The Nuclear Family is a social construct - it's just one form of family (and likely not the best)

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The idea of a heterosexual monogamous couple raising their own biological offspring in a single family home is a unique family form.
Human family forms exhibit a remarkable amount of diversity across different cultures and historical contexts.
Humans have the ability to adapt their mating and child-rearing practices based on their environments.
The book aims to challenge the notion that living in a nuclear family is the only way to organize family life.
The organization of family life is contingent on historical circumstances that can change.

“Today’s future-positive writers critique our economies while largely seeming to ignore that anything might be amiss in our private lives,” writes Kristen Ghodsee. Even our most ambitious visions of utopia tend to focus on outcomes that can be achieved through public policy — things like abundant clean energy or liberation from employment — while ignoring many of the aspects of our lives that matter to us the most: how we live, raise our children, and tend to our most meaningful relationships.

Ghodsee’s new book, “Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life,” is an attempt to change that. The book is a tour of radical social experiments from communes and ecovillages to “platonic parenting” and intentional communities. But, on a deeper level, it’s a critique of the way existing structures of family and community life have left so many of us devoid of care and connection, and a vision of what it could mean to organize our lives differently.

Mentioned:

“The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake” by David Brooks

Saving Time by Jenny Odell

Book Recommendations:

Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia by David Graeber

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin

Gender and the Politics of History by Joan Wallach Scott

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This episode was produced by Emefa Agawu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Jeff Geld. The show’s production team is Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, Rogé Karma and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero and Kristina Samulewski.