ choose, like how to live, most people will choose a way that offers as little interference as possible.
There is also another way that our current cultural practices contribute to the falling fertility. The fact that we outsource most of our child rearing means that most young girls today are totally unprepared for becoming mothers.
Previously, a young woman would have grown up with small children all around her. She would have helped taken care of small siblings and any small children in the extended family/tribe. Nothing about child rearing would be a mystery for her. Not only would she know what to do, it wouldn't be a big lifestyle change to have a child of her own. It would just be natural continuation of what she was already doing.
Today having your first child is often a momentous event. Not only will you have zero experience to go on, and have to rely on books and online advice know what to do, it will also totally change your life.
It should be no surprise that people feel apprehensive about this and reluctant to take this step.
Great piece.
I have thought of this as the lumpiness of modern life. You spend years focused only developing yourself, then years working and isolated, then years being overwhelmed by the need and constant touch of several other humans, years juggling obligations, then a stretch at the end of boredom and uselessness.
This would all be much better if the phases were spread out evenly over time.
How does this work with a modern economy and need for long term human capital development? I can see part-time education and work playing a big role, as well as more consistent school calendars. Perhaps remote school and work would help here, if families could combine it with living in larger multigenerational households.
Yes, really. The market picks us in our prime, when we are the most useful and the least troublesome. Before and after, we are mostly someone else's problem.
I think you are right on point with the tension between the need for autonomy and community. Any time we have been presented that choice, we have chosen more autonomy, but at a huge cost.
The best attempt I know of when it comes to dealing with this dilemma, was actually an experiment done in England back in the 1920ties. It was a pair of doctors that noticed the declining health of the community, and attributed it to the social isolation, especially as experienced by the mothers of the family. So they created a centre explicitly with the purpose of improving the health of the entire family by giving them a community outside the home. It was called the Packham Experiment.
On the surface it looked like a community centre, but it was far more. You could only join as a family, and they had doctors on staff who actively worked to increase the health of all members. With activities for all ages, all the way down to open nurseries (where the parents could still be with their children), they gave parent something close to a tribal experience where they could be with their children without having to be _with_ their children.
There is an old video about it on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6aiCK3PGfs
In the video you will notice how they again and again mention that a key principle of the centre is that they will not in any way try to coerce the members to do anything, even in the face of evidence that it would be for their best. Aiming to let them keep their individual autonomy and freedom while still making them part of a larger "it takes a village" community.
It was a great success at the time, but was shut down by the war and never really recovered. There is quite a lot of info about it if you search online, but I can recommend the book "Being Me and Also Us" by Alison Stallibrass.
Very interesting! My spontaneous reaction was that such arrangements should be avoided. In reality it is not a problem for me because I'm a hundred years too late. But my typical reaction when I need to appear in public with my family among other families is caution. Parents judge each other all the time (I'm judging people, I know they are judging me back). Even worse, public employees are judging parents.
I think that you make a great point about family trends revealing preferences. On social media I've seen the idea of "it takes a village to raise a child" promoted by Hillary receiving a lot of pushback with a feminist retort that it usually just means unpaid female labor. Relatives are becoming less likely to babysit and even some older siblings say that they felt victimized by having had to provide childcare resulting in the trendy psychobabble concept of “eldest daughter syndrome”.
In the future we are going to see more and more of the child-free ideology becoming accepted and even less support and sympathy for parents.
It makes me think of Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and her reports about loving fathers who feel no obligation to support their partners and children because they earnestly believe it was "her choice not to have an abortion". When parenthood becomes a choice, the attitude to parents in general becomes the same.
Older sisters of today probably often feel the same isolation as parents when asked to take care of a younger sibling.
Well written, interesting points.
I think another large reason people don’t live together nowadays is that authority and who can resolve disputes is unclear. If you have a roommate who is being a total jerk you don’t have much recourse besides leaving.
