What if I told you that focus on the nuclear family has caused more harm than good?
By: Brigitte Pellerin
Tags: Suburbs, Society, Conservatism, Isolation, Family

The suburb as we’ve come to know and loathe it (I speak for myself, obviously, but feel free to jump on my cranky bandwagon), is a mid-20th century invention. Before that, only farmers and wealthy people populated rural or picturesque areas outside cities.

Yes, I may be exaggerating. There may have been other folks who lived outside cities. But by an large, if an area was attractive enough to people who could afford country estates, it tended to attract people wealthy enough to own country estates. Arable lands were reserved for agriculture. The rest; the fields that weren’t worth farming or building a lovely country estate on, they just sat there unwanted, collecting weeds. They would have to wait many decades to see their first Walmart supercentre and get paved all over.

Normal people, neither farmers nor landed gentry, the kind you see today driving around shiny suburbs, used to live in or near the city centre before the second half of the 20th century. They owned townhomes, or rented apartments, ideally near enough their workplace so they could walk or take the tram. Individual car ownership was out of reach for most normal people back then. It only became widespread at around the same time as the first suburban developments went up.

Life in the city wasn’t all that great back then. It was crowded, dirty and smelly. There was a lot of pollution; that was before we realized ditching our trash anywhere we liked was a bad idea. I’m not blaming people for wanting a patch of grass their kids could play barefoot on, and cleaner air to breathe around a brand-new house fitted with the latest appliances. I would have wanted it, too.

But.

What they left behind, life in a dense city where the street or lane is the backyard, had advantages too, and those were lost. True, laneways are not as pleasant underfoot as freshly mowed suburban grass. But on the other hand urban children get exposed to a whole slew of experiences and people they wouldn’t see if they played alone or in small groups in their fenced-in yards. Some of those experiences are desirable, such as larger and more diverse groups of friends, whereas some are less desirable, such as pollution and street gangs. But one undeniable benefit of growing up in a dense city is that children learn quickly how to navigate complex transportation systems and how to interact with a wide variety of people of all ages and social status.

It’s not just kids who benefit from dense cities. Streets are also a common space for adults, where they naturally congregate, chat, share news and play their part as members of a community. Sometimes that means bringing food to a grieving widow, or looking after kids when a mom gives birth to a new baby. The street becomes an extension of everyone’s living room, where complex relationships create a rich tapestry for any individual’s private life.

Dense city neighbourhoods encourage a sense of fellowship and community where keeping an eye on the welfare of your fellows isn’t seen as nosy. They make chronic isolation difficult.

In a dense city, people walk to work, or take transit, but whatever mode of transportation they choose no commuter is alone for very long. Everyone is forced to make eye contact every now and then with other commuters, if only to avoid bumping into them. Eye contact is a critical part of communal life; without it we become isolated pods who care for no one except ourselves. Like sullen hooded teenagers hunched over their phone.

In the suburbs of the nuclear family where the father is the breadwinner and the mother stays home to look after the family’s needs, every commuter is alone in his car for extended periods of time twice a day every day.

Yes, I know life in the suburbs in 2019 is different than the June Cleaver model. Now both parents tend to work, and share domestic chores better than people used to in the 1950s. This is all to the good. But it’s irrelevant to my point, which is that a focus on the nuclear family of the kind social conservatives are nostalgic for constitutes pining for the wrong solution to a very real problem.