Fair enough but these things aren't going to happen overnight. It will likely take decades.

I have experience with 2 countries going down the drain: Turkey and Bulgaria.

The Bulgaria one has an overnight event, the collapse of communism and then it has about 25 year log period decomposition and after things start getting better they also don't get fixed overnight and Bulgaria still holds the title of "The worst country on the X scale in EU" where X can be anything like education, vaccination rates, wages and so on. The problem with the collapse of institutions is that they aren't coming back anytime soon. Suddenly anything with long term or intangible returns like Arts or Science research becomes unfeasible and your brightest start driving Taxi for living and after 25 years your pool of great researchers and artists gets replaced with taxi drivers who once were extremely bright at school but life happened. The culture in everything changes to push for short term gains and frown upon on higher ideals. How do you protect your family from that? With Bulgaria, the answer was to be in close connections with politicians and have your privileges or leave the country. With the ecological collapse the leaving option is not there in any scalable way.

With Turkey, it happened in 20 years. The difference here was that it was more like wealth and power transfer from one part of the society to the other. To some point it made things fairer but the problem with that kind of transfer is that unlike the structured ways like taking high taxes from those who have a lot and subsidising those who have a little, those who do the transfer don't stop until everything collapses. I'm sure you have some idea about the situation in Turkey but you probably don't know about the recent events where a mafia boss that used to collaborate with the state and do their dirty work was "discarded" and now he makes videos from abroad where he tells it all. Every video gets over 10M views on YouTube alone, many of the claims are being partly confirmed by the people involved in these things but no one goes to jail or not even investigated. Only the mafia boss who talks managed to get chased by the police. That's what happens when you have a strongman, how do you protect your family against that? In Turkey, those who did well are those who have political connection, share the wealth and don't talk. This again creates a lot of trouble, that's the NK or Iran version. People can't leave en mass, they simply live the way they are told to live. Unless you can join the elite, you can't protect your family on this version too.

I'm not sure which one is worse, the dysfunctional state or the strongman. On the strongman version, your material wellbeing tends to be better overall with slowly crumbling until it reaches the bottom(it crumbles because you the strongman will need to install figureheads to carry out his agenda. For example, to remove Evolution Theory from schools Erdogan installed the former chef of a Zoo as the head of National Academy Of Sciences. Just recently he installed low grade academician as rectorate at one of the most prestigious universities in the country) however the social and intellectual price is very high. The dysfunctional state version very quickly goes to the floor in terms of material wellbeing however the ethical and intellectual load is fairly low as there is no state to shape you. Some shaping can be good of course but you have full autonomy with your life.

I simply don't see how you can protect your family from multi decade long collapse of the civilisation.