At risk for … what?

I have a fifteen-month-old. He walks around, climbs on everything, and needs constant supervision to keep him out of trouble. The more adults that I know around, the better off I think he is. When there’s only one adult around, a moment’s distraction puts him on top of the couch back, or on the windowsill. Many adults means more eyes to watch.

Or … did you mean something else?

Engels was drawing largely on the work of Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan was an anthropologist who studied kinship structures among American Indians. One of his discoveries was that there were definite patterns to the language used to describe kinship, that didn’t actually match up with the concrete forms of the family. This led him to an evolutionary theory of family structure. The sort of family structure I described, Morgan called Hawaiian kinship.

Anyway, while I was fuzzy on the details, I think there’s plenty of evidence for my basic point, that family structures have varied greatly from what’s considered normative in the contemporary U.S.

The real point is, if it’s assumed that the normative model of the family is the only viable model, and laws and institutions encourage that form and discourage other forms, then trying to live by a different model will be very hard. There’s a circle there, and some of us want the circle broken.

I am, as you said, a 34 year old, childless man, and I don’t want to get married and have children. That doesn’t mean that I want to be alone most of the time, or have no part in contributing to the care of children. But in practice, my options are limited. Options were even more limited for my sister, who was under great pressure to marry and have children from the time she graduated high school.

Yes, I mean in terms of survival. It’s not much of a problem for me or Sandra Bullock; for you, I don’t know. For mothers in Chicago’s South Side, it’s an operant factor.

I don’t mean at all to downplay infant mortality in Chicago, a city that has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the U.S., but in historical terms, the rates are very low indeed. In 1910, the overall American infant mortality rate was 124 per 1000 births. In Chicago in 2000, it was 10.5 per 1000 births. (And as I said, Chicago’s rate is unusually high. It surely was in 1910, too: if we were comparing apples to apples, the contrast would be even more striking.) I found an article in the British Journal Population Studies that put infant mortality among early-18th century Chinese nobility at 400 per 1000. Another article in Population Studies suggests that about 30% of children born in 18th-century German villages died before they were 5. The massive decline in infant and child mortality throughout the developed world, even on the South Side of Chicago, has been one of the most notable aspects of a real revolution in health care that has occurred in the last century and a half. I doubt there was any place in the world in 1900 that had an infant mortality rate as low as 10.5 per 1000 births.

The child mortality situation in the modern developed world is totally unprecidented: it is radically different from anything that existed anywhere before germ theory, immunization, antibiotics, etc. It seems deeply silly to use historical child mortality statistics to argue about the best family arrangements today, since there’s no reason to think that the causes of contemporary childhood mortality are the same as those a hundred years ago, much less a thousand. And you actually don’t get bonus points for substituting self-righteousness for logic.

It also means their child is at a greatly increased risk for a large number of bad things.

But if it works for them, great. And if it works for other parents, that’s great, too. But most adults would not find that arrangement a net plus under our current circumstances of life.

We can’t speak in absolutes, of course, and it is eminently likely that for some people, other arrangements work better. But societies aren’t composed of some people, they’re composed of everybody.

Fortunately, not everyone in society has to live the same way.

By the way, I’m an adult who lives with a 15-month-old girl and her parents (among other folks). The arrangement means that there are more adults around to watch the toddler; less isolation from adult company, compared to what some (not all) other parents experience; and it means that her parents can afford to go to college. If you read the literature on communal housing arrangements, intentional households, and intentional communities, you’d run into plenty of articles written by parents who find it an excellent arrangement for raising children.

There’s no argument I find more condesending - or less persuasive - than the “if you were a parent you’d agree with me” nonsense. I know plenty of parents, and guess what - other than some very basic stuff (i.e., all of them want their kids to be healthy and happy), they don’t actually agree on everything. If all the parents you know agree on everything and live in the same lifestyle, that doesn’t suggest that all parents agree; that suggests that you don’t know a wide variety of people.

Brian, which tribes are you referring to? And, given that there is no written history of any American peoples, I’d like to know how you know that this communal system worked for thousands of years.

Although there are many viable ways to organize family life, it is fairly clear from historical practice that cultures oriented around two-person marriage (whether the surrounding family was nuclear or extended) seem to have better outcomes for children than those oriented around multiples.

I’m not arguing with this, but I’m curious about how you’d measure “outcomes for children.” Do you mean in terms of survival? Because if so, I’m not convinced that’s an issue in contemporary America, which is where Sandra Bullock lives. And if you mean in terms of emotional health, I’d be very skeptical of attempts to compare that across time and space.

We don’t need to assume it.

Although there are many viable ways to organize family life, it is fairly clear from historical practice that cultures oriented around two-person marriage (whether the surrounding family was nuclear or extended) seem to have better outcomes for children than those oriented around multiples. We can’t speak in absolutes, of course, and it is eminently likely that for some people, other arrangements work better. But societies aren’t composed of some people, they’re composed of everybody.

I’m jumping to a conclusion about your childlessness here, but I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong: as a 34 year old with no children, surely you recognize that the things you find comfortable and convenient in organizing your life are not material to how people with offspring organize theirs. Yes, living as an adult in a household full of other adults is a fantastic way to live as a single guy. For a reproducing couple with three kids, not so much.

You know, cohabitation. Or shared custody.

In my adult life, most of my living arrangements have involved groups of three or more adults. Probably the most comfortable arrangement was when I was living with a dozen adults in a shared house. I don’t think my experience is particularly uncommon, either.

Larraine, as Q-grrl and Amanda pointed out, we’re not just talking about whether marriage is better than single parenthood. We’re talking about whether marriage ought to be the only paradigm. Some folks think that life-long pair bonding is more or less hard-wired in humans. Others don’t.

Family structures are often driven by economics. Whether hunter-gatherers, medieval nobles, or modern Americans, how people arrange their romantic relationships, living arrangements and childcare is driven in large part by what works economically. The atomic family unit is specific to historical periods and economic situations, as is the hunter-gatherer band and the clan system of the Scottish highlands.

So, in that sense, there’s something too simple about generalizing to human nature from any time’s or place’s family relationship. The fact is, humans have made so many changes to our environments, and have socialized each other so much, that it is very difficult to say what “human nature” is.

It’s particularly congenial to the parts of us that want to have sex with multiple partners. Marriage, after all, is fantastic for exploring those feelings and spouses feelings never get hurt at all. ;)

Bullock is dating Jesse James, the guy who runs West Coast Choppers, and who I know has been divorced at least twice. If she doesn’t want to marry him, I can’t say I blame her.

Communal - Patriarchal - reminds me of the worst parts of Feminism.

Hmmm. It sounds as if you’re surprised to encounter feminism on a feminist blog. That’s sort of odd.

Who said that Sandra Bullock wants to have children?

Marriage is more compatible with many aspects of human nature, resulting in a society which does not have to spend as much time/energy/resources socializing people into accepting one of its building blocks. It still requires socialization - but not as much as the constant re-education needed to get people to accept a modern communal style of living. (For example, compare the efforts required to establish and continue the kibbutzes in Israel. It’s not impossible, but it takes a lot less energy to perpetuate a society built around marriage than it does to perpetuate one built around other concepts.)