The nuclear family is probably the greatest enabler of child abuse, ever.
Putting two people in complete control of another person (who is particularly vulnerable and has few legal rights) and then having no oversight for the whole arrangement is the absolute worst idea.
Families are garbage.
Hahaha wtf
I wouldn’t even know where to start with this. omg.
OP, what would you propose as an alternative to families?
communal child raising
less isolated familial structures in general
children being made aware of how they should and shouldn’t be treated
Some form of child protection services that don’t just believe the parents and assume a child is lying when they report abuse
more legal and counselling services made available to children
I don’t get people that are like “lol, what? that’s so weird, lets laugh at the very notion that traditional families are abusive”.
communal child raising is the traditional family. 70-100 years ago 4 generations lived together in the same house, having 4 grandparents, 6 aunts and 15 cousins around every day was normal.
Things that should be mentioned:
– These communities are not necessarily connected by an biological ties. In a lot of these multigenerational ‘families’, including people in the family who are not relatives or married into the family is totally normal. This has always created a lot more space to support people without families, support people who do now want to partner up and to create communities in which couples who can not have children (like some queer couples but not all & other couples too) can be a part of child raising.
– Having a lot more young people around often means young people learn from each other. In many cultures young people form a non-hierarchial group that learns together and can do a great deal without adult supervision.
The nuclear family doesn’t just facilitate abuse, it facilitates hierarchy. It’s a training school for obedience to authority.
Now, which system would push such a training school strongly so it could get docile obedient citizens? Which system whould push the nuclear family.
I’m not saying it’s capitalism but it’s capitalism.
And then there’s the fact that the 2 parent, nuclear family can be most easily pushed into the pattern where one adult works an extremely exhausting job many hours a day that leaves that adult hardly capable of doing anything else, while the other adult takes on all the other things that adult would otherwise have done: care for children, clean the living space, prepare food, prepare clean clothing, etc. for free. What we know as traditional gender roles.
This way capitalism gets one intensely loyal worker who feels ‘responsible’ for ‘supporting a family’ while all the work to keep that worker going is done for free by an unpaid worker in the home.
And, you know, communities need a lot less stuff. A community of 50 can do just fine with one or two hammers. 25 nuclear families need 25 hammers. The nuclear family demands a huge amount of commodity purchasing.
(hooboy that last point)
Damn. What a breakdown…
Communal living is fantastic for the disabled and elderly folks, as well.
The “nuclear family” is just one more bit of toxic waste that came out of the 20th century.
The idea that an isolated pair of adults, at least one of whom is outside the home for 9+ hours a day, can raise multiple children with no connections to their community, no accountability to anyone to make sure those children are cared for, learning, and able to communicate with people they don’t live with, would be considered ridiculous for most of history.
Then there’s, as mentioned, the commodity purchases – plenty of companies got rich by pushing the idea that each family needs a full toolkit, its own car (or two, or three!!), a complete set of cookware for all occasions (how often are four families on your block using springform pans at the same time?), a library of “the classics,” medical supplies of all shapes and sizes, and so on. You can bet Amazon has no interest in changing the nuclear family meme.
This doesn’t mean “families are stupid.” Families are how most communities have been built for thousands of years – but they weren’t “two parents and their offspring, who leave when they get married to form their own tiny nests.” They were multigenerational, sprawling things – cousins, aunts, uncles, child-of-grandmother’s sister-in-law who was mostly raised by an aunt, and so on.
There were non-biological ties as well,although often, if someone was sticking around, there was an attempt to get them to marry into the family. That’s what marriage was for: To make family out of unrelated people.
it’s not a coincidence either that the more authoritarian and abusive a subculture the more likely they are to homeschool their kids and keep them from encountering any form of unapproved outside media or education. Isolating kids from outside influence is harmful in the same ways and done for the same reasons as a cult insisting an adult cut all ties with the outside world and only read approved books.
It’s odd how there’s a network of forums that are effectively forums for abusive parents, even though they wouldn’t accept that label, although it probably comes down to bad driving out good more effectively than the reverse. She mentions in one of the posts that people who are estranged from their children through no fault of their own occasionally show up, but they don’t stick around.
twelve months on the parallels with incel culture are obvious.
Looking over this page again it’s interesting to note how many commonalities there are with societies build on traditional kinship networks (i.e., societies that don’t partake in atomized individualism, everything from feudalism to small-town 19c America). Especially the bits about how hierarchies between adults and children never go away, even when the children are grown, and refusing to acknowledge that an individual has a right to unilaterally end a toxic relationship (as opposed to being obligate to enforce a group shunning). Also, note from the next page:
The child can’t resist these demands without accusations of immaturity.
As far as their parents are concerned, wiser people are meant to guide
less wise people, and experienced people are meant to guide the
inexperienced. Teenagers rebel because they’re young and stupid, but
once they’ve learned the ways of the world, they’re supposed to settle
down and stop their juvenile bucking against their betters. True
maturity is found in graceful submission to powers greater than oneself.
Children who refuse to recognize this are bratty, immature, proud,
rebellious–even if they’re 48, a father of three, and head of the local
Rotary Club.
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman; a
woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All
homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views,
is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and
sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by
destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a
bishop, or a father are only common homicide; and if the people are by
any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most
pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny. […]
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot
possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us;
nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly,
taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your
revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to
the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as
such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume
that on the whole their operation was beneficial.
As in microcosm, so in macrocosm: even against outrageous abuse, toppling the order you were born into is to support anarchy. The same logic which places a parent forever at a rank above a child places an aristocrat forever at a rank above a commoner; things are the way they are for a reason; the metaphor runs “kings are fathers to their nation,” not the other way around, because fathers are, in this line of thinking, the original kings, the primeval tyrants.
This is a kind of conservatism so prehistoric it can hardly be called conservatism anymore, and I’m not even sure the neoreactionaries truly believe in it given how steeped we are in a modern understanding of psychology, i.e., we acknowledge there exists such a thing as abusive relationships between parents and children and that kings can be so bad they can expect, if not deserve, to be overthrown by popular rebellion.
I’m not saying it was universal, because universality is a hard claim to make in any context, but I am pretty sure a lot of the features of the past can be explained by the fact that many people were severely traumatized in one way or another. Between PTSD, the generational effects of famine, the constant threat of warfare, and social structures justified on incredibly abusive models of how human beings are supposed to relate to one another, it’s frankly a wonder we’ve managed to make it this far as a civilization.
Hello everyone! We wanted to do an Accent Challenge so that we could really get to know each other in the Discord. This is your standard accent challenge, with a couple language things thrown in! Find the Challenge under the cut.
“We have apartments next to each other and sometimes you’re blasting shitty music but other times you’re jerking off and that’s even louder than the music please quiet down” AU
べんきょうしなければならない 