The Nuclear Family: Today’s Whipping Boy

Discussion of marriage and family, whether by religious or by secular thinkers, seldom continues long without making disparaging statements about the nuclear family. The term itself has a negative implication. “Nuclear” suggests self-containment and lack of creative interaction with others of the same type.

The conventional wisdom is that the family consisting of two parents, permanently committed to each other, and their children is an institution out of keeping with the times. Such a family is considered to be a residential and inheritance group whose members have mutual affinities and interests so self-regarding that an adequate value system for the times cannot be transmitted in it.

Some think the monogamous family is totally inadequate to the task of meeting, not only social needs, but also the personality development needs of the persons involved. These include the romantic and sexual requirements of adult members and the needs of the young to develop young toward wholeness and creative adulthood. Many persons, including some Christians, feel that the conjugal family has been weighed in the balances at this point and found wanting.

Various remedial proposals are being made. The more moderate retain the basic features of the monogamous family; the more radical propose life-styles that frankly challenge and supplant it.

The moderate proposals are usually attempts to overcome the isolation that the conventional family is said to produce. This isolation is often identified with the separate family dwelling. What is proposed is an extension of the “family” that would involve monogamous groups in a network or grid of families, three or four being the ideal number, and would extend many aspects of the intimacy that belongs to conventional marriage.

What limits should this have? What degree of privacy is essential to meaningful marital life? What degree of unity among parental figures is necessary to the discipline of children? These are some of the unanswered questions.

Underlying this kind of proposal is the assumption that couples need some type of close exposure to other conjugal units, and that children need to be exposed to more than two parent-figures. These needs are held to overbalance the need for the privacy and compactness provided by the usual form of family life. These are, to say the least, major assumptions.

The various types of communes offer more radical solutions to the problems presumably posed by the nuclear family. Underlying most commune-forms is the view that it is emotionally and socially desirable for a man to love more than one woman and a woman to love more than one man. This love may or may not have a sexual aspect; certainly in many cases it is not ruled out.

Some communes claim a religious and spiritual basis, but the majority of the 3,000-plus operating in the United States apparently do not. There are both rural and urban communes. As a general rule, the religiously based groups are more stable than the others. Also, the rural communes suffer less from the incursions of transients, runaways, and drug addicts that plague those in urban areas.

One gains the impression that rural communes are more orderly. The relative degree of sexual permissiveness in the two geographic types is undetermined; there are evidences both ways. Many communes seem to subsist largely on romantic enthusiasm and novelty. If reports may be believed, many break up over sleeping arrangements.

A common denominator seems to be the desire to develop extended or group familial relationships. But some of the problems involved seem insuperable. The splitting of authority over children when there are multiple parent-figures, the normal desire for male certainty about paternity—these and other factors seem to lend at least some support to the view that the monogamous family is one of the Creator’s orders for mankind.

The story is told of the fond mother who sent the following message to her son’s schoolteacher: “DEAR TEACHER: If my Archibald is naughty—and he sometimes is—just whip the boy next to him. This will frighten Archibald and make him behave.” One is tempted to wonder whether the concerned attack upon the nuclear family, by writers of both religious and secular orientation, is an attempt to do something of this sort. The real target may be, not the nuclear family, but something much more profound.

Involved in many of the “new and creative life-styles in marriage” is the downgrading of what has been commonly accepted as Christian morality. In the United States, the attack upon this is much less vehement and virulent than it commonly is in Europe, where the one concerned to maintain such standards is dubbed a Philistine. Here, he or she is more likely to be called a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant), and his or her ethical standards are likely to be termed “middle-class morality.”

While the defects of the controversial family are many, it is far from clear that the comparisons between it and proposed alternative life-styles are fairly made. The alternatives are often portrayed in less than realistic terms, designed to give a better impression than is warranted.

A case in point is found in an article in the January, 1975, issue of the Christian Home, publication in which three major denominations participate. The article, “The ‘Commune’ Next Door,” presents a glowing picture of Iris Mountain Community, a religiously based community of the less radical type.

Quite possibly the report is wholly factual. What is misleading is the implication that this is a representative commune. Nothing is said about the deeper familiar arrangements or the type of marital theory that underlies the community. In my view, it is grossly misleading to imply that this is a typical commune, and that communes in general are the idyllic places that the report suggests. If few are as perverse as Charles Manson’s, few seem as ideal as Iris Mountain.

Might not spokesmen for the Christian Church, instead of presenting glowing pictures of communes and favorable reviews of books such as Nena and George O’Neill’s Open Marriage, do better to recognize the “new life-style” adventures in marriage for what they are, namely, a rejection of structured relationships and of divine ordinances? And why not emphasize instead family life based upon fidelity, upon lifelong commitments made and kept?

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