Essay on Nuclear Family

The nuclear family, one of the key hallmarks of middle-class life is a familiar sight to many. Popular culture has painted a facade over the true nature of the nuclear family. Nuclear families are deeply entrenched in the beliefs of the 1920s when the term was first created. This inability of the nuclear family to adapt to the modern world has led social reforms to face many obstacles. Margaret Mead observed firsthand in her work as an anthropologist how the nuclear family has come to destroy the social life of the middle class. This “ideal” family structure has gradually whittled down traditions and essential skills that have persisted for millennia. Although the nuclear family reduces stress for many families, the nuclear family structure perpetuates inequality, promotes children’s insecurity, and leaves families with a self-centered worldview. 

By reinforcing inequality, the widespread nature of the nuclear family has led poor people and traditionally marginalized groups to be suppressed by society. The nuclear family operates on a system where the husband is the sole breadwinner of the family, tasked with ensuring economic stability and prosperity. While the idea of only the husband working may have been viable in the early to middle 20th century, modern working-class jobs do not pay as much as they used to, forcing families to either abandon the stability of the nuclear family or face growing poverty. On the other hand, wealthy families have profiteered from the destructive nuclear family structure by gaining increased freedom from extended family members to pursue more business ventures. Margaret Mead references the lack of a support system associated with the nuclear family, which is observed in this scenario where both parents are forced to work unlike in other familial structures. The schism between the rich and the poor has only grown because of the false narrative that the nuclear family is the key to achieving the American Dream. This breadwinner system has severely limited women’s independence, resulting in tensions increasing in nuclear families. These high tensions have led to increased divorce rates and overall shorter marriages over the years. The days of the nuclear family being a stable structure are long gone in a modern world where working-class people must make frequent sacrifices to make ends meet. 

Over the course of generations, the continued fragmentation of families in the nuclear model has led the welfare of children to become a subordinate priority for millions of people. Many of the problems associated with children in the family have to do with the fact that both parents are often forced to work out of economic necessity. Also, as Margaret Mead notes, the lack of support in the nuclear family leaves no one to fill the void when both parents must work.  The disastrous effects on children include feelings of isolation, anxiousness, and anti-socialness. The nuclear familial structure has created a crisis in the modern family; when these children grow up, they will generally have shorter marriages than their parents and fewer children—creating an unstable positive feedback loop. The nuclear family is in no way a symbol of stability, and the modern world has revealed it to be a perpetrator of children’s insecurity. 

The nuclear family structure leaves people with very few people that they consider to be genuinely close with, and this limited close social circle creates a self-centered worldview. Above all, the nuclear family encourages people to provide for themselves, whether it be economically or emotionally, before helping others. This self-centered worldview that develops has numerous consequences, including children becoming selfish, and parents not caring about those less fortunate than themselves. The popularity of the nuclear family means that the world is deprived of genuinely virtuous people, which leads issues promoting the greater good of a community to be ignored. Although the nuclear family may help reduce stress for many people, it also reduces their ability to solve conflicts by separating society into uniform units. Overall, the nuclear family has had disastrous consequences on the modern world with inequality, children’s security, and open-mindedness all being negatively enhanced by this archaic family structure.