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”.
It’s because of the very deliberate effort to make out the nuclear family to be the sole ideal, to the point that people can’t even stop to think of alternatives. They can’t imagine objecting to it because they weren’t raised to think of anything else as viable, or even existent. Families where grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends are a constant presence in a child’s life and have a role in caring for that child are seen as strange to the point of being absurd, even comedic. Families where adult siblings live with their parents and help care for younger kids are seen as failed, since the adult children didn’t move out and start their own nuclear families.
I would be confused because i was raised in a functioning nuclear family unit.
I see how lucky I am to have two loving parents and a supportive if slightly dick headed older brother.
My parents never tried to make me into something I’m not, were firm but fair in their discipline.
My idea of family has been defined by that.
Even if your experience growing up in a nuclear family was perfect (mine was pretty great too), and you still want to understand what communial child raising is all about you could ask yourself some questions:
- would your parents have had even more time to support you if they didn’t have to raise the money for a whole living space, food etc with just two people?
- would you and your parents have had an easier time overcoming hardship if there were more people taking an active interest in supporting you?
- would your parents have had more time for themselves if they didn’t have to do all that parenting with just two people?
- suppose as one point one of your parents had turned abusive, would you have been safer in a world where you are not legally the property of two people while everybody else considers your home situation a private affair not to be medled in?
- would your relationship to authority have been different if more of your education had come from figuring stuff out together with other young people, instead of listening to adults tell you how it’s done?
- would your relationship to consent have been different if your parents hadn’t been able to make all major decisions for you (like where you live) for the first 2 decades of your life?
- would you feel better about your own adult life knowing that you did not need to find a single life partner to raise kids with and together raise enough money to survive? knowing you had a much wider community to fall back on and you could have children and feel financially secure with or without a life partner?
- would you feel better if the task of being a loving support to your parents in old age didn’t fall on just you and your siblings? if there were more people caring for them out of a sence of community?
Some of these questions may not apply to you because I know nothing about you, but for many people it may be worth imagining a world of communial child raising because of the obvious fact that a lot of people together can provide more safety, more support and as a result more freedom than two. (doesn’t mean they automatically will, just that they can).
QueerAnarchism 