I think the "nuclear family" isn't the best setup for young kids. That is, a household comprised of only mom, dad, and their children. If you look at family configurations in Asia, the grandparents lived with the "immediate" family.
(I always found "immediate" to be a hilarious term. Growing up, my grandparents, on my dad's side, lived with us. I would find it insulting if someone pointed them out as not "immediate" family. They are family as much as my parents are. It's all of us or none of us.)
My take on the nuclear family came kinda randomly this week as I, again, thought about Lauren and I raising our daughter. “Isn't it kinda crazy we just decided to have a kid and then had one?” I asked her. “The staff at the hospital just let us go home with this her... they have no idea if we know what we're doing.”
Of course we have pediatricians and family checking in on us, but for the most part we've been entrusted with raising a human as FIRST time parents. In school you at least had a teacher to guide you through the curriculum. At a new job, you're assigned a mentor and/or go through onboard training.
Raising another human is a huge responsibility. Not only do we have a major influence on our kid’s well-being and happiness but also how she'll affect other people--like your family and friends. Screwing this up is a major risk that can have outsized impact to a lot of people... and yet we let it go unsupervised. Like a giant social experiment we're everyone goes, "¯\_(ツ)_/¯ eh they know what they’re doing."
I can anticipate the mass public’s gut reaction to the word "unsupervised." I am not at all encouraging the government to check-in on how parents are raising their kids. I'm also not suggesting grandma and grandpa barge in like Marie and Frank from Everybody Loves Raymond to tell you how to raise your kids. It is your right to have the final say on how your child is raised, but do you have any real experience being a parent? Maybe you can benefit from the experience of your parents (who have raised children) if they were around more regularly.
We like to say "it takes a village to raise a child" because there's truth buried within it. By a certain age, children have a built-in aversion to listening to their parents and look to seek knowledge elsewhere. Having grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins around grants your kid a diversity of opinions. Your grandparents are of a older generation, your aunts and uncles aren't 100% responsible for you and so they can be more honest, cousins allow you to learn through osmosis and mimicry. A child who may have closed off, immature parents has a fighting chance of confiding in other people--because, maybe, Uncle Mike happens to be a better listener than mom and dad.
But in the West, in 2024, I don't see the village. Grandma and grandpa live in their own house, a few hours away at best. Kids don't play outside or hangout, except if it's in a matchmaking Call of Duty lobby. In fact, everyone seems to be stuck inside--we don't know our neighbors.
There are exceptions to what I'm pitching here, of course. There are toxic family members and bad influences in the neighborhood, but overall I think the diversity and the support system of the old world had its upsides and we’ve lost them. The West's push towards mobile, nuclear families, has been great for parents looking for independence but may be at the cost of their child's enriched development. "We're moving to be closer to family" has never made more sense to me than it does now.
Yours,
-Rahul
P.S. a reminder you can reply directly to oldmanrahul@substack.com, or you can tweet me @oldmanrahul about this edition. Thanks for reading and supporting my writing :)