Depending on your family structure/situation, it can be the same with in-laws. Most folks aren’t comfortable with anyone being the head of the household anymore.
>>I think another large reason people don’t live together nowadays is that authority and who can resolve disputes is unclear. If you have a roommate who is being a total jerk you don’t have much recourse besides leaving.
That's an important point. Overall I think that the lack of agreement to follow a certain ideas is one of the culprits. In traditional societies there tends to be some agreement that this or that stupid idea is the only right and just. When people try to think for themselves instead, they inevitably disagree.
Great piece. Thinking about communal/individual living arrangements strikes me as one of the areas where the evo-psych perspective is at its most useful. Why the right is generally pro-nuclear family has always confused me a bit, being vaguely anti-nuclear family seems like the obviously correct view for anyone considering it from this angle.
The fact that people just don't like each other that much is actually a pretty deep insight I think, simple as it seems, and probably it is the main reason communalism has declined. Another couple of more minor reasons might be the move to living in labour intensive to produce houses and more formalised rigid jobs. It's a lot more difficult to hang out with people regularly when you haven't got much control over where you live or work. Particularly for wage labour and private home ownership.
So I would have thought it's possible to have more communal norms and institutions despite some natural dislike of each other. I don't think there are any examples of HGs commonly living in isolated family units , even where material conditions would allow it.
If we're doing leftist arguments against the nuclear family, Marxists econ suggests it's exploitation that makes childcare so expensive. Professionalising childcare probably does make less efficient compared to the HG approach, like you mentioned, but it should still be extremely efficient. In the UK a career can look after 6 kids, so someone on the same wage as the career should be able to take home 5/6ths of that wage working a job after childcare costs. But because labour only gets paid a portion of what it produces, both at that job and for the career, the actual cost of childcare is about a half the median wage in the UK, i.e. capital takes 2/6ths, or one third, of those efficiency gains. Effectively raising a kid at home moves that economic activity out of the domain of capitalist relations and into the household (where's there's no exploitation in the Marxist sense), making it irrationally cheaper, if that makes sense.
I think by "career" you mean "carer"? Or "career nanny"? Or "career carer"? :p
(Autocorrect fixed my "carer" to "career" just now too.)
Ah, I get it the third time I read it: HGs are hunter-gatherers. Now I get the message a lot better!
I have very little talent for abbreviations - what is HG?
In theory, professional daycare should be the cheaper option. In practice, it is not as cheap as it should be. If I take a quick look at cost levels in Sweden they are almost half a normal salary, (when many children are there only part-time). Doing things professionally costs. Partially because of housing, but also because doing things professionally costs in general. Trust saves resourcesm
I expect it used to be cheaper when Sweden was more socialist. Google says child care costs were 1/10th an average wage in the USSR, which is more in line with what you'd expect under a system where everyone's time exchanges roughly equally, although child care was also quite heavily subsidised.
In Sweden child care is dirt cheap with subsidies, 3 percent of household income between about 1000 and 5400 dollars a month. But if subsidies are counted, it amounts to a substantial part of average salary. I think one reason is that the less trust involved, the fewer short-cuts can be taken. Like, for example, employing people just because they are good, without four years of education.
Tove, you are a genius. As the father of 3 children under the age of 5 and the husband of a SAHM who both loves and hates being a SAHM, you have captured the paradox exactly in modern living. I've had thoughts of these nature but in a more vague and half formed way. Seriously, this may be the most insightful thing I've read all year (and I devour a lot of Substacks). Bravo.
I do think there are likely more pieces to the puzzle though of the unhappiness of modern parenting besides the communitarian/multi-generational gap we have nowadays. A huge factor is also likely also the inherent difficulty of entertaining children in the modern era - which granted is in large part due to the lack of communitarian/multi-generational ethos - but cars have had a huge effect on children's ability to wander, and the economy wide transition to knowledge work also has too I suspect. I don't know about your toddlers, but I suspect they're far more willing to watch adults chop down trees and dig roots rather than watch those same adults stare at a computer screen and type.
Thank you for your kind words. I was preparing a pause in writing in favor of construction work and childcare when I found out that I could actually write about childcare.
>>I don't know about your toddlers, but I suspect they're far more willing to watch adults chop down trees and dig roots rather than watch those same adults stare at a computer screen and type.
You bet! That's a toddler universal. Early on I noticed that toddlers cooperate when their caretakers are doing something they understand is work, but will get restless and nervous if I read or write. In a perfect world the problem should be at least partially soluble, since staring into screens all day is not healthy for adults either.
It seems to me that your timeline for the shift to nuclear families from large clan living and the decline in fertility doesn't quite line up. You cite the early 20th century as the time when a move to nuclear families became the norm, but the trend was in evidence long before then, at least in England and America. Likewise, the fertility decline you are explaining is more recent than the early 20th century, and so even if the nuclear family structure only became the norm by the early 1900s there is still a lot of population drop since then to explain. Otherwise we are left saying that multi-generational families were the norm up until what, 1970? 1980?
I would also like to note that you should be careful when using "individualistic" or "individualism" the way you are. One is likely to make the mistake of thinking that we should be more communistic, when really the locus of rights lying with the individual or the group is not at question here. Communist countries were certainly not known for their high fertility rates.
>I would also like to note that you should be careful when using "individualistic" or "individualism" the way you are. One is likely to make the mistake of thinking that we should be more communistic, when really the locus of rights lying with the individual or the group is not at question here.
I was thinking the same thing. To me, "individualism" means individual rights and liberties, not social isolation.
Indeed. There's been an odd habit for a lot of Substack writers (among others) to use individualism for the latter. That typically was the move of the socialist left in the mid 20th century, trying to discredit individualists by saying they rejected all society or favored social isolation instead of merely wanting individual rights and rejecting the forced "social" relations, as though saying "No, I do not want to part of your social welfare scheme" is the same as "I reject being part of a family, church or social club." It is strange that so many apparently more on the right have picked up the habit.
>>It seems to me that your timeline for the shift to nuclear families from large clan living and the decline in fertility doesn't quite line up.
It doesn't. The decline in clan living was gradual and rather early in Northern Europe (the Hajnal line and all that). But clan living is not the only communal child rearing arrangement. A nuclear family with ten children, some of whom work near the home, is very different from a nuclear family with two children.
The baby boom in the 1950s was clearly not a result of communal living arrangements. It was a kind of informal social experiment that was less and less repeated by subsequent generations.
That doesn't quite work either, however, as you don't have a mechanism for explaining why women went from nuclear families with 10 children to nuclear families with 2 children. So why did women decide that having more children because the older ones could help no longer worked and decided to stop with the older ones and not have more?
I don't think that saying "People stopped having big families with lots of children because they had big families with lots of children" actually helps the argument. If anything it highlights that changes in household structure are at best endogenous to the decision to have more or fewer children, suggesting that something else must be driving the decision.
What about the clear cause of contraception becoming available?
That means the nuclear family question isn't the question at hand, but rather why people went from nuclear families with lots of children to nuclear families with fewer. There is also the question of how much contraception is used by married couples; I don't have any real evidence one way or the other on that one to hand, but I don't know many other people with kids that are using e.g. the pill, either.
But again, the question is "Why are people deciding not to have more kids?" It is possibly they wanted fewer kids in the old days too, but contraception was too hit or miss and abstinence was out of the question, but that just seems off since the shift wasn't terribly sharp when contraception became available. That is, if everyone was wishing to have fewer kids but for the pill or cheap and easily available condoms, when such things became available one would think it would have been much more readily taken up. That doesn't seem to be what happened.
This is my opinion on fertility matters. If you don't like it, I have others https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/why-fertility-inevitably-sinks-in
The strains of taking care of small children is only one of several reasons why people choose to have few children. Economic reasons are probably more important to explain the fertility decline